Satisfaction survey: 6 tips to improve your return rate

When it comes to customer feedback management, one of the major challenges is always to maintain a reasonable return rate from an e-mail questionnaire. Indeed, by obtaining a sufficient number of responses, it's easy to estimate that the panel of people questioned is representative of the customer base.

Average e-mail return rates vary considerably from one sector to another, but if we had to give a few figures, let's say that a good return rate in BtoC is around 20% to 30%, and 5% to 10% in BtoB. When should you be particularly concerned? If you achieve a return rate of 30% and the following month it's only 10%. There's clearly a problem. But in most cases, companies observe a low rate right from the start, or notice an erosion. What are the levers for improving return rates? Here are some answers.

Mail presentation

To convince the recipient to take the time to answer, avoid excessive length, both in the subject line and in the e-mail text, and emphasize the clickable button leading to the questionnaire. To improve your return rate, don't hesitate to add a question in the body of the e-mail: "What do you think of your last purchase?" to engage the recipient. Also make sure that the e-mail content is responsive design on all devices. Finally, explain why you're asking your customer and the purpose of the survey, as it's important to contextualize: "You've just made a purchase in one of our stores,..."

Ensuring deliverability

Deliverability problems are often at the root of low return rates. All it takes, for example, is for ISPs to introduce stricter routing conditions. To avoid this kind of inconvenience, test dummy e-mail addresses with different domain names to ensure that e-mails don't end up in spam.

Keep it short and concise

Beforehand, tell the customer the length of the questionnaire or the number of questions, to reassure them. If the questionnaire is short, specify it by saying: "Answer these 3 questions...". On the other hand, avoid surveys with 40-50 questions. By trying to cover every item, you lose the customer, so you have to make choices: a satisfaction score, a few closed questions and one open question.

Think customer journey

Rather than relying on global feedback, think about building your customer journey by identifying key moments: welcome, product selection, checkout or online purchase, delivery, and so on. This will make customers feel more involved in their own experience. And this will enable you to identify the positive and negative points of each stage of the customer journey, and thus obtain real levers for action.

Letting customers express themselves openly

Don't limit yourself to a satisfaction score and closed questions. Open-ended questions, which should be limited to one or two, leave the customer free to express his or her true feelings. On your side, it's a way of obtaining real information on the reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction. By analyzing comments, you can quickly identify real levers for improvement.

Demonstrate responsiveness

Soliciting your customers on the spot is the best way to get a response. The closer you are to the actual experience, the better the feedback. Ideally, a survey should be sent out within 24 hours. As for the one-off follow-up, it's sent a week later. Of course, if your business involves frequent contact between your brand and your customers, be careful not to send out questionnaires systematically. Set up rules, on a case-by-case basis, to avoid over-soliciting your customers.

If, after having followed these tips, you still observe an erosion of the e-mail channel, why not turn to another solicitation channel such as SMS, IVR or the integration of contextualized surveys on your website or online customer area?