Planning a survey

Plan your survey tool campaign
It’s important to plan your survey well in advance of your start date. You need to give yourself time to make sure your survey campaign is as good as it can be.
When planning your survey tool campaign, consider the following:

• Who is your target audience?

To make your survey relevant, you need to identify your target audience and understand their needs. This will allow you to design a survey that will engage them and encourage them to respond.
You may identify more than one target audience and they may have different requirements. One survey may not be suitable for all.

• What are your objectives?

Identify what the main aim of your survey is.
Do you want to raise awareness in a specific area of your operation, seek members’ opinions or improve member retention?

• How are you going to measure the success of your survey campaign?

Anyone not tracking their message survey's performance is missing a big opportunity for improvement.
Tracking your survey’s performance is a great way to look for areas that require improvement or to identify areas where you are performing particularly well; so you can then replicate the process for other surveys.

Segment, personalise and be relevant
Use the information you have identified about your members to send them targeted, relevant messages. Segment your member list and, if possible, develop specific surveys for each target audience. The better your targeting the more likely your campaign will be a success - 80% of a survey’s success is down to the targeted list; 20% the creative content.

Write a great subject line
In order to maximise your survey open rate, you need to write a good subject line for your survey - it’s the first thing your recipients will see when they are deciding which emails to read and which to junk! Keep your subject line simple, to the point and tell the reader what to expect inside. Don’t use words like “free” which might trigger spam filters.

Design a strong survey campaign
It is very important when designing your survey that you design a strong wire-frame template and consider these tips:

• Make good use of the top 2 to 4 inches of your message design which is prime reading space

• Keep your message short – keep scrolling to a minimum

• Don’t use lots of different fonts and colours

• Make your call to action prominent and clear so that your audience knows what to do

• Make sure copy is easily scannable – members won’t read every word

Test before you send
Don’t forget to test your survey before you send it out to members. First impressions count and you don’t want anything to go wrong which might put them off interacting with your survey.

Measure campaign success
It is very important to make sure that you are monitoring key survey metrics such as:

• The number of survey messages delivered
• The number of survey messages opened
• Ideally, each time you send a survey, you want to increase the number of members who open and act on it. Analysing your campaign results will help you do this

Keep testing and learning
You aren’t going to get everything right first time, so it’s important to use your survey campaign results to modify and re-test your survey – perhaps your subject line could be stronger. Remember to only change one part of your survey at a time so you can clearly see the effect that change has had on your results the next time you send your survey.