How to Send Email Survey: A Step-by-Step Guide

When it comes to getting inside your customers’ minds, an email survey is like having a casual coffee chat—except you don’t have to leave your desk, and your customers can respond in comfort.

We all shop online regularly. The moment we click that “complete purchase” button, what often follows is a survey invitation. An email pops up in our inbox, asking, “How did we do?” It’s quick, personal, and gives us the perfect chance to share our thoughts. That’s the beauty of email surveys—simple, direct, and incredibly effective for conducting a customer feedback survey!

In today’s world, there are tons of ways to reach out—social media polls, in-app feedback, website pop-ups, and kiosk surveys. Yet, email surveys continue to hold their ground as one of the most effective ways to gather feedback. Why? Because emails are still one of the most trusted and widely accepted forms of communication. They reach your customers right where they are—on their phones, laptops, or tablets—and they don’t feel intrusive.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the world of email surveys: what they are, why they matter, and how you can use them effectively to connect with your customers. We’ll cover everything from setting up your email survey to using templates and best practices that make your emails hard to ignore.

By the end, you’ll be ready to send out surveys that not only get responses but also help you build stronger relationships with your audience.

Let’s get started on this journey to better feedback!

TL;DR

• • An email survey is one of the most common, old yet effective ways to survey your customers and collect valuable feedback from them. An email survey is sent through emails with a message inviting customers to take a survey, followed by the survey link which the customers can easily open and take the survey, and then submit their responses.

  • Email surveys are cost-effective, and an easy & speedy method to collect honest feedback from your customers.

  • To create and send email surveys effectively, you should understand your objectives and target audience, choose a good email survey software, and then with its help, create and send your email survey. You can also schedule a survey to be sent periodically or at specific touchpoints of the customer journey.

  • Follow the 9 best practices while conducting email surveys: personalization, clearly communicating the purpose of the survey, using an engaging subject line, avoiding over-surveying your customers, optimizing for mobile devices, and more for effective communication.

  • Zonka Feedback is effective email survey software for creating and sending effective email surveys. It offers a 14-day free trial.

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Send Email Survey Invitations, Embedded Email Surveys, and In-Signature Surveys. Measure Customer Feedback remotely, in real time.

Understanding Email Surveys

It’s a type of survey that allows businesses to gather responses directly from their customers by sending an email invitation with a survey link, button, or even an embedded question via email. Typically, a survey email includes a friendly invitation message that encourages the customer to take a moment to respond, followed by a clickable link or button that opens up the survey.

Effective Methods to Send Email Surveys to Your Customers

There’s no one-size-fits-all for email surveys! Whether you prefer using links, and buttons, or embedding questions directly into your emails, here are the best methods to send surveys and maximize customer feedback.

• Survey Link: A traditional method where the email contains a hyperlink that customers click to access the full survey. When a person clicks on the hyperlink he/she will be redirected to another page to complete the survey questions.

• Button Survey: This method includes a clickable button in the email that redirects customers to the survey page instantly, making it visually appealing and easy to access.

• Embedded Email Survey: Here, the first survey question is embedded directly within the email. Customers can answer the initial question right in their inbox and are then directed to the full survey, making it easy to start engaging. This method to embed a survey can significantly enhance response rates.

• Email Signature Survey: This type embeds a small survey link within the email signature used in regular communication, providing a subtle yet continuous way to gather feedback from customers over time.

By offering multiple ways to participate, email surveys make it convenient and straightforward for customers to share their feedback, helping businesses gather the insights needed to drive growth.

Benefits of Sending Email Surveys

Email surveys are a smart, cost-effective way to connect with customers and gather the insights that drive growth. So, what makes them a game-changer? Let’s take a look at the benefits:

• Budget-Friendly: Forget the big-budget hassle. Email surveys let you reach thousands without breaking the bank. All you need is a reliable survey platform, and you’re ready to gather feedback affordably. It allows you to create surveys and send them to multiple users cost-effectively.

• Fast and Far-Reaching: Want to reach customers worldwide? Email surveys get the job done in seconds. Design, send, and voilà—feedback is just a click away, no matter where your customers are located.

• Effortless Data Collection: With email surveys, data collection is straightforward. Set automated triggers to send surveys at key touchpoints, like after a purchase or service interaction, making it easy to capture relevant responses right when it matters most.

• Honest Feedback, Guaranteed: Customers are more likely to be open and honest in email surveys since they can respond privately. This anonymity leads to accurate insights without the pressure of face-to-face feedback.

• Real-Time Feedback for Real-Time Action: With email surveys, responses come in fast. This means you can access immediate insights, allowing you to make quick, data-driven decisions based on customer feedback.

