Many of us roll our eyes when we see an email in our inbox asking us to spend time answering questions about a brand – even a brand that we like.

And the discount offer in a survey email subject line usually sounds too good to be true (“100 free pairs up for grabs!”).

But (you knew it was coming) – there is a right way to do customer survey emails. And they can help you to understand your customers better, so you can make the right decisions when sales are lower than you’d like.

In this article, we’re taking a deep dive into customer feedback surveys:

• Need-to-know stats about how many people actually respond to surveys
• A quick case study on a high-end skincare company that saved themselves a LOT of money through feedback survey emails
• Quick guide to creating effective survey request emails, from subject line to sign-off

Feedback Survey Emails: the Good, the Bad, and the Spam-Worthy

It’s no secret that a lot of ecommerce email marketing surveys are poorly executed, and give readers unnecessary work.

That’s probably why the average response rate for feedback surveys hovers somewhere between 20 and 30%.

But email surveys are an essential tool in the email marketing toolbox, for a couple of reasons:

They give you the literal voice of the customer: your current and potential customers are engaging with your website and/or ads. So if you want to answer critical questions about your brand, there is nobody better qualified to answer them.

They’re pretty cheap: the costs are relatively low, even if you use a dedicated survey platform. 

Surveying customers shows you care: people in general may not like surveys. But they do like it when a brand listens. If you give them a chance to air their opinion – and then act on that information, you can make a lasting impression.

Email Marketing Case Study: Customer Survey Emails as a Source of Vital Business Intelligence 

One of our newest clients at Hustler Marketing is a high-end skincare brand that uses natural, safe ingredients. 

When they came onboard, they had great products and beautiful, rich digital experiences from website to social.

Despite all of that, sales weren’t what they wanted them to be – and the relatively high price tag looked like the most obvious culprit.

But we’ve seen this before, and we suspected the picture was more complex. So, before rushing to offer big discounts and special deals, the Hustler Marketing team pitched a different strategy: customer feedback surveys.

A Twofold Survey Invitation Email Strategy

Our team created 2 survey invitation emails, for buyers and non-buyers. These emails were plain text, and each contained a link to a simple Google Form with 5 clear questions.

We ensured that there was minimal friction: the survey was easy to complete, and there was an attractive discount incentive for those who completed it.

Buyers Survey: Focused on demographics, past purchases, satisfaction, packaging, shipping, customer service, overall experience, and suggestions for improvement.

Non-Buyers Survey: Gathered information on skincare habits, age, and reasons for not purchasing.

The Results of Our Customer Survey Emails

For non-buyers, the main barriers in order of priority were:

• I don’t know the brand well enough
• I want to try out a product sample before I buy
• Physical shopping is how I like to buy skincare products
• The price is a little high
• I need more information before I can make a decision

For buyers, the main areas for improvement were:

• There are some issues with packaging
• Product variety isn’t broad enough
• I liked the product, but the price is keeping me from buying again

The really interesting thing here was that price didn’t make #1 position for either segment.

So, if the store had resorted to discounts to boost sales, they would have lost out on revenue (completely unnecessarily). 

How to Create an Effective Survey Request Email

There’s a simple rule when it comes to survey request emails: reduce friction as much as possible.

Friction comes from things like:

Asking too many questions: the more questions you ask, the less time people spend answering each one. So pick a small number of questions that target the info you really want. In the case study we outlined earlier, we went with 5 short questions .

Demanding long form answers: instead of asking “how do you feel about our prices?”, use something like a scale. For example, the question can be: “Our prices are…”, with options ranging from 1 (really low) to 5 (way too high).

Not offering anything in return: you don’t have to offer crazy discounts, but you’re more likely to get engagement if readers feel like there’s something tangible in it for them.

Survey Email Subject Lines: Clear Trumps Clever

People see through email marketing copywriting tricks. So we recommend just being honest and straightforward.

