Customer Satisfaction: Collecting Customer Feedback via Newsletter

Our professional newsletter tool makes it easy to send feedback surveys directly to your customers via email.

Customer Satisfaction Survey and Email? A perfect match!

A customer satisfaction survey is a great way to find out if your content, products, or services are resonating with your users. Customer feedback tells you if you are on the right track with your offers or if you need to improve.

• How satisfied are my customers?
• How helpful is my content?
• How well do my products or services perform?
• Is my business recommended to others?

The answers to questions about customer satisfaction are of great interest to any company, no matter how large or small. They provide valuable insight into what customers think, want, and even struggle with. Satisfied customers not only come back, but in the best cases, become brand ambassadors.

But how well is your offer being received?

Use email feedback to find out and measure customer satisfaction!

In this post, you’ll learn how our powerful yet simple email marketing tool can help you do just that, and how you can get valuable feedback.

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Collect Customer Feedback Properly: Define Goals

Those who survey customers via email newsletters benefit from the results in several ways:

• Get instant feedback on your product/ service.
• Asking for feedback builds customer loyalty.
• Receive suggestions for new products/ services or desired changes to your existing offers.

Before you start creating your customer satisfaction survey, define your goal(s). This determines which tool is right for your feedback newsletter.

Things you might want to know about your customers:

• Level of satisfaction with a product or service: After a customer makes a purchase, contacts a member of your support team, or reads a blog post, you want to know if they were satisfied. This survey is tied to a purchase or other transaction and will only be sent to those customers. The survey can be very brief, but can also ask detailed questions.
• General customer survey: The survey is not related to a specific service or product, but covers several topics or points such as price, quality, shipping, comprehensibility, friendliness, etc.. The target group can be the entire customer mailing list or only parts of it.
• New Features / Services: Want to know if an innovation or a planned new product feature or service will be well received by your customers? Send a customer satisfaction survey to a representative part of your email list.

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How Can Email Measure Customer Satisfaction?

There are several ways to collect feedback from your customers via email.

Send an online survey to your customers via a newsletter. Ask them what they think about your company, products or services. Use an online survey tool or ask for feedback directly in the email using very simple rating options.

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Quick Feedback via Yes/No Buttons Directly in Your Newsletter

If you need clear feedback about a product or service fast, you can use a Yes-or-No survey directly in your newsletter – without any external landing pages or survey tools. Simply create an email with CleverReach and insert buttons and add links and tags to them. Your customers – or rather their data records – get the tag attached after clicking the button.

A yes-or-no survey is very quick and easy to complete because there are only two answer choices. It is also ideal for querying individual facts, such as “Did you like our product?” after a purchase in an online store.

The yes/no division makes the result clear, but also polarizing. You can’t find the passives this way.

Another problem is that Apple users cannot be tracked when they click the buttons because of the mail privacy protection.

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NPS Survey: Recognized Customer Satisfaction Measurement

NPS is short for Net Promoter Score. NPS is a recognized metric that measures the satisfaction of your customers. Use your NPS to find out how you are doing and how customer satisfaction evolves over time.

The Net Promoter Score has been established in the 1990s. It was first introduced in the book “The Ultimate Question,” and it is this “ultimate question” that customers are asked to measure their satisfaction and loyalty. It’s: “How likely are you to recommend this company to your friends and colleagues?” The response option is a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the lowest probability and 10 is the highest.

A 9 or 10 indicates that the user is actively recommending you, your product, website or service – a brand ambassador, so to speak. Conversely, people who rate with numbers 0-6 are assumed to publish their negative opinion. The passives are in between.

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of positive reviews from the percentage of negative reviews. The difference is the NPS, which is between plus 100 and minus 100. The more promoters compared to detractors a company has, the higher the NPS – and the more likely you are to benefit from customer referrals. NPS is therefore also called “Loyalty Score”.

Send NPS surveys to your customers via email newsletters and measure their satisfaction with this customer loyalty metric. Use an online tool or embed an NPS survey directly into your own website. Take a look at GetApp, a platform comparing business software, which gives you an extensive list of NPS software.

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Online Survey Tool to Measure Customer Satisfaction

You want to get detailed feedback? Or ask more than one question? Then using an online survey tool makes sense. Use external survey software to create detailed online surveys. Invite your customers to participate via email. Some of the tools also allow you to embed the surveys into your own web page, so you can create your own landing page for the survey.

The advantage of this type of survey is that you are more likely to get honest answers because the surveys are anonymous. This gives you a very realistic picture of customer satisfaction. This allows you to customize what you offer based on how your customers feel.

Anonymity is also the downside of collecting feedback through an external survey tool. Unfortunately, the data cannot be used for your email marketing because the responses cannot be associated with an email recipient record.

There are a variety of survey tools that you can use to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Some of them are even free, at least in a lightweight version. If you want to use all the features or have a lot of questions, you often can’t avoid a paid full version.

