Part four in a four-part series (read parts one, two, and three)

4. Survey your team
+ Send an employee satisfaction survey
+ Create a company suggestion form
+ Publish a quick staff-wide poll

As you’re seeing how email and surveys can help you stay in touch with your customers, don’t forget the same tools can help you get to know your employees better, too. A survey helps you gauge employee satisfaction, and you can even collect responses anonymously to protect your staffers’ privacy.

You might also send a survey to get employee feedback on simple but meaningful things around the office. If you’ve got a monthly charitable budget, poll your people to see which non-profit they’d most like to support. Find out which after-hours social destination is most popular. Or send a survey about the all-important break room snack options. The people, they want the Funyuns.

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Part three in a four-part series (read parts one and two)

3. Do some market research
+ Create an opinion poll
+ Conduct a market research survey
+ Discover new segments of your audience

Alas, many of us come from humble email marketing beginnings, starting out with nothing in our databases but email addresses and first names. With surveys & forms, you can expand on that knowledge a bit and ask your audience where they live, what their interests are or where they work.

Use what you learn to refine a product or entice advertisers with better demographics. Or fold that information into your email strategy to create new segments of your audience. Then, send more targeted campaigns down the road based on what you now know. You savvy marketer, you.

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Part two in a four-part series (read part one here)

2. Manage your Events
+ Create an event registration form
+ Follow up with a post-event questionnaire
+ Send an evaluation form for an online class

If you host events of any kind - seminars, conferences, online classes or fundraisers - you’re probably coordinating lots of moving parts. Are the parts literally moving? One hopes not, unless you’re envisioning some kind of elaborate event showcasing pulleys and levers and such, in which case, good luck with that.

No matter how involved your events are, surveys & forms can simplify how you manage ‘em, with pre-event forms to register who’s coming and post-event surveys to collect feedback. Pair surveys with date-based trigger emails to simplify things even more, automatically inviting attendees to take your survey one week after the big pulley showcase.

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Part one of a four-part series

For the last couple months the Emma community has been gearing up to make the most of our new surveys and forms feature. A lot of ideas for how to use the feature have been tossed around, and we want to share some with you, fair blog reader. We’ll post on the topic for four days this week - one big category (and a few examples) for each day. Hope you enjoy the series…

1. Ask for Feedback
+ Send a customer service evaluation form
+ Create a product review
+ Publish a product sampling survey

These days, a lot of organizations are focusing on better service, loyalty and retention, knowing that their current customers (or donors, members or fans) are among their most valuable assets.

Why not send a quick survey asking those folks for feedback on your latest product, your customer service or even your monthly email newsletter? You’ll hear great insight from your customers, and your customers will have an easy way to share their thoughts with you. If only there were a punchy phrase to describe this kind of mutually beneficial situation. Oh, well.

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Let’s face it, some folks have gotten greedy when creating a survey. Asking too many questions can overwhelm and frustrate your audience, and that’s just no good for anyone. To get good feedback and keep the the positive vibes flowing, let your customers know in advance that you respect their time and have kept the questions brief. Here’s an example from Levi’s where the time commitment was very clear from the beginning. The email reads…

PS It only took me one minute to complete the survey. Not bad at all. Nice job, Levi’s.

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Email is one of the easiest ways to invite customers to participate in a survey. Since surveys are a recent addition to Emma’s lineup, we’ll be covering survey strategy and creative examples on the blog. Here’s the first post on the topic to get things started…

When you’re inviting survey responses, be sure to communicate the larger vision to your audience. It’s so important to let people know *why* they should participate. Will the next new product be chosen from the results? Will your pricing structure be based on the feedback you get? Will you open a location near them if the results call for it? If you don’t tell them that their voice matters, and makes a difference in how you run your business, they won’t know. And if they don’t know, they won’t be motivated to give you their time and attention.

This example from LinkedIn isn’t terribly specific, but it is clear that the survey data will be used to shape the direction of the service. Keep your eye out for invitations that clearly communicate a compelling reason for participating. And if you think of it when you see one, send us a screenshot. There’s nothing we like better than bonding over the little-noticed nuances of a marketing strategy. Okay, there are a few things we like better (eggnog, gingerbread cookies, flying reindeer and jelly-of-the-month clubs just to name a few), but you know what I mean.

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