Closing the Loop

Effective communication includes asking as well as telling. If your email marketing program consists only of telling, you may be missing out on a huge opportunity.

I often tell my clients to picture themselves at a table with 3 of their friends. Then to imagine they are telling these friends what is going on with their business - the same information they want to convey in their email marketing efforts. This is the same voice and style they should use when writing their emails.

What they also figure out is the following:

• their friends are going to ask questions
  
• answering the questions helps clarify the message
• they like to ask their friends about past events

Immediately they realize the importance of two way communication.

Feedback, feedback, feedback
When you go to a restaurant, I guarantee you will be asked "How is everything?" at least once during your meal. This feedback is important for the restaurant to improve. Can you imagine a restaurant that never asks for feedback? Can you imagine any business not asking for feedback?

You can't. Which points out how important customer feedback is to all businesses.

Effective ways to get feedback
The simplest way is to ask your subscribers to reply to the email you send. The person has opened the email. All they have to do is click reply and type and they're giving feedback. I'm amazed at how infrequently this is done within email marketing programs. A simple sentence at the bottom of the email - "please reply if you have any questions or comments...." - is all it takes to hear back from one of your subscribers.

And this is not an ordinary subscriber. Anyone who gives you feedback cares at least enough to tell you what they think.

The second best way to get feedback is with focused mini-surveys. Not the generic multi page kind that most businesses use. I'm talking about event specific 3-5 question surveys.

Close the loop
I'll give an example from a restaurant client. Balzac wine bar has a monthly wine dinner. They send information about the wine dinner to their subscriber list at the beginning of each month.

During the wine dinner they ask the attendees if they are on the email list. If they are, they get their name so they can send them a thank you. If not, they ask the customer if they'd wish to join. At the end of the wine dinner they have a list of subscribers who attended the wine dinner.

A few days later they send an email to this targetted subset of their email list. This email contains 3 items.

• First, it says "Thank You" for coming to the wine event
• Second, it asks them to fill out a short 4 question survey about this particular event
• Last, but certainly not least, it tells them about the next wine dinner
  

A few things should be pointed out with this example.

1. The feedback they receive on this event will be actionable and specific. This is the best kind of feedback.
2. Sending to a subset of your list based on data about your subscribers allows you to send very specific emails.
3. When these subscribers fill out the survey, you will have even more information about them - allowing you to tailor an even more customized message to them in the future.
   

Communicating with email marketing is best if the flow is two way. Don't just tell, ask as well. You'll get a lot more value then just "blasting" out a monthly email.

As always, let me know if you have any comments or questions.