We present the most commonly used survey tools for customer satisfaction surveys:

1. Google Forms: free and beginner friendly

Google Forms is great for simple, straightforward surveys. The tool is one of Google’s free business applications. Even beginners can learn how to use it.

With 9 survey types and various response parameters, Google Forms covers the most important basics of a survey tool.

The results are displayed in a Google Sheet.

2. SurveyMonkey: the most popular survey tool

SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular and widely used tools for creating and conducting surveys, like customer satisfaction surveys.

It has a large number of functions, but is very easy to understand and offers various options for analyzing the results.

A survey – even a complex one – can be created very quickly and either embedded into your own landing page or sent out via email.

There is a basic version that is free of charge, the more feature-rich versions cost an annual fee depending on the scope of their functionality.

3. LimeSurvey: Open source software in over 80 languages

LimeSurvey also has a free basic version for beginners and more feature-rich, priced packages for professionals. Currently, the free version includes 25 responses per month. But these are quickly reached and therefore only useful for private users. If you want to get customer feedback in meaningful numbers, you should upgrade to one of the paid packages. LimeSurvey is open source and can be self-hosted. This powerful solution can be expanded with templates and question types. Surveys can be created in more than 80 languages and run in parallel in multiple languages.

4. Qualtrics^XM: Experience Management Platform with AI Support

QualtricsXM is an extremely powerful survey tool and consists of multiple platforms that allow you to conduct all types of market, brand, customer, and product research. Taken as a whole, Qualtrics is an Experience Management (XM) platform. From simple customer satisfaction surveys to comprehensive research projects, Qualtrics can help.

Despite its complexity, Qualtrics is very user friendly. As a special feature, the software is powered by AI, which allows you to receive personalized recommendations for designing surveys. The evaluation is also AI-powered and provides you with detailed results. There is a limited free basic version as well as very extensive extensions for a fee.

5. easyfeedback: classic and hosted in Germany

Easyfeedback does what it says on the tin. It’s a tool that makes it easy to create and conduct online customer surveys. Easyfeedback is cost effective and easy to use. There are 70 free survey templates available. The questions are ready to go. The tool is hosted in Germany and is GDPR compliant and ISO certified. The free plan currently includes 10 questions and 100 participants per survey. There are also several packages available for larger volumes. It is also possible to book a single survey.

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Which survey types work well for feedback?

There are different question and answer options available for your customer satisfaction survey, depending on the survey tool you are using. The types of questions to get feedback from your customers depends on what you want to achieve with your survey.

What do you want to learn from your email survey?

• Collect product feedback/ develop products
• Identify needs, wants, expectations develop new products
• Measure customer loyalty
• Optimize pricing
• Conduct market research survey

Of course, you can also combine your goals. However, always keep an eye on the length of the survey: if it takes too long for people to answer all the questions, they are more likely to drop out. On average, a survey should take no longer than 15 minutes, although the ideal length will vary depending on the type of survey. Deviations up or down are possible.

open / closed questions

Basically, surveys have open and closed questions:

• In case of closed questions, different answer options or scales can be checked.
• Open-ended questions allow participants to enter free text, which allows for highly individualized responses, but makes scoring more difficult. Very few tools offer automatic scoring.

Therefore, closed-ended customer satisfaction surveys are more targeted. A final input question with a free-text field for an individual response is a good way to solicit personal feedback: “Is there anything else you would like to say about our service?” or “Which product is missing from our range?

 

Common Question Types in Survey Tools

• Versatile Choice Questions

This type of question asks a question with multiple answer choices. Of those, you can click on either single answers (single choice) or multiple answers (multiple choice). Multiple choice questions in particular are among the most commonly used question types in surveys.

Choice questions also include Yes/No questions that are limited to answering only those two choices.

• Rating Questions – for a more accurate evaluation

What is problematic, what is well-received? Ask your customers to rate your offer on a rating scale, and you’ll get a more accurate picture of how well your offer is being received. NPS surveys are an example of evaluation questions. The star ratings are also a part of the evaluation questions.

Rating questions can be divided into rating questions, which ask for a number of points on a single scale, and ranking questions, which ask for a ranking order.

• Likert Scale – the classic for surveying customer satisfaction

Questions that have a Likert scale response option are particularly useful for customer satisfaction surveys. The Likert scale is used to measure an attitude, an opinion, or a behavior. Instead of a set of questions, a Likert scale has a set of statements that are rated. The rating scale ranges from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” and is either a five-point or a seven-point scale with a neutral midpoint. This way, attitudes and opinions can be measured more accurately than in a simple yes/no survey.

• Matrix Questions – The All-Inclusive Satisfaction Survey

Matrix questions cover different aspects of a topic, product or service. A Likert scale is used for answering, allowing you to rate different elements. To gauge customer satisfaction, the survey asks, “How satisfied are you with ….?”; responses range from “Not at all satisfied” to “Completely satisfied”. Based on the responses, you can assess where customers are fully satisfied and where there is room for improvement.