• Track, Remind, and Maximize Responses: Unlike traditional surveys, email surveys make it easy to track who has responded and who hasn’t. Set up automated reminders to nudge customers who haven’t completed the survey, maximizing your survey response rate and ensuring you don’t miss valuable survey responses.

When done right, email surveys can become a powerful engagement tool. Research conducted by PeoplePulse shows that targeted, well-designed surveys can achieve response rates as high as 85%.

Send Email Survey Like a Pro: Ready-to-Use Templates and Examples

When it comes to boosting that response rate, remember: how you ask is just as important as what you ask. Whether you’re gathering insights on customer satisfaction or diving deep into product feedback, these customer feedback survey email templates are designed to help you get the answers you need—effortlessly and in style!

1. Send Email Survey To Measure Customer Satisfaction

Measuring customer satisfaction is a must for any business—it shows how well you’re meeting customer needs and expectations. Try this email survey template to start measuring and improving your customer experience right away.

With this email survey template, reaching out to customers for valuable feedback is a breeze! It’s a simple, structured way to get their thoughts on what’s working and what could improve.

2. Streamline Your Product Research

Looking to refine your product? Use this survey email template to tap into the insights of users who’ve already signed up. Just send them a product research survey, and let the feedback roll in!

This ready-made template makes it easy to reach out, gather valuable insights, and create a product that truly resonates with your audience. Remember, a successful product starts with understanding your users—this template helps you do just that!

3. Send Email Survey for Market Research

Make market research easy with ready-made email survey templates! Perfect for testing new ideas, gauging brand awareness, and boosting customer satisfaction. Try this customizable template to gather valuable insights in no time.

Use this template for collecting targeted feedback directly from your audience. Gathering these insights will help you improve strategic planning, refine products and services, and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.

4. Collect Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Measuring customer loyalty is key to spotting your biggest fans and those ready to spread the word. A quick way to do this? The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey! With a catchy subject line, the NPS survey simply asks customers how likely they are (on a scale of 0 to 10) to recommend your business.

Use this NPS email template to gather loyalty insights, pinpoint improvement areas, and make smart decisions to boost the customer experience!

5. Measure Customer Effort Score (CES)

Every interaction—whether resolving an issue or chatting with support—reveals how hard customers have to work to get what they need. Using this quick CES survey email, you can spot pain points, identify areas to improve and smooth out the customer journey. It’s an easy way to understand and enhance the experience for your customers!

6. Send Email Survey Post-Purchase

Capturing feedback right after a purchase is one of the best ways to gauge customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships. By understanding how customers feel about their recent purchases, you can drive long-term loyalty and success. Here’s a quick post-purchase customer satisfaction survey email template you can start using today!

This post-purchase email survey template is fully customizable to fit your industry and product. Personalize it, automate it, and watch valuable feedback roll in! You can also automate this email survey right after purchase and even schedule a reminder, ensuring customers share their thoughts after using the product. Simple, timely, and effective!

How to Send Email Surveys

Sending email surveys is not a tough process, especially when you are using an effective email survey tool like Zonka Feedback. Here are the simple steps you need to follow to send your customized email invitations and collect valuable feedback from customers.

1. Understand your Objective and Target Audience

Before sending email surveys have a clarity of your your objectives for surveying your customers. The core objectives of these surveys can be to collect feedback but be more specific about your goals. You may have different objectives for different surveys like:

• To collect regular feedback through annual surveys to track your relationship with the customers

• To gather customer insights about a particular touchpoint or aspect of your business.

• To measure customer loyalty, level of satisfaction, or efforts to get a job done or an issue resolved through a customer satisfaction survey.

• To track the performance of your customer service agents.

• To find a numerical value of customer loyalty and the position of your company in the market.

• Conducting market research to understand customers’ choices and preferences.

Additionally, it is important to understand your target audience, and their characteristics, preferences, and expectations so that you can create better surveys and obtain accurate responses from them. If you have customers from different language backgrounds, you can use multilingual surveys to ask them questions in their own language.

2. Add Your Survey

The next step is to create the surveys you want to send via email. Click the "Add Survey" button on the right in Zonka Feedback Platform, and choose to create your survey using available templates, by creating it manually, or with the help of AI.

• Choose the Right Question Type: Select the question type and rating scale that best fits your survey needs. You can use multiple-choice questions, Likert scale questions, or rating questions to let customers evaluate their experiences. For metric-based surveys, consider the following:

  • NPS (Net Promoter Score Questions: Measure customer loyalty.

  • Customer Satisfaction Questions: Assess customer satisfaction levels.

