5 Best Survey Follow Up Email Examples: Ultimate Guide
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Every business that sends surveys dreams of high response rates from satisfied customers.
Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Our well-intentioned survey emails often get neglected in busy inboxes, but you can turn that around with the right survey follow up email.
This guide includes 5 survey follow up email templates as well as our tips and best practices to optimize response rate, so you can master the tricky art of the customer feedback survey.
Have you ever received or even completed a customer survey and never heard about it again?
A survey follow up email puts an end to that, by checking up on a customer survey email previously sent. It’s a way to remind customers to complete your survey, ask follow-up questions to those who did, or just thank participants and remind them that you value their input.
Despite being such an important part of the process, 97% of companies don’t follow up with recipients after sending a survey.
As a result, many customer surveys go unanswered.
Businesses can set themselves apart by sending a personalized email sometime after sending a customer experience (CX) survey. This is one way to show you care about listening to your customers.
Whether you’re sending a one-time reminder email or automating multiple survey follow-ups, most survey reminder examples fall into the following categories.
Your customers are busy, so surveys can easily end up under a neglected pile of unanswered emails.
This type of reminder acts as a nudge, bringing your survey back to the top of their minds. It’s a great tool to improve the response rate and get the required sample size, so don’t assume a survey is a lost cause if you’re low on responses after the first send!
It’s customer survey best practice to follow up with those who did fill out your survey.
This is an opportunity to dive deeper into the reasons for their responses. You can get granular with their experience with your brand, as you know these people are open to sharing their thoughts.
You can also send an investigative follow-up survey when a customer buys a product from your website. Wait 30 days to give consumers a chance to get familiar with your product, before emailing them to gather feedback about their experience.
Show your appreciation to customers who responded to your initial survey.
Thank them for taking the time to provide feedback and assure them that you’re taking their responses into account.
You could combine this with investigative follow-up questions to reduce the number of emails a customer receives.
If a customer has raised a complaint or responded negatively to a feedback survey, it’s important to ensure their issues have been resolved.
A simple post-resolution survey is ideal to gauge their satisfaction levels at this point.
Consider opening the door to further comments, in case the customer has more to share.
Businesses need happy customers to thrive. And sometimes, just one survey email isn’t enough.
If no one replies to your first survey email, the whole thing was a waste of time. Send a survey follow up email to improve your success rate and get the answers you need.
Customers often just need a reminder email to jump over to your survey and share their thoughts.
Follow-up emails are a second chance for them to tell you about the customer experience, from their perspective, and could be exactly what you need to salvage your first (ignored) attempt to collect feedback.
Customers are more likely to buy from you when they feel listened to.
Getting to know what they enjoy about your products or services, and what they think could be improved, is the best way to hone your offerings to boost sales and conversions.
96% of customers cite good service as a key deciding factor in their loyalty to a brand. Optimize every touchpoint with your brand to show your customers you care.
This is all about providing an exceptional customer experience that goes beyond your products or services.
So, follow up with survey respondents to gather more in-depth data and have one-on-one conversations to resolve any issues.
In your bid to optimize the customer experience, make sure all survey follow up emails are well-designed and engaging, so customers want to interact with them. An email builder is a good tool to call on, as it’s packed with features that make it easy to design stunning emails in minutes - even without coding or design experience!
You can connect with sources such as Slack, Feedly and stock image sites to create powerful multi-media emails right inside the email builder platform. Overall, this makes for a highly engaging, more enjoyable customer experience.
You might believe your product or service is the best, but your customers - who use it all the time - could have a different perspective.
Send a survey reminder to get to the nitty-gritty of how your customers really see your product or services. Only when you understand your weak points can you improve on them.
No one likes to be bombarded with emails from a business, so you’ll want to get the balance right.
Don’t send a survey follow up email too soon after sending a survey or you risk annoying the respondent. On the same note, don’t wait too long or they might forget why you’re getting in touch.
