The main objective of any business is to grow and earn more and more profits. And to earn profits, you need to satisfy your customers. So the route of Profit Maximization goes from the one and only way of Customer Satisfaction. If your customers are happy with the experience you provide with your products and services, they will spend money on them. If you are not able to satisfy the customers, you lose the entire game.
Researches suggest that an average American if goes through an unsatisfying or poor experience, tells around 15 other people. Whereas if the customers get satisfied, they can even pay you more. Studies say that 67% of customers and 74% of business buyers are willing to pay more for a great Customer Experience.
Now the question arises, how to know whether the customers are satisfied or not? The key is to ask for their feedback through surveys. Customer Surveys are a great way to collect Customer Feedback and measure their satisfaction levels, and companies use various channels to send Customer Surveys like SMS, email, tablets, kiosks, websites, and QR codes. Among them, email is a commonly accepted channel to send surveys.
For sending a survey through an email, you can choose among two ways. One is to send an Email Survey post-interaction when the deal with the customer is complete. The other one is to send surveys along with regular communication emails in their signature. The latter is known as Email Signature Surveys.
In this article, we will provide information about Email Signature Surveys as well as Post-Interaction Surveys and compare both of them to know which one is better in which situation. Let’s start with Email Signature Surveys.
Get Started with Email Surveys
Send Email Survey Invitations, Embedded Email Surveys, In-Signature Surveys, and measure Customer Feedback remotely, in real-time.
What are Email Signature Surveys?
Email Signature Surveys are those that are sent to the customers along with the regular emails used for communicating with the customers for several purposes. These surveys are sent in the signature of the emails and hence are known as Email Signature Surveys.
No special email is sent to distribute these surveys. Rather, they are sent as a part of emails sent for communication purposes regarding different aspects like a notification of bill payment, delivery, a transaction, or for a resolution for a customer concern or anything for which an email is needed.
Email Signature Surveys are beneficial in various aspects. Let’s learn how.
Advantages of an Email Signature Survey
- It takes less time to create surveys
- It takes less time to view and respond to surveys
- It has a better open rate and response rate
- It can collect feedback at every touchpoint
- It helps to fetch instant feedback
Let’s learn how these advantages make Email Signature Surveys a great way to survey your customers for feedback.
1. It takes less time to create surveys
Email Signature Surveys are short surveys embedded in the signature of the emails. You don’t need to draft another email to invite and motivate the customers to take the survey. Rather, you are just providing an opportunity to them to provide feedback if they have any feedback in mind.
All you need to do is to attach the survey in your signature and send your emails with that signature. This is a very short process which you can do with the help of any good Email Survey Software very easily and quickly.
2. It takes less time to view and respond to surveys
Email Surveys are not only quick and easy to create, but also easy and less time-consuming for the customers to respond to these surveys. By sending surveys as email signatures, you do not fill their inbox with any additional survey emails and save their time. Customers can easily view the survey, respond to it with a few clicks in a matter of seconds.
3. It has a better open rate and response rate
Do you open every email in your inbox? If you do this, it’s a good practice; but people often don’t follow this practice. Do you know that around 40% of the customers have nearly 50 unread emails at any point of time in their inboxes?
Many people usually skip surveys and marketing emails due to paucity of time. But when you use emails as a means of communication for sending information to the customers about various aspects, they open your emails and respond to them wherever required. While communicating with emails, they also go through the embedded Email Signature Surveys or their link or button. And if they have some feedback in their mind, they can hardly stop themselves from responding to your feedback surveys. This increases the responses rate of your surveys.
4. It can collect feedback at every touchpoint
Email Signature Surveys give you the ability to collect feedback at every touchpoint of your customer journey. With every email communication during the customer journey, you can send Email Signature Surveys along.
If at any point your customers have any concerns, they can share their feedback with you and you can take timely action and improve the particular aspect of your business.
5. It helps to fetch instant feedback
As Email Signature Surveys are easy to create for you and easy for your customers to respond to, they have the ability to provide you instant feedback. Neither you have to wait for the customers to have a full experience of your product or service to ask for feedback, nor your customers have to wait for a survey invitation if they have feedback in mind. All this process of seeking and giving feedback becomes easy and quick for both parties.
Now let us learn about Post-interaction surveys and how are they different.
What are Post-Interaction Surveys?
Post-Interaction or Post-Transaction surveys are those that are sent after an interaction or transaction like a purchase, a closing of a deal, a bill payment, a delivery, a call or chat conversation with the customer, a dine, a hotel stay, or any transaction or deal with the customer.