It is a good idea to alternate question types and response options, but only in moderation – otherwise the survey will look unstructured and cluttered.

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How to set up an online survey

A successful feedback survey should not take too long to complete. However, you should not rush it.

After a brief introduction explaining the purpose of the survey and, if applicable, the questionnaire, begin with introductory or icebreaker questions. This can be followed by a series of transition questions.

Finally, all content questions are asked in the main section. These are built from general to increasingly specific. Include control questions. This will help you check for inconsistent answers. The survey ends with demographic questions designed to learn about the respondent. Finally, thank the survey participants and give them the opportunity to make a final comment, if they wish.

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What to look for in a customer satisfaction survey

Get a single fact at a time

When asking questions, it is very important that only one fact is actually asked, otherwise the customer will not be able to answer the question correctly and will either skip it or answer incorrectly. For example, do not combine two different topics, as in this example question, “Do you like our product and would you buy it?”

From the questioner’s perspective, the two may be related. But strictly speaking, a website visitor may like a product because it’s high quality and trendy, but they wouldn’t buy it because they can’t afford it or don’t need it right now. In this respect, the answer to the question can be “yes” as well as “no”-and the answer will be “no” because this part of the question is (presumably) more relevant to them.

Keep it short and simple!
When formulating questions, adapt the language style to your audience and avoid using technical terms that your users may not be familiar with. Also, ask the question in a way that makes it clear what is being said in the answer.

Sometimes, less is more
In particular, limiting the questions to a few and making the answers easy to understand encourages more users to participate in the survey. This way, you get more valuable feedback from your valued customers.

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Which template is best for sending online customer satisfaction surveys via newsletter?

You can use any CleverReach template for a feedback newsletter. Our free newsletter templates are highly customizable. You can include a link to your online survey or buttons for yes/no questions.

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Use Email Automation for Your Newsletter Survey

Set up an automation workflow to get more feedback from your customers.

Are your customers happy because you’re delivering what they want? It’s great when no one is complaining. However, a high level of satisfaction does not usually trigger customer feedback. Negative experiences, on the other hand, release much more energy to let off steam. This is good, because it is the only way to improve your service, but the hopefully more positive feedback is also valuable for your company. Send a newsletter to all customers asking for feedback. With our email automation tools THEA, you can remind those who have not clicked on the survey link to participate in your customer satisfaction survey.

This is what your automation workflow could look like:

Another possible use for our email automation tool is to survey customers following a purchase or support contact. The purchase or contact is the trigger. After a certain period of time, an email is sent with a link to the survey.

Here, too, it would be possible to take a further step by sending a reminder email.

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Customer Satisfaction Surveys: a valuable contributor to your success

Customer satisfaction surveys will boost your business and increase sales – if they’re planned well. That’s what planning and reporting is all about:

What is your goal?
Do you just want to check if your customer is satisfied with a certain product? Or do you want to test more: communication, shipping, handling, portfolio ….? Define your goal in advance, clearly and in detail.

What is your target audience?

Who do you want to query? And how will you reach these people? Segmentation allows you to use your CleverReach recipient list in a targeted way and send your survey email only to a specific group of people. Offer incentives when appropriate and use automation to remind people to complete the feedback survey to ensure a high response rate.

What questions are useful?
Ask the right questions – and really put some thought into how you phrase them until they are precise and clear. Get inspired by AI tools like ChatGPT if you like. Not only do vague questions lead to incorrect or biased results, they also lead to fewer responses.

It’s helpful to choose the right type of question. Do you want to give multiple answering choices? A scale? Or a text box for open-ended responses? All of these can have a significant impact on the outcome of your survey.

Which survey tool do you want to use?
If a simple yes/no survey is sufficient for your customer feedback, our Email Marketing Tool allows you to integrate this type of survey directly, easily and quickly into your newsletter. Otherwise, a variety of online survey tools offer a wide range of solutions. They differ in usability, price, features, ratings, and more. We have introduced a few of them here, but there are many more tools out there. We believe that there is no single best tool to address all feedback needs. This makes it all the more important to be clear about your objectives, target audience, etc. when choosing a solution.

How can you send out your survey via email?
No matter if you have created your own landing page with a survey or if you use an online tool: With CleverReach, you can send a link to the survey in your newsletter.

Where do you find your customer satisfaction survey results and how do you evaluate them?
If you use external software, you will find your survey results in the tool’s report. But the numbers and the ratings are one thing – what is much more important is the insights that you can draw from the answers. DIt can help you better tailor your offerings to customers’ wants and needs – and increase sales and profits in the future. Some tools help here by providing graphs and percentages.

Good luck with your customer satisfaction survey. So don’t hesitate, get started right now and test CleverReach with its many yet simple options to get indispensable feedback from your customers.

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