  • Customer Effort Score Questions: Evaluate how much effort customers feel they need to expend to accomplish a task.

3. Choose Distribution Channel

Now, select the distribution channel to reach your customers. You have multiple options such as Website, In-app, SMS, Email, etc. Select the option Email. You can send survey invitations and in-signature surveys manually, via APIs, and from third-party apps.

• Select Survey Format: In-Email Question, Button/Hyperlink, or In-Signature: A good email survey tool like Zonka Feedback allows you to choose how to include your survey in your emails. You can:

  • Send a link to the survey.

  • Embed the survey question directly within the email.

  • Include it as a button or in your email signature.

Decide which method is most suitable for your survey. Choosing the embedding option is usually better than distributing the survey link, as an embedded survey email immediately engages customers as soon as they open the email.

4. Customize Your Email Survey

With Zonka Feedback you can personalize your email surveys extensively to engage your audience better and reflect your brand identity. You can customize various elements, including:

• Questions: Tailor the survey questions to suit your specific objectives. You can modify the wording, add new questions, or rearrange them to make the survey more relevant to your recipients.

• Colors and Design: Adjust the color scheme, fonts, and layout to match your brand's visual identity.

• Variables and Personalization: Use variables to personalize survey emails, such as inserting the recipient's name, gender, email IDs, etc. Personalization features in Zonka Feedback can increase engagement and improve response rates.

• Languages: If your audience is multilingual, Zonka Feedback enables you to offer surveys in multiple languages. This ensures recipients can respond in their preferred language, leading to more accurate and meaningful feedback.

By customizing these aspects of your email survey you can create a more engaging and effective tool for collecting valuable customer insights.

5. Choose Recipients

The next step is to choose and add the recipients to whom you want to send your survey email. There are three ways to do this, whether it's a general feedback survey or a post-event survey email

• Add Manually - Manually input recipients by entering their email addresses and relevant information. In the recipient field, you can enter the contact's name and email address separated by a comma. This is useful for small-scale surveys or when you have a limited number of recipients.

• Select from Contact Lists or Segments - Use this method when you have predefined lists or want to target specific customer groups.

  • Choose from contact lists or segments created within your email survey tool.

  • If your tool integrates with a CRM or customer database, you can select recipients from specific segments.

  • This allows you to target groups like recent purchasers or new subscribers.

  • All available contact lists will be displayed in a dropdown menu for easy selection.

• Import CSV - Import a CSV file containing email addresses and any additional data like names, contact attributes, and custom attributes. This method is efficient for bulk imports and ensures your recipient data is accurate.

6. Preview Before Sending Email Survey

Once you are done with creating your survey and adding the recipients, you can finally preview the surveys to cross-check the last-minute errors. You must ensure that your subject lines are engaging to maximize open rates. You can choose to send the survey immediately or schedule them to be triggered at the right time either with a particular customer action or schedule the survey to be sent in the future as a trigger email.

Zonka Feedback allows you to automate survey triggers based on customer actions like purchases, payments, or issue resolutions, or set up periodic surveys—annual, quarterly, or monthly—to maintain ongoing relationships.

How to Pick the Right Email Survey Tool

Choosing the right tool can be tricky in the market where so many of them are available each climbing to be the best. To make the right decision, you should prioritize your requirements, and ensure that the tool you choose has the features to fulfill your requirements, including the ability to send customized email invitations.

A good email survey software should have these features:

• Customizable email survey templates to create the type of surveys you need.

• Multilingual feature to survey customers of multiple language backgrounds.

• Features like skip logic and question branching to make your surveys logical and dynamic.

• Ability to white-label your surveys and add your own branding and style to them.

• Ability to send surveys through multiple channels in case you want to try other channels too.

• Ability to embed survey in emails so that you can create embedded email surveys if needed.

• Real-time feedback alerts to notify you regarding negative feedback and take instant action on feedback.

• Automated workflows and ability to close the feedback loop effectively.

• Feedback analysis and reporting capabilities to analyze survey data, survey results, and feedback trends, and rise and fall in customer satisfaction.

• Ability to integrate with popular and useful tools like your CRM and your email service provider.

Evaluate the features of the tools, take a free trial of the email survey app or software you choose or intend to choose, ensure how well the price of the tool matches your budget, and then finally invest in the tool.

9 Best Practices to Send Email Surveys and Improve Response Rates

For creating and sending effective email surveys to obtain valuable customer insights, it is recommended to follow the below best practices to get a good response rate to your survey.

