Surveys are the voice of your readers.  When asked about a topic that’s important to them, they will tell you exactly what they think.  It’s your job as an e-newsletter publisher to listen to these voices and, whenever possible, to act upon them.

The place to start is by finding questions that will ultimately give you feedback, not only on how to improve your e-newsletter program, but also on what kind of new products and services your readers are interested in.  Here’s what we’ve learned from our surveys and how we’re incorporating that information into our own e-communications program, as well as our product and service releases.  

• In a survey on the importance of e-newsletter programs, 78% of our readers who responded told us that their e-newsletter program is either a helpful or a key component of their overall marketing program.  To us, this means that it’s our job to provide our readers with new ideas on how to make their e-newsletters and e-communications programs more effective – and one such idea that we would like to suggest is, in fact, to add a survey to each issue you send out! 
• Eighty one percent of our readers who shared their views on customer retention say that customer retention is very important to them.  In fact, 47% of our respondents use their e-newsletter program as part of a customer retention program.  We’ve responded by introducing services such as Loyalty Driver for auto dealerships and Loyalty Lifter for health club owners.  Because our readers asked for them, these programs were created to help specific industries enhance the customer loyalty and retention of their customers and/or members.   
• Another interesting fact we discovered about our readers through our surveys is that 23% of our readers who answered an RSS survey either use RSS to receive information themselves, or their companies use RSS as an alternate means of providing information to their customers and prospects.  Thirty-nine percent are interested in experimenting with RSS, while a large number of survey respondents are not familiar with RSS or aren’t sure how they can use it in their world yet.   Because of this, we will continue to provide articles in the near future on the benefits of RSS so that our readers can be on the forefront of this technology trend as it continues to evolve. 
• Finally, we asked our readers about metrics.  The results confirmed that metrics are indeed important, with 90% of the respondents telling us that their management requires metrics for their marketing programs.  Interestingly enough, lead generation results are still the metrics most people use to measure success, with lead-to-sales numbers and ROI respectfully coming in as the second and third most commonly requested metric.  A couple of facts that surprised us:  25% use guesswork and intuition for their metrics and, coincidently (or maybe not so!), 25% are using e-newsletter services that provide no metrics.  A quick side note: we had an offer with this particular survey (for a free study on metrics) and the response from our readers was almost double what we typically receive.  So when you have the opportunity, do include an offer. 

We’ve heard your voices and we hope that you will take every opportunity to give your readers the chance to speak up too.  If you have any questions on how to incorporate surveys into your e-communications program, feel free to email us.