How to Ask for Customer Feedback Through Email

Customer feedback is an integral part of creating a successful business–it shows you what you’re doing right, where you might be missing the mark, and makes your customers feel heard. But you may be wondering exactly how to ask for customer feedback in a way that’s both practical and effective. 

Even if you have your survey or questionnaire ready to go, you still need to reach out to your customers and motivate them to respond consistently. While you may use a variety of techniques as part of your overall marketing strategy, you shouldn’t discount email as an efficient avenue to ask for customer feedback. 

Here are a few reasons why:

• Email gives you a high return for a low cost–for every $1 spent, $44 is earned on average, which is a 4400% ROI
• You can segment your reach so that you only target your customer base, or even certain members of your audience that have taken a particular action.
• Email automation means that you can easily set up customer feedback emails to be sent at any point of a customer journey, such as right after your customer makes a purchase or receives their product.

What are the benefits of customer feedback?

1. Learning more about your customers

Feedback gives you an even closer view into the things your customers care about. When you’re fully immersed in your business, it can be difficult to look at things objectively. We forget that what makes sense to us may not necessarily resonate with our customers and may even confuse them entirely. Or you may overlook certain processes that could be causing frustration for your customers, simply because you’re on the inside. Gaining feedback is a great way to understand your customers’ experience and keep up with their evolving interests and desires. 


2. Understanding what to improve

Even though negative feedback isn’t always nice to hear, you can’t discount the necessity of it. In fact, asking for customer feedback can also be a great proactive tactic for your business. Instead of being blindsided by negative reviews from angry or frustrated customers, by making sure you listen to your customers consistently, you can catch any issues early on and keep low ratings at a minimum.

3. Understanding what to continue doing

Feedback isn’t meant to be all negative. If you’re doing something right, your customers should let you know as well. One excellent feedback strategy is to use email marketing to segment the subscribers who buy the most or engage with your service frequently. You can let them fill out a short answer question, which will allow them to be more specific, or gauge their opinions through a rating scale question. For example, you can ask your audience to rate their experience with your customer service team from a range of 1-5.

4. Showing your customers that you care

People like to feel heard and they especially want to feel like a priority when they’re spending their hard-earned money. By making the effort to listen to your customers and implement their suggestions, you’re showing them that you value their opinions and not just their wallets. It also lets them know that you care about improving your processes and aren’t staying stagnant.

How to Ask for Customer Feedback

1. Be personable

Remember that behind all the metrics, purchases, and funny-sounding email addresses are real human beings. With the amount of competition businesses face today, coming across as authentic and down to earth can be a nice way to set your brand apart when it comes to communication—and it’s certainly a plus when asking for feedback.
Let your customers know how much they’d be helping you by giving you feedback–it’ll make them feel like they’re doing something good and it will make them feel good to know that you value their ideas and experiences. 

2. Offer a reward

Providing a little incentive for feedback can definitely make your email campaigns more successful. It's okay to give discounts in exchange for feedback, including reviews. You can even ask customers to update their reviews once an issue has been resolved. But one thing you should never do is bribe your customers into positive feedback. 

For example, if you want to offer a $15 discount to your customer on your next purchase, don’t make the trade-off that they need to write you a 5-star review. This comes off as shady and can even wind up backfiring if a disgruntled customer writes their own negative review and reveals that the company essentially attempted to bribe them. Have confidence in the quality of your product or service and remember that bettering your brand is the goal ultimately. 

3. Make it easy

Your customers are busy people with jobs, families, and lives of their own–even the most generous of customers can get turned off if what’s being asked of them looks too complicated or overwhelming. So make it simple for them by doing the following:

• Keep your email short and sweet–try to avoid blocks of text or any information that isn’t relevant to getting feedback
• Provide an estimate on how long the survey will take–letting your customers know it will only take a few minutes can make them more likely to give in
• Don’t make your survey long–five minutes or less is a suitable length 
• Minimize the amount of steps involved–if you can link the survey straight to your CTA without making your customers do anything else, your conversions will be much higher

How to Write a Customer Feedback Email

1. Subject Line

Before you can get feedback, you have to catch your customers' attention and you can only do this with a compelling subject line. Naturally, you’ll want to incorporate words like “feedback”, “opinion”, “thoughts”, or even the discount amount that you’re offering, but another common tactic is to ask a question.

Take a look at these sample subject lines for ideas:

• How was your experience with [product]?
• Did you enjoy your stay at [place]?
• Let us know how we can improve
• Take our survey and get 25% off your next order
• We want to hear your thoughts
• How has your new product been?
• Get $20 off for your feedback
• How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?
• So, what do you think? 
• Give us your honest feedback
• Did you love it or hate it?
  

2. Explain the purpose of the feedback

When creating a customer feedback email, there’s likely a specific reason you want to hear from your customers. This can include wanting more insight on how the launch of a new product is going, tightening up your customer service methods, or making sure your customers aren’t running into any issues when using your website. Whatever it may be, being straightforward and honest about the goal of the feedback will help your customers know what to expect and encourage customers with relevant experiences to respond.

3. Include a Clear CTA

Once your audience knows what kind of feedback you're looking for, it’s time to tell them where to go. Your CTA should be the most notable part of your email so that it’s not easily missed. Make it a hyperlink that is separate from the rest of the text in your email or a button with a color that stands out on its own.

The actual CTA text should be short and simple, but also encourage for your customers to take action immediately. Check out some example CTAs below:

• Take our 3-minute survey
• Tell us what you think
• Give your feedback
• Review us here
• Start the survey now

Customer Feedback Email Template

Here’s a basic customer survey email template that you can use as inspiration to build your own:

Heading: We Want to Hear From You

Hi [FIRST NAME],

We hope you’ve been enjoying your [PRODUCT/SERVICE] so far!

At [COMPANY], we’re always looking for more ways to improve what we do so that we can better serve you. We’d really appreciate it if you could take a short survey to let us know more about your most recent experience shopping with us. Tell us what you loved, kinda liked, or what you feel we could do better. 

It’ll only take about 3 minutes and your feedback will be a huge help.

Thanks for your time!

Take the 3-minute survey

Now that you know what goes into crafting an effective customer feedback email, you should be ready to create your own. But if you want more guidance on how to enhance your emails even more or revamp your email marketing altogether, let us help you. Our team at Scalero is an all-in-one email powerhouse and can aid you with email design, strategy, and so much more. Get started today!