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December 2010 blog entries:

Tips on writing effective email invites for surveys

28 Dec 2010 — There's an art to writing emails that get opened and get your target panellists or mailing list respondents to click on the survey link. We are often asked to advise on tips for getting better response levels, and there's two principal things you have to think about: the psychology of respondents and the technology of spam filters.

The psychology of respondents: Remember that respondents are often inundated with emails, and they often skim through subject headers of emails. They will assess your email on strength of a strong subject line. So it's always best to give a call to action and incentive (for example, "Take our survey and you could win £100 cash").

But if the subject line appears quite different from what your list's main interests are, then you can expect them to hit the delete button, or worse "Add Sender to Spam List" option. If you're on a mailing list for Fashion Afficianados, an email headed "Tell us why you love chocolate!" could confuse or anger potential respondents.

Also it's always good practice to keep your email text succinct: after all, you're main aim is to get them to click on that link and take your survey! Be precise and identify the buttons you need to press to get them to act.

Spam filter technology: This is a hard nut to crack, but you can do things that will help your survey invites get passed junkmail filters in personal software or spam firewalls at the server level. There's a lot of technology assessing and judging whether emails should be quarantined, and those pieces of software are looking for things such as different URLs behind links, special characters (especially exclamation marks and currency symbols) and lots of line breaks in an email.

If the hidden link is different from the one shown in the text then spam filters can be activated. It's always best to have the main text read "Click here to take our survey", and hide the actual URL link behind that. Avoid special characters - !, *, ?, #, { } and so on - like the plague. And, above all, don't puts lots of line breaks in a survey; it's assumed that your are trying to get people to scroll down to some hidden text.

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