Customer Survey Email Examples

Understanding customers is one of the hardest, yet most-critical, aspects of building a loyal brand following. Customer Survey Email Campaigns can help you get the insights you need.

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Understanding why customers interact with your brand the way they do (or don’t do) is crucial for providing a better customer experience and safeguarding your reputation.

While you can add surveys to all kinds of emails, such as subscription cancelation campaigns and win-back campaigns, it’s a good idea to send a dedicated survey email every now and then so you can focus all attention on your questions.

Send your survey invitation emails to everyone on your email list, from subscribers who haven’t purchased yet to one-time buyers, recurring customers, and past customers. This allows you to gather valuable feedback from people with varying degrees of loyalty to your brand.

Need some inspiration? We’ve gathered some great survey email examples from our database below.

Strategic recommendations for surveys

A successful email survey is one that is able to get a solid response rate. That means you need strong customer survey email subject lines, enticing copy, and a focused email template to make recipients want to give up a bit of their spare time to help you out.

Read on for survey email examples and email subject lines from other ecommerce brands.

Organize a giveaway

Meal service Plated organized a giveaway with a prize worth over $400 as an incentive for its subscribers to take its email survey. The giveaway is hinted at in the survey email subject line, making it more likely that the recipient will open the email.

Inside the survey email, the copy urges the subscriber to provide feedback quickly by adding a deadline for participating in the giveaway. The CTA button clearly states what the recipient is supposed to do (“take the survey”) and all of this is supported by a large image displaying all of the items the recipient could win.

Lastly, note how Plated is aware that people might be worried about how long it will take to fill out the survey form, and so they mention that it’ll be “quick” to remove that hesitation.

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Add a personal touch

Bristol Farms presents its survey email as a letter. The copy is written the way you’d write an email to someone you know, and signed by the company’s CEO. One thing that would have made it even better, is if the “Dear Bristol Farms shopper” would have been personalized.

Just like Plated (above), Bristol Farms incentivizes its subscribers to leave feedback by organizing a giveaway. This is more cost-effective than offering every subscriber who fills out your survey from a discount.

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Keep it brief

It’s not always easy to get a lot of survey responses as email surveys require time from your subscribers. If you don’t offer something in return, they might not be willing to invest that time.

BookBub knows this and so it keeps its email survey short to help increase its response rate. The survey contains just one multiple choice question that recipients can answer directly within the email. The brand mentions that the survey will be quick both in its subject line and at the top of the email body, and also includes that it’s a “1-minute survey”.

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Use the subject line to describe the email

oVertone uses its subject line to make it clear what its email is about: by answering a couple of questions, the recipient can win a sweet reward. It then proceeds to mention how they need customer feedback to keep on improving. The copy below the image explains how the giveaway works and is paired with a clear CTA.

If your campaign contains more than one survey email, you can create variations on your subject lines while still keeping them descriptive.

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Explain why constructive feedback is helpful

Hearing positive feedback is great, but it’s constructive criticism that helps you improve. Warehouse asks subscribers for honest answers and offers 20% off their next purchase as well as free shipping for filling out their email survey. The brand includes not one but two CTAs that both include a survey link.

Offering a discount can be a good idea if you want people to fill in a longer survey as they know for sure they’ll get something out of it. This in contrast to organizing a giveaway that benefits just one person.

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Use minimal copy

Here’s a good example of a short and sweet survey email. ROKA sent a two-sentence-long email with beautiful visuals and one big CTA (“TAKE SURVEY”). You don’t want to make customers read a long email and feel like they’ve already spent too much time before they even started the survey, and ROKA gets this.

The brand offers a voucher to those who leave customer feedback and clearly describes the terms and conditions for getting this voucher. When you send a survey email that offers an incentive, this is good practice as it prevents subscribers from getting frustrated if they fill out the survey too late, for example.

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Make it simple to change the survey settings

Gucci sends a short survey to customers who’ve made a recent purchase. It offers this customer satisfaction survey in multiple languages and offers the recipient the option to change the survey language directly in the email.

If your survey has different settings, mention them in your survey email and add an option to change them easily to increase your response rate.

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Use an interesting email template

A survey email is best kept short and sweet, but it doesn’t have to be plain and boring. Keep its design in line with that of the email templates you use for other types of email marketing campaigns, as Native does here. The brand includes product images, lists some of the benefits of buying from them, and adds a CTA to connect on Instagram, all while keeping the focus on its survey.

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Ask for help

Blume introduces its email questionnaire by asking its subscribers to help it create the products and content they really need. It’s a message that’s straight to the point and that makes the recipient feel heard and included.

The brand also knows that most people don’t want to spend a lot of time filling out a survey, and so it mentions that the survey should only take three minutes. Providing specific information such as how long a survey will take or how many questions the recipient will need to answer, helps set expectations and stops people from dropping out midway.

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Use email to collect feedback about in-store experiences

If you have a way to email your in-store shoppers, you can send an email survey to ask them about their latest in-store shopping experience. That’s what The Body Shop does with this survey email.

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Customer Survey Email Strategies

You can play around with email templates and copy to figure out which type of email gets you the most user responses but don’t forget about the importance of your survey tool. Once a recipient clicks on the link to fill out your email survey, they need to be taken to a system that properly logs the data they submit and that integrates with your ESP. We’ve covered some best practices that ensure all of this goes smoothly below.

It might also be the case that not your email marketing team, but your customer experience team will process your email survey results. If that’s so, you need to make sure that everyone is on the same page and has all the data needed to analyze and follow up with customers.

Create custom URL parameters within the survey tool for the customer’s email address

Okay, so this is more work on the survey creation side than the email side, but it’s still essential to the email to survey experience. By capturing a user’s email address (or other non-personal identifier, like a token) when they click through the email to the survey, you’ve eliminated the need to ask them for all of their information again.

Set up an integration between the email service provider and survey tool if available to track responses

This can be done through a native integration or a third party automation tool like Zapier or Workato. Integrating the two tools would allow a brand to track success in the email program and be useful to the email marketer who may want to send follow-up emails.

If sending a follow-up email regarding the survey, exclude users who have taken the survey

If an integration exists like in implementation tip 2, great! If not, export the data from the survey tool and upload emails of those who have filled out the survey to an exclusion list and omit from follow-up sends.

Survey emails are a great pairing for strategies such as newsletter signups, recent purchasers, or canceled subscriptions. With a MailCharts pro account, you’ll have access to entire brand journeys where you’ll see exactly when a survey was sent and to what audience.