How to create and send a customer survey

One of the best ways to get good feedback from customers is by sending out a survey. Find out what they like, what they want and what they aren’t so happy with quickly and efficiently. But if you haven’t done one before, it can feel a bit confusing. 

Here are some tips on how to create a survey, ask the right questions and then get it out to the right people.

Customer surveys – What do you want to know?

The first step is to define what you want to know and learn from your customers. If you are looking for a large amount of feedback or lots of information, don’t send it all in one survey and overwhelm them. Rather break it up into separate campaigns and send them at intervals. If the process is too long or complicated, people won’t opt-in or fill out anything.

Create different surveys for things like:

• After a customer has purchased something
• After someone has attended an event or function
• After someone has made a donation
• After someone has signed up for something
• After someone clicked through to your offer, but didn’t buy it
• Gauging interest in a new product or service you are developing or interested in introducing
• Customer research on pricing, service and quality
• After someone has experienced a service at your business.

Create separate surveys for product feedback and customer satisfaction.

Keep your survey simple

Less is always more. Make the questions short, sharp and to the point. Make it quick and easy by offering answer options to choose from by using radio buttons, checkboxes or a sliding numeric scale to choose from. Limit questions that require people to write long lines of text and keep written answers to a minimum.

Choose your survey software

If you are already using a mail service like MailerLite, Mailchimp or similar, you can create surveys for free using simple templates. There are also options like Survey Monkey and Survey Sparrow that you can use to develop surveys and send them out as links in an everyday email. 

Using a template that is already available in your mail service dashboard is an easy way to create a survey, send it out to your specific customer base and then get the analytics and data all in one place.

Surveys as automations

Setting up surveys as automations that are triggered to send after an event such as a purchase, sign up or after an event is easy to do. 

Automations save lots of time and have all kinds of capabilities to collect information, tag and group users depending on their interactions with your survey or campaign and can provide your customers with a lot of personalised touch points along the way. You can even set up a survey to go out annually at an anniversary date or birthday. The possibilities are pretty limitless!

Surveys are a great way to keep in touch with your customers and help you get information that will improve their customer experience without you needing to pick up the phone and speak to everyone individually. 

If you’re not sure where to start or how to set things up, let’s have a chat, we’d love to help you get some great surveys out and automate them so you can set and forget.