Dissemination of an online questionnaire by email

Your new survey is ready. Having done an accurate targeting you are about to launch an invitation by email. This although essential step is often overlooked. But it is crucial to take good care of email if you want to improve your response rate as this it is the gateway that your respondents should take to participate in the survey. Your motto:

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Dissemination of an online questionnaire by email

Here you find a list of the most common email mistakes to avoid

First of all the invitation email should be delivered to recipient. Then, the respondent must open, read and, last but not least, click on the survey link in order to respond. All this sounds simple but the sources of error are numerous. By following the up coming 4 points you can avoid mistakes that could be fatal to the success of your surveys.

1. Quality of database: cleaning & hygiene

The quality of data in your database can make a big difference to the success of your campaigns Clean your mailing list regularly to avoid two problems: high costs and weak deliverability. When your subscribers and recipients begin to lose interest in your mail, click-through rate and opening rate fall.

In their fight against spam, ISPs (Orange, Free) and webmail solutions (Gmail, Hotmail) analyze the reactivity of emails and when they detect poor performance (open rates, unsubscribe, spam declaration IASP) they put emails from the same sender automatically in the spam folder. Worse yet, the domain name can be blacklisted and no email will be delivered. So you need to define a managing strategy for removing inactive and invalid emails to ensure clean data.

2. Sender email: customization

The email sender is absolutely critical in the recipient’s decision to open or not open a message. Choose a custom sender so your recipients will quickly identify you and open rate will improve: “Emilie My Business” with an email “emilie@mybusiness.com”. Do not change the sender, this would disrupt your recipients as well as ISPs and webmail.

Please, never ever send any email from no-repy@mybusiness.com address. Your recipients may interpret your choice as a lack of consideration: “Respond to my survey, for the rest I do not care about your comments or questions. Don’t write me. I will not answer you.” That said: when you receive messages sent to Emilie, answer them.

3. Email message: layout, loading and unsubscribe

Your respondent received the email, he identified the sender “Wow, Emile again! ” and he clicked to open it. Now, it is your turn to seduce him with a pretty and user friendly layout which meets specific technical and legal constraints.

It is jungle of desktop and web-based email software out there! That said, always double-check the message on the most popular email clients (e.g. Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail…). Make sure links work, images are loaded correctly. This is not the case? Do not use solely images, texts are always displayed. It is advisable to have a minimum of 30% text for 70% image, some even advance a ratio of 50% / 50%.

Then, make sure the weight of the message is not too heavy to avoid too long download. It is recommended to not to exceed 50K or even 30K. Always provide a top mirror link to view the content in a web browser and a footer with an unsubscribe link. This is not only a legal obligation (LCEN Act 2004), but also a good practice advice. If you leave the choice to your recipients to unsubscribe they will avoid declaring you as a spammer. Your deliverability will only get better.

In their fight against spam, ISPs (Orange, Free) and webmail solutions (Gmail, Hotmail) analyze the reactivity of emails and when they detect poor performance (open rates, unsubscribe, spam declaration IASP) they put emails from the same sender automatically in the spam folder. Worse yet, the domain name can be blacklisted and no email will be delivered. So you need to define a managing strategy for removing inactive and invalid emails to ensure clean data

4. Sending emails: authentication and routing

Without a professional emailing system, the likelihood to see poor campaign results grows exponentially. Sending a message to a large number of recipients with your BCC or from your webmail account is a particularly bad idea. Sending bulk emails has become too technical and specific. Professional ESP (an Email Service Provider) ensure to be whitelisted ISPs (Internet service providers and webmail), manage soft bounces and hard bounces, that is, the errors in the emails sent back to the sender.

When you go through an Email Service Provider external to your business you must be transparent. Today, it is easy to send an email in some else’s behind using email address of anyone. Two authentication systems have been created to strengthen the fight against spam and phishing: the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail). SPF provides a list of servers that are authorized to send e-mail from listed domains and DKIM includes a “key” in the email.

Professional Email Service Providers offer both protocols to declare in the DNS of your domain name. If you want to set them up for your online surveys with AreYouNet do not hesitate to contact us. Please note that SPF and DKIM do not excuse you take into account all the other criteria mentioned above.

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