Here are some of the timeframes that tend to work best:
It’s tempting to send reminders until respondents reply to your survey, but that’s not the best approach. In fact, that can lead to more unsubscribes!
We recommend sending between 2 and 4 follow-up emails to your survey.
Let your current response rate guide the actual number. If you’ve already had a good response rate, you probably don’t need to send as many follow-ups to other customers.
Struggling to move the needle? Boost the response rate of your survey emails by following these 5 best practices.
A powerful survey reminder email subject line can mean the difference between a successful survey and an unopened email. Your recipients use the subject line to decide whether or not to read an email, with 70% of email users reporting emails as spam based on their subject lines alone.The most compelling subject lines invoke a sense of curiosity, use personalization and/or include an incentive (such as a discount). For inspiration, check out this list of 184 of the best email subject lines!
While it’s important to remind your customers of the survey (because they might have missed or forgotten about your previous emails) it’s easy to overdo it and become annoying.Play it safe and stick to 2-4 survey follow up emails.
Let recipients know why it’s so important for them to have their say.Always relate this to their benefits. Are you sending a survey so you can improve a product feature or your customer service? Or are you trying to learn more about their preferences so you can personalize the experience and offer more relevant recommendations?Miro does this well with a short email focused on the customer benefit.
Company branding makes your emails stand out in a crowded inbox, and fosters recognition and trust. This is what encourages recipients to respond.Include your logo, typeface and color scheme, and use the tone of voice your brand is known for.
When you design emails using an email-building platform, you get access to hundreds of pre-built, beautiful templates that are already designed using best practices.
From their layouts to well-placed CTAs and multi-media, these templates form the ideal foundation for engaging emails.
Some email builders offer in-built analytics to help you optimize your emails for better results every time.
They track the performance of your emails, analyzing clicks and opens. Plus, you can visually see which content is performing with heat maps, for the insights you need to continually improve conversions.
Start sending more successful follow-ups with these survey reminder examples.
We’ve compiled 5 templates for different aspects of the follow-up process, so you can choose the one that suits you and customize it with your copy and brandi
This follow-up email template should be sent after an interaction with your customer service team. The goal is to make sure the customer is satisfied that their issue was resolved.This email feedback template works well with a rating scale, so respondents can easily score their satisfaction level.
When you’ve already sent a survey email and the customer hasn’t responded, you can remind them with a follow-up email.Include a link to the survey and use the body copy to reiterate the importance of sharing feedback.
Send another nudge if your follow-up email goes unanswered. We recommend keeping this short and to the point, and assure readers you won’t ask them to complete this survey again. This can help to keep them away from the Unsubscribe button.
When a customer takes the time to fill out your survey, thank them.Keep this short and sweet and, where relevant, share survey results with the customer. If you offered an incentive for respondents, this is the time to share it, just like Revolution Tea does in this survey message example.
Your investigative follow-up taps into a customer base that’s already responded well to your survey emails.This is your chance to get deep into the details of their experience, using a longer survey with more open-ended questions.
You’ve gathered the responses you need - now what? It’s time to put them into action.
The best way to improve results for future surveys is to track success. How well are your survey email reminders being received by your customers?
A good email builder incorporates powerful analytics so you can understand the metrics that matter. With analytics for open rates, click rates, social sharing and heat mapping capabilities, you can make data-led decisions for future content.
It doesn’t matter whether you send emails in Outlook, Gmail or over 57 other email service providers, email builders track engagement so you can understand how they’re performing and continually optimize your campaigns.
The 5 survey follow up email examples in this blog are a great way to boost the response rate and get the intel you need to improve your business. Of course, you can adjust the examples to suit your brand messaging and the individual customer’s journey.
Bring an email builder into the mix to access beautiful, customizable templates for every stage of the survey process. With a tool like Publicate, you can reduce the email design process to minutes without sacrificing design quality.
Give it a go with a 14-day free trial.
