Customers are at the core of your profitability as a business. Thus, you should always strive to know their thoughts about your product or service offers. Customer feedback helps your brand grow in several ways. You can tell what pain points to resolve. You can also learn which product features you can improve to retain and gain more customers.
Businesses can get customer feedback through email. But for the email to generate feedback, it should be crafted the right way.
Read through the rest of this article for an ultimate guide to customer feedback email.
What Is a Feedback Email?
Customer feedback emails are structured to get the recipients’ opinions on a particular subject regarding your business. This could be about a product, service, or the operational processes within the business. This Tailor Brands email is a great example of a customer feedback email. It asks for opinions on how the company can improve their products.
In most cases, the customer feedback loop involves businesses and brands trying to gain more information on what customers think about them. Are the product and service delivery good enough? Are there any pain points that customers experience with your business? Would your customers recommend the business to other prospective customers?
Feedback emails can be sent one-to-one, or as email blasts using the automation feature on most email marketing solutions. Automated email solutions allow you to deploy autoresponders and perfectly timed email sequences. This allows you to reach more people than a personal email would. Most will also provide customer feedback email templates.
Why Feedback Emails Are Important
Nothing beats a loyal customer or a satisfied customer who trusts a business. Around 82% of marketers agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition. When you have loyal customers, they’ll spread the good word about you. That can lead to even more customers for you.
In the same manner, nothing is worse for a business than unhappy customers. Just imagine what they can do to your business. If they don’t like your product, they can easily write a negative review online. When potential customers see that, they will most likely opt for your competition.
So, how do you keep your customers happy and fulfill all their needs?
The first step is creating a winning product that your customers will love and have little to complain about. The second step is to improve that product and the customer experience. To achieve this second step, you need to obtain actionable feedback from your customers.
In most cases, feedback is obtained using automated email surveys, through enterprise feedback management software and customer feedback portals, or through customer review sites like Trustpilot and Yelp.
Gathering, sharing, and implementing customer feedback will allow you to be in tune with your customers’ needs.
There are different types of feedback you can obtain. These include:
- Feedback to gauge customer satisfaction through customer satisfaction surveys
- Feedback to gauge customer loyalty through surveys that include techniques such as Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Sales feedback to learn how the customer’s experience was with your sales process
- Qualitative feedback on customer preferences and likes
- Feedback about the customer’s experience with the customer service team or a sales representative
The Opencart screengrab below is an example of a customer feedback email for a brand looking to gauge customer satisfaction.
To effectively implement the customer feedback your company receives, ensure you involve your team in the feedback collection process. By doing this, you allow your team direct access to the unfiltered feedback. This allows them to develop better ideas on how to resolve customers’ issues.
5 Feedback Email Best Practices
Customer feedback emails should be your go-to instrument for learning different things about your customers. You can use them alongside promotional emails and other marketing copy.
Customer feedback emails can also be incorporated into your early morning meetings and stand-up rituals. For an agile team, the customer feedback can be linked to a daily standup tool. This allows project team members to be on the same page about feedback received and about solutions to outstanding issues.
Now, let’s discuss five of the best customer feedback email practices.
1. Create Good Feedback Subject Line
Email subject lines play a big role in determining your email open rates. Survicate estimates that 35% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. There is no denying the power of a good email subject line.
Let us take the example of the screengrab above. The first green-marked subject line from Hostelworld.com, “Take our short survey, earn $10 credit on Hostelworld”, probably has the highest chance of being clicked on.
Why? The subject line immediately grabs attention. There’s a clear $10 credit incentive for users who take part in the survey. The intention of the email is also clearly laid out, i.e. to convince the reader to take part in a survey. Another example of a catchy subject line for a survey email is something like “Answer 5 quick questions in our survey and win a $100 gift card.” We’ll talk more about the importance of stating the recipient’s benefits when answering emails later.
This leads us to the features of a great email feedback subject line.
- Keep it short, succinct, and catchy.
- Personalize the message. In the above example of Hostelworld, the subject line could have been improved vastly by addressing the user with their first name on the subject line.
