Best Practices for Mailings, Surveys, and Campaigns

There are a number of methods or techniques that are generally found to be superior to those achieved by other means or that have become a standard mode of operation. Best practices as they apply to Outreach and Feedback as well as email management are listed here.

• Best Practices for Sending Email
• Best Practices for Using Branded Email Domains
• Best Practices for Creating Effective Survey Reminders
• Best Practices for Writing Effective Questions
• Best Practices for Mobile Surveys
• Best Practices for Using Matrix Questions in Mobile Surveys
• Best Practices for Topic Monitoring

Ensuring that contacts read your message

Because most mail clients list new messages by From address and subject, the contents of these fields are critical to having your message read. Refine your message subject to be concise yet informative and make sure it clearly states your purpose and any special conditions of your offer. If it isn’t clear who you are or what you want, your message can be easily passed over.

Improving your email marketing

In addition to anti-spam legislation, many other external factors can negatively impact the efficiency and success of your surveys. As an Outreach and Feedback user, it is important that you follow industry-accepted best practices to protect your reputation, optimize your audience, and produce well-formed content. While these best practices do not guarantee that your emails will always be accepted, they can improve the chances that your messages are delivered to the intended recipients with minimal interference from content monitors and filters. Since these practices are focused on improving the quality of your contact data as well as your messages, your survey conversion rates will most likely improve as well.

Standard element placement when using next and back buttons

When you use next and back buttons with standard elements, we recommend adding those elements to the end rather than to the middle of your flow. For example, suppose you add an Incident element to the second page of a survey, and then you add next and back buttons on subsequent pages. This scenario could cause two incidents to be created if respondents go back to the first page, because when they are ready to move forward, clicking the next button will resubmit the incident. Therefore, to avoid the possibility of triggering duplicate actions, we recommend adding standard elements (such as an Incident element) to the end of your surveys.

Send proofs to key staff

When sending proofs, consider adding key members of your customer support, sales, and marketing teams. Sharing a sample of each mailing or survey can help ensure that all contact “touch points” (groups in your organization that work directly with customers) are aware of the messages being communicated to your customers. Providing a consistent message across all channels is key to providing a world-class customer experience.

Scheduling mailings and surveys for market testing

Market testing your mailings and surveys works best when you schedule the test messages at the same time rather than launching them a few minutes apart. By scheduling test messages at the same time, the database and servers have to process data only once instead of multiple times.