Think about how many emails you receive each day, and how many inboxes you reach. Email is a trusted communication tool, of course, but it can also be a great source of valuable customer satisfaction data.
You can gain insights into your customers and their experiences directly from each email with a short, attractive signature survey. While traditional survey methods typically have low response rates and may not give the most accurate feedback, email signature surveys are a great way to get the honest customer insights you’re looking for – without being demanding or annoying.
We know email signatures aren’t for everybody, and there are even some situations where we wouldn’t recommend them. Before we get into the details about how they work, and how to use them, let’s examine the pros and cons of including email signatures in your emails
✅ The pros of email signature surveys
The convenience factor
Presenting the survey as a simple, optional action at the end of an email – rather than a stand-alone task – is a subtle way of gathering feedback without being annoying.
And nothing is quicker and easier than a one-click survey. This is where you embed feedback buttons directly into your email. Pair an easy question like: “How are we doing?” with universally recognized symbols like thumbs up/down, smiley/sad faces, or star ratings, and your customers will be able to share their honest sentiments with just one click. Its simplicity and brevity mean you’re not going to put people off with long, time-consuming surveys.
Flexibility
Want to get feedback about how a particular team is performing? You can ask members of that team to add an email signature survey that gathers responses about their service. At the same time, you can ask members of another team to embed a different survey into their emails depending on what insight you want on how they are performing.
Email signature surveys are also a good way for companies that don’t have a help desk to get customer feedback. Even a little bit of insight from customers about how your team is performing is better than no insight at all!
Avoiding the trash
An issue with typical email surveys is that they often get caught by spam filters. If you have already been emailing customers and clients regularly, then it’s likely you’re considered a trusted source. So by putting a survey in your signature, it is less likely to end up in someone’s junk mail or trash.
❌ The cons of email signature surveys
Anonymity limits follow up
Survey responses in Gmail and Outlook are anonymous by default (solutions on how to get around this below) – this is just a feature of these platforms. It’s been proven that people tend to give more honest feedback if their responses are anonymous, but, it also means that you won’t have information to follow up on any negative responses.
And if you’re not using ticketing software, it can also be easier for survey results to be skewed by spam responses or “rage clicks”. Unfortunately, junk data does exist when it comes to surveys, but look beyond that and focus on the overarching trends to see the bigger picture.
They're not always appropriate
In some cases, it would just be flat out weird or insensitive to include a survey in one of your emails. Fortunately, most email clients and add-ons make it easy to remove surveys on a case by case basis.
😎 How to get the most out of email signature surveys
Simplesat makes it easy to create and paste surveys into Gmail or Outlook. You can then enter the relevant meta-information associated with a rating, such as a team member, customer, or company’s details.
Below are ways we recommend to get the most out of using email signature surveys with Simplesat, including how to get around anonymous survey responses.
Uncover relevant information
To get around the problem of anonymous survey responses, we recommend using a 3rd extension like Gorgias Templates. It allows you to insert custom variables, such as the recipient’s name, to capture relevant information for each survey.
For example, here’s a screenshot of the variable Gorgias Templates uses to automatically insert the first name of whoever you have added in the “to” address. We like Gorgias Templates because it’s easy to use – and free!
Here are some other tools that allow you to do the same:
Alternatively, you can capture relevant customer information by sending emails from a CRM or service desk like Pipedrive.
Improve response rates with one-click surveys
When all it takes to complete a survey is a single mouse click, your customer response rate will dramatically increase. With Simplesat, you can quickly add one-click surveys to your email signatures, allowing you to gather crucial information from customers without them having to fill in time consuming surveys.
Look for bigger trends
Examining individual email responses is not enough to reveal how your team is performing or how your customers feel about your product or service. Instead, you need to pay attention to trends in your data: changes over time.
Are negative responses increasing or decreasing over a 90 day period? Why have email survey response rates declined over the last 30 days?
🤓 How Simplesat can help you to start using email signature surveys
It’s fun and easy to create your own surveys with Simplesat.
You can make the survey unique to your brand with customizations for question types, colors, and logos. Then simply paste the survey into your Gmail or Outlook email signature. You can also create custom follow-up questions with Simplesat if you want more information about your respondents. Additionally, Simplesat tracks IP addresses for those times when you want to know where a response came from.
Simplesat surveys can integrate with basically any help desk, CRM, or email service provider, so you can get your email signature survey up and running with minimal hassle.
Curious? If you use Gmail or Outlook, then all you need to do is sign-up for a free Simplesat trial account to get started.