Here are some examples of effective survey email subject lines we used for our skincare client:

• How is your order going? ✨ (curiosity)
• We hope you loved everything✨🌿 (caring)
• Your opinion = 25% off ✨ (help us help you)

Ecommerce Email Marketing That Gets Results: Hustler Marketing Makes it Happen

At the end of the day, getting to know your customer isn’t just about personalizing your email marketing. If you really listen, you can gain real business intel that translates into cold, hard revenue. 

So here’s some advice from an email marketing agency that’s seen it all: don’t forget the tried-and-test email feedback survey. Make it clear and simple, so the people who know your brand best can tell you what’s up.

As always, we at Hustler Marketing are here to help. Reach out to our friendly team to learn more about our done-for-you email & SMS marketing services, and how they could transform your retention marketing strategy for long term growth,

Why is it necessary to lean into retention marketing?

On one hand, with skyrocketing media ad costs, increased competition for consumer attention, and new tracking limitations for targeted ads, customer acquisition can feel like an uphill battle. On the other hand, long gone are the days when businesses could rely on social media organic reach to connect with their customers or leads. Right now, branded content reaches a very small percentage of its intended audience thanks to ever-changing social media algorithms. 

But don’t throw in the towel just yet. Retention marketing channels like email and SMS, enable you to have more control over who you reach out to and when. Plus, with the right deliverability strategies, you can almost guarantee that 88-99% of your email subscribers will receive your messages and 98% of your SMS contacts will receive your texts. And let’s not forget about the financial benefits – the average ROI through email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent, while SMS marketing can bring in an average of $25 per $1, according to SMS Bump.

But it’s not just about the numbers – email and SMS are also great for setting up flows/automations that can bring in recurring revenue and strengthen brand loyalty to increase customer retention.

How to leverage Email and SMS for Customer Retention?

1. Set up the essential automation

Step into the world of effortless marketing with automated flows. These are customized sequences that allow you to engage with your audience at the right time – whether they’re subscribing, browsing, or making a purchase.

Think of email and SMS flows as the ultimate marketing toolkit. You can use them to segment your subscriber list and target your audience more effectively, turning leads into loyal customers and boosting customer retention. Start with a welcome series, tackle abandoned checkouts and carts, and follow up with post-purchase flows. Scale your efforts with replenishment, sunset, and winback flows. 

Check out our article for all the details on The WHAT, WHY and WHEN of Email Marketing Flows. 

2. Create a content strategy for email and SMS campaigns to drive customer retention

While your flows are up and running and generating tons of revenue for your business, leverage email and SMS campaigns to build awareness, keep your audience engaged and push sales. 

A great starting point to develop your content strategy is answering the following questions:

• What message do you want to share?
• What’s your ultimate goal?
• What does your audience crave from you?

Based on your answers, create custom content that speaks directly to your audience. Offer flash sales, deals, and exclusive promotions to drive sales. Don’t forget to educate your leads and customers about your brand, products, and benefits through valuable, non-promotional content. Build a loyal community that feels connected to your brand.

If you need more ideas, here are 7 Types of Email Campaigns You Can Add to Your Content Strategy.

3. Grow your list but don’t forget about your subscribers

Once the essentials are set up, scale by adding new subscribers to your list. Utilize the power of pop-ups, landing pages, social opt-ins, and more to gather email and phone contacts. Acquiring new leads is crucial for growth.

But don’t forget about your existing subscribers – keeping them engaged is a top challenge for 45% of marketers. Remember, customer retention is key to success. It’s easier and more cost-effective to keep your current subscribers happy than to constantly chase new ones. Don’t let them slip away!

4. Be smart about segmentation

Don’t make the costly mistake of ignoring segmentation. It’s the cornerstone of a successful marketing strategy. Without proper segmentation, your email and SMS campaigns can suffer, leading to lower deliverability, decreased engagement, and lost sales.

If you need more specific ideas on how to power up your segmentation strategy, check this 101 Guide on Segmentation (with examples!).

5. Optimize your strategy for customer retention

To keep your subscribers engaged, you need to continually innovate and optimize your marketing tactics. Don’t be afraid to experiment and test different elements, such as subject lines, preview text, call-to-action, offers, send times, design, and copy tone. Embrace the power of A/B testing and keep your marketing strategy fresh and effective.