In most cases, Post-interaction surveys are triggered as soon as a transaction is complete and are sent to the customers automatically with the help of Email Survey Software. You can also choose to send them after a selected time interval as per your requirement and the nature of your business, like an hour after delivery, a week after a product purchase, or immediately after an online banking transaction.
Post-interaction surveys are beneficial to get overall feedback about the customers’ experience with your products and services. Let’s explore the advantages of these surveys to know more about how they are helpful for your business.
Advantages of a Post-Interaction Survey
- It helps to gauge overall Customer Experience
- It gives time to the customers to evaluate an experience
- It provides the feedback of the resolution provided
- It helps to predict loyalty and churn
- It tells you the position of your business in the market
Let’s learn how these advantages make these surveys useful for your business:
1. It helps to gauge overall Customer Experience
Email Signature Surveys measure the immediate satisfaction of the customers, but sometimes they fail to measure the accurate overall satisfaction. Post-Interaction Surveys are very helpful in such cases as they are useful to gauge the overall Customer Experience in broad terms.
2. It gives time to the customers to evaluate an experience
Post-Interaction Surveys give considerable time to the customers to think and evaluate their experience rather than prompting them to just share quickly their at-the-moment emotions. It happens that sometimes the customers are not happy with a particular aspect of the deal and they share very bad feedback about it.
But later after evaluating all the positives and negatives, they realize that nothing is perfect and you are much better than your competitors. Post-Interaction Surveys prevent such negative feedback and gives time to the respondents to do a better evaluation and then provide more accurate feedback.
3. It provides the feedback of the resolution provided
90% of the customers consider issue resolution as a major aspect that affects the overall Customer Experience. When the customers are facing an issue, they get frustrated with your products and services for some time. In such a situation, when you ask for feedback with every email communication, they will obviously give negative feedback.
But when you handle their issues in a good way and genuinely help them to resolve their issues, it improves their experience and changes their perception of you to a large extent. Researches suggest that 83% of the customers feel more loyal to brands that listen and respond to their complaints and resolve their issues.
4. It helps to predict loyalty and churn
Sometimes people give feedback on the basis of their immediate emotions at a certain touchpoint of their customer journey, but their actions are contradictory with the feedback they provided. Sometimes they curse a brand at an instance, but still, make repurchases from that brand.
Whereas, sometimes customers praise a brand at a moment, but still switch to another brand within no time. Post-Interaction Surveys are more accurate in terms of measuring Customer Loyalty and helps you to predict better about repurchases and churn.
5. It tells you the position of your business in the market
Post-Interaction Surveys are helpful as they tell you your position in the market. The metric surveys like NPS and CSAT which help you measure Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction give better and more accurate results with Post-interaction surveys than in Email Signature surveys.
Difference between Email Signature Surveys and Post-Interaction Surveys
Email Signature Surveys |
Post-Interaction Surveys |
Used at every touchpoint of the customer journey. |
Used once after the interaction or transaction is complete. |
Collects feedback and measure CX about each aspect |
Collects feedback and measures CX with overall Customer Experience. |
Helps to take immediate corrective action before it gets too late. |
Takes feedback after the resolution is provided and helps as a guide for future actions. |
Less time-consuming for both business and customers. |
Takes more time to create and send surveys. |
Gauges immediate customer insights and emotions. |
Gives customers time to evaluate their experience. |
Can’t provide accurate predictions of Customer Loyalty and churn. |
Provide more accurate predictions regarding Customer Loyalty and churn. |
High open rate and response rate. |
Comparatively lower open rate and response rate. |
Conclusion
Survey distribution channel plays an important role in making your surveys successful. So you have to choose the channel carefully considering your requirements, nature of your business, and most importantly the purpose of your surveys.
A good response rate is necessary to make your surveys successful and Email Signature Surveys can fetch you a much better response rate than those of Post-Interaction Surveys, sot they are any day better. But they cannot solve every purpose.
You should choose Email Signature Surveys if your purpose is to:
- To capture immediate feelings and real customer insights.
- To know feedback for every aspect of your business.
- To gather responses from the maximum number of customers.
- To collect instant Customer Feedback.
- To save time and effort of creating separate survey emails.
- To track the performance of employees of different teams and departments.
On the other hand, you should choose Post-Interaction Surveys when your purpose is to:
- To collect feedback on the overall Customer Experience.
- To know your company’s position in the market in the market in terms of CX and Customer Loyalty.
- To track the performance of the employees in terms of providing resolutions for customers’ concerns.
- To have more accurate predictions about Customer Loyalty and churn.
Get Started with Email Surveys
Send Email Survey Invitations, Embedded Email Surveys, In-Signature Surveys, and measure Customer Feedback remotely, in real-time.