• Personalize Your Email Surveys - Personalization has a positive effect when it comes to marketing or communicating with customers. Studies suggest that around 76% of customers agree that personalized communications prompt them to consider the brand more seriously. So personalize your email message and subject line to have a good open and read rate. Moreover, you can also implement personalization in your questions by making them dynamic through features like skip logic and question branching.

• Be Clear in Communicating Purpose - Clearly communicate the purpose of your email survey through a compelling survey invitation email message. Use sentences in your message or subject line like ‘help us to serve you better by taking this short survey' or ‘share your feedback through this short survey so that we can provide better products and services for you.'

• Use Captivating Subject Line - Use an engaging subject line to motivate your customers to take the survey. A subject line like ‘Share what you feel about us through this 2-minute feedback survey' can serve the purpose. You can also use the first question of the survey as your subject line like ‘How happy are you with the performance of our product?'. This will act as an effective email survey invitation directly engaging the customers in a conversation and helping you get more survey response rates by increasing the open rate of the email through an effective subject line.

• Optimize Distribution - Ensure that you don't send survey invitation emails too frequently. Over-surveying your customers can cause them survey fatigue and make them less likely to respond to the surveys. Rather, trigger surveys only on specific touchpoints like a purchase or ticket closure, or periodic surveys like annual or quarterly surveys so that you can collect regular feedback without frustrating your customers with a high number of surveys. Features like survey throttling help you do this.

• Audience Segmentation - Segment your audience into different groups or categories and send surveys accordingly to various segments. Use questions that are relevant to particular segments and also keep your distribution rate optimized as per different groups of customers. 

• Compelling Call-to-Action (CTA): Use a clear and prominent CTA to motivate respondents to take the survey. Phrases like “Share Your Thoughts” or “Start Survey” are effective because they are direct and engaging. A strong CTA grabs attention and guides the recipient on what to do next.

• Easy-to-Use Survey Link: Ensure the survey link is easily clickable and functions properly. Place it prominently within the email to reduce any friction in accessing the survey. A broken or hard-to-find link can frustrate recipients and significantly lower your response rates.

• Mobile-Optimized design - 85% of the users use smartphones and mobile devices to access their emails. So it is essential to make sure that your survey designs are mobile-friendly and that they can work well on mobile devices the same way as on desktop. Use an email survey tool that helps you create and share mobile-optimized surveys.

• Incentive for Participation: Offer an incentive, such as a discount coupon or entry into a prize draw, to encourage participation. Incentives provide additional motivation for recipients to complete the survey, which can substantially boost your response rates and the quality of feedback received.

Common Mistakes to Avoid Before Sending Email Surveys

Avoiding common mistakes can help you increase response rates and gather valuable feedback. Here are some common mistakes to avoid:

• Sending Too Many Surveys: Over-surveying your customers can lead to survey fatigue and decreased response rates, and may even cause them to unsubscribe from your future emails. Instead, focus on sending surveys at key touchpoints or on a periodic basis. This approach allows you to gather regular feedback without overwhelming your customers.

• Using Poorly Designed Surveys: A poorly designed survey can confuse respondents and lead to lower response rates. Ensure your surveys are clear, concise, and relevant to your objectives. Use a mix of question types and keep the survey length manageable.

• Not Personalizing the Message: A generic survey email can feel impersonal and lead to a lack of engagement. Personalize your message by addressing recipients by name and tailoring the content to their specific experiences.

• Not Following Up: Failing to follow up with respondents can result in missed opportunities for engagement. Send reminder emails to those who haven’t completed the survey and thank those who have. Following up shows that you value their feedback and encourage participation.

By avoiding these common mistakes, you can improve response rates and gather more valuable feedback from your customers.

Transform Customer Insights with Effective Email Survey Software

Email surveys are an effective, cost-efficient way to gather valuable customer feedback and strengthen relationships. By defining clear objectives, customizing your surveys, and selecting the right distribution channels, you can collect honest insights that drive growth.

Implementing best practices—such as personalization, compelling subject lines and CTAs, mobile optimization, and offering incentives—can significantly boost survey response rates. Avoiding pitfalls like over-surveying and poor design prevents survey fatigue and ensures meaningful engagement.

Choosing the right tool is crucial. Zonka Feedback is a powerful email survey software that allows you to create and distribute surveys, offering features like personalization, embedding options, automation, and robust analytics.

By applying the strategies in this guide, you can harness email surveys to better understand your customers, improve your offerings and build stronger relationships. Start enhancing customer engagement today with effective email surveys.

Remember, every piece of feedback is an opportunity for growth. Try the 14-day free trial of Zonka Feedback email software to send email surveys and begin collecting impactful insights that propel your business forward.