Finally, go straight to the point. Do not use clickbait subject lines – instead, make your intention clear i.e., to request feedback sincerely. If you use clickbait subject lines, you run the possibility of your recipient blacklisting you and marking your emails as spam.
2. Introduce Yourself
Introducing yourself is always a great way to build rapport, trust, and, eventually, a working relationship. Besides, customers don’t want to receive emails from people they don’t know, or from people who just assume the recipient already knows the sender. They might just think you’re spamming them. Once they think that, don’t expect to receive a response. Your email might even be deleted.
So, a brief introduction in your customer feedback email is key. Check out the example of a good introduction below:
The introductory email is effective because the sender says who they are first (Matt). Then they specify the company they’re affiliated with (CEO of Cometeer). If the sender still doesn’t know the company, the last sentence gives the recipient additional information:
- The recipient has unsubscribed from the company.
- The company has something to do with coffee.
Include as many details as you can so the recipient will recognize who you are. Remember, people deal with many companies on a daily basis.
You could manually type these emails and send them out yourself. However, that would entail a lot of work, especially if you have many people to send the emails to. This is why you should use drip email sequences. You can have tailored emails sent to specific subjects based on certain triggers. In the above case, the trigger might be the customer unsubscribing from receiving any more marketing emails from the company.
3. State What Recipient Can Gain
It is always important to state how answering emails, particularly the feedback email, can benefit the recipient. Just think about it. If you don’t state what the recipient can get from answering the email from the get-go, they won’t even continue reading the email. In general, people take action only if they perceive a benefit for them.
What are possible recipient benefits? Well, mostly it has to do with material concessions. Remember our email subject line examples above that offer a $10 credit incentive or a chance to win a $100 gift card? Those are great incentives for people to answer surveys.
You can also mention the recipient’s benefit again in your introductory paragraph. In the above customer feedback email, the company specifies those who answer the feedback email can win a $100 REI gift card.
You can also give your recipients discounts on their next purchase.
4. Explain How Customer Feedback Can Help
Customers want to know why their feedback matters to you, why you collect their information, and how you use such feedback. This should support the incentive you give them for answering the customer feedback email. Don’t just tell them they’ll personally benefit if they answer the survey. Make them feel like they’re doing something good, too.
But how exactly can their feedback help? Here are some ways:
- They help improve products or services
- They help improve customer service and the user experience, for example, during the onboarding process.
- They help other consumers determine the best products to buy.
In the example below, the brand Chewy is requesting a customer to leave a product review. The company makes it clear the requested review will help other pet parents looking to buy similar products.
When customers know that they are making a positive contribution, they’re more likely to answer your customer feedback email, too.
5. Say How Long It Takes for Survey to Be Completed
Customers are busy people. They barely have enough time to read through your email copy, let alone fill out lengthy surveys. You should therefore strive to keep your surveys as short as possible. Research by SurveyMonkey recommends keeping surveys to between 8-10 minutes, or less, depending on the audience and required survey granularity.
Letting your recipients know how much time each survey is going to take upfront helps to prepare them mentally. This, in turn, makes customers adopt a more positive attitude toward taking the survey.
In the above screengrab, the brand Top Edit clearly states in the email copy that it takes five minutes to complete the survey.
Alternatively, if you are not sure of the exact length of time the survey might take, you can state how many questions your recipients should expect to answer. This achieves the same effect of building trust and comfort, encouraging customers to fill out the survey.
In Closing
Customer feedback is an essential part of growing your business or brand. Customers can provide helpful feedback that will enable you to offer better products or services. The feedback can also help you improve the customer experience. This will, in turn, help you grow sales, improve customer loyalty and outrank your competitors.
Customer feedback emails provide some of the best ways to maximize customer interactions. From this article, you learned five best practices you should follow when sending customer feedback emails.
Create catchy email subject lines. These are the first things customers see so you should make them personal. Also, introduce yourself. Clarify why you are sending the feedback email to begin with. You should also state what email recipients can gain from answering the survey. Explicitly state how their feedback can help make a positive contribution. Finally, be upfront about the length of time it will take to complete the survey.
With these five best practices, you’ll be able to craft effective customer feedback emails that nurture positive customer relationships, reduce churn rate, and drive growth for your business.