Pro-tip: Don’t forget to put your customer first

To truly resonate with your audience, you need to understand their thoughts, challenges, and pain points. Gone are the days of generic marketing tactics. Personalization is the key to success, and the numbers prove it: 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that offer personalized experiences, and 9 in 10 marketers see improvements in customer retention, revenue, and loyalty from personalization efforts.

Make your customers the center of your marketing by leveraging data on a regular basis. Take advantage of “Get to Know Your Customers Day” every quarter to gather valuable insights through surveys, quizzes, and other data collection methods.

But don’t stop there. Use the data to inform your email and SMS campaigns, creating tailored content for each unique customer based on their needs and preferences. 

Customer retention is a crucial aspect of running a successful e-commerce business, especially in today’s competitive and ever-evolving market. Email and SMS marketing remains the best retention marketing channels to forge strong customer relationship and create loyalty. 

By setting up essential automation, creating a targeted content strategy, growing your subscriber list, being smart about segmentation, and continually optimizing your tactics, you can build a loyal and engaged customer base.

With the right retention marketing strategy, you can thrive in the competitive e-commerce landscape and achieve long-term success. Are you ready? Book a free call with us. 

You started out with a single-product Shopify store, and it blew up. You’re doing amazing with steadily increasing revenue. But you wonder how long is this gonna last?

You know you need to expand your product line, but doing so is risky. More ad spend, product testing, customer education, and maybe it’s all for a flop!

Basically you’re starting from scratch with that same stress that you had when you started the business.

Current Customers to the Rescue??

Something occurs to you, though. If your first product worked wonders on your current customer base, couldn’t your second, especially with trust already established?

You’ve already collected all their emails!

You’ve got a chance.  You’ve set yourself a launch date, and now what? How do you move forward carefully in a way that builds enthusiasm without eroding goodwill? You can’t afford to manhandle your list — one of your business’s most precious assets — with a seemingly random and unsolicited promo.

How do you make customers ecstatic to see what else you have to offer??

By nourishing the list beforehand. Take the time to build a relationship with your current customers and slowly put them on their toes to see what you’ll send them next.

To do this right, you’ve got to start small!

STEP 1: Start with the most engaged people on your list, the ones who opened or clicked an email from you in the last 15 days.

It’s really important to have them knowing what to expect from you.

You can do this by:

• Mentioning it in your welcome email
• Let them know in the order confirmation email
• Ask them to move your email from the promotions tab to the primary tab with a clearly illustrated GIF
• Ask them to reply to the email so you know that you can send them the content they want (this one is gold if you can do it)

If you do all of these, you’ll have a list of extremely engaged people that will read almost every email you send them.

STEP 2: Expand the audience slowly.

Especially if you haven’t sent any emails in the last few months to your list members, start with small steps.

A lot of people make the mistake of blasting the whole list with one email that kills deliverability in the long run. They’re shooting themselves in the foot.

Instead, send to recipients who opened an email in the last 30 days. Then expand the segment to 60-day openers, then 90-days openers and so on. Send them a plain text email, with a really engaging headline that will intrigue them.

And guess what…. That will do the most to re-engage your list, immediately expanding your 30-day engaged segment. How awesome is that?!

Before:

After:

STEP 3: Provide valuable, relevant content.

Establish yourself as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) in your niche, the very niche your engaged list cares about. This is the cool part. You can now go ahead and send the most engaged people lots of emails with your most interesting and valuable content.

Once you are sending regular campaigns to a warmed up list, your product launch has a significantly higher chance of success. Successful launch angles include:

• Exclusive offer for brand insiders
• Limited-time friends-and-family discount before public launch
• Favor of making new product available out of gratitude for list’s support
• Request for list’s valuable feedback in testing new product
• Chance to become part of an exclusive group
• Secret information before the public reveal
• Unique no-risk, guaranteed money-back trial
• Special announcement
• Personal confession
• Personal invitation to join celebration
• Referral request
• Any combination of the above.

People who get genuine value from your email content will feel like they owe it to you to at least try your next product. (This is especially true if your offer includes a generous return policy.) You’ll be their BFF!

And that’s how you do a successful product launch without spending a ton of money on ads or placing crippling ROI bets: just three steps to turn your product fans into brand fans.

Comment below with how you launched a new product — let’s compare notes!

Ioan Siran and Thomas McClintock,
Hustler Marketing

1. Repeat buyers spend more
Up to 300% more. Repeat customers buy more over time than new customers. They also are more likely to trust you enough to buy your more expensive products or services.

2. Repeat buyers close easier
Marketing to prospects only closes 13% of the time. Repeat customers buy 60-70% of the time.

3. New customers cost more
It costs 5 times more to get a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer. Bringing that new customer to your existing customers’ spending level costs 16 times more.

4. Repeat customers promote your business
Focusing on repeat business creates a group of loyal customers that sing your praises and promote your business. Repeat customers refer 50% more people than one-time buyers.
Investing in repeat business costs you less and makes you more!

So, with that motivation, how did we double our repeat buyers in 3 months? By following these steps:

1. Send valuable content.
Provide unique content to your customers in the context of your offering. Running an online store takes a lot of specific knowledge that you should use in your campaigns. Establish yourself as a subject matter expert (SME) in your field, be it healthcare, fashion, travel or even handmade Christmas-tree mobiles.

Of course we still sent promos, but not exclusively. By alternating between hard sells and soft sells, limited-time discounts and evergreen specialized knowledge, earnest appeals and holiday celebrations, we kept our readership guessing. They never knew what exactly they would get, but they knew it would be topical, and that kept them opening.

We filled our newsletters with the who, what, where, when, why and how of our niche, healing collectibles. We provided history, advice and personal stories our subscribers could relate to and benefit from. We got better and better at it, and now many can’t wait for our emails. They know they will find something useful about a subject for which we share a deep passion.

Example:

Though it’s true that high open rates in nurturing emails don’t usually translate to high revenue, they have a big impact over time. Why? High open rates mean more see your email and more like your information.

This, in turn, means recipients are more likely to begin to know, like and trust your brand That does ultimately translate to more referrals and more sales. Dripping meaningful content over time helps you go from being a stranger, to an acquaintance, to a friend, to a trusted advisor.

2. Build relationships.
We made stories in which we invited our readers to interact. We let them know we genuinely care about them.

Example:

When they reply to your inbox, reply back. This has two benefits. The first is building the relationship between you and your prospect.
The second is improving your deliverability. When inbox providers recognize interaction, algorithms identify you as a desirable content provider, not a spammer.

3. Reward buyers.
We rewarded buyers with better offers. This served as both a thankyou and an incentive, accelerating the repeat-purchase cycle.

First, we segmented buyers from non-buyers. Then we delineated a VIP segment out of buyers in general. We defined VIPs as those who have spent more than a predefined amount or purchased more than a certain number of times. By targeting each of these segments with personalized messages and tailored incentives, we converted more non-buyers to buyers and more buyers to VIPs.

Example:

4. Track Your Repeat Buyers Metric.

Review this statistic regularly. You can’t improve what you don’t track nearly as well as when you focus your eyes on the prize. Make a concerted effort to see how your various campaigns and split tests affect progress toward your goal. Report the information weekly.

For us, every Monday we reviewed with the client how the prior week’s emails improved repeat buyer numbers. Progress began incrementally at first, then became more pronounced. Progress remained steady as the number of repeat buyers grew.

Following these steps combined premium content based on unique, industry-specific knowledge with consistent messaging. This messaging understood, per the quotation attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, that they “don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care.” This differentiated our emails from so many other less personal and less relevant marketing messages.

As a result, our open rates, clickthrough rates, and, most importantly, repeat buyers climbed, the latter doubling in three months. What Key Performance Indicators have steadily improved in your recent email campaigns? Comment below and let us know.

Marko Kojadinovic and Thomas McClintock

Hustler Marketing