You’ve heard it before: “the customer is always right.” Cliché as it may sound, it’s true. Your customers have valuable insights that can help you improve your email marketing strategy in ways you might not discover on your own. The key is learning how to collect this information effectively.
The answer lies in user feedback—a process that allows you to understand your audience’s experiences, needs, and preferences. In this context, “user” and “customer” are interchangeable; they both refer to the people your business serves and depends on.
This article will guide you through the benefits of collecting user feedback, the types of feedback to gather, and practical ways to analyze it to enhance your email marketing strategy.
1. Gather customers complaints
No matter how good your product or service is, customers will always have feedback or complaints. Collecting these insights proactively helps you prevent bad PR and demonstrates that you value their input.
According to a survey by survey by ThinkJar: ThinkJar, only 1 in 26 customers share their complaints with a brand. As ThinkJar’s CEO Esteban Kolsky notes, “The absence of feedback should not be viewed as satisfaction; the true enemy is indifference.”
By encouraging feedback, you not only reduce negative publicity but also build stronger customer relationships.
2. Provide excellent customer service
In today’s marketplace, Customer service is more important than ever. Research by SurveyMonkey research, shows that 91% of consumers believe companies should use feedback to fuel innovation. Similarly American Express found that 90% of Americans consider customer service quality before doing business with a brand.
Collecting user feedback allows you to identify service gaps and respond when customers need it most..
3. Improve your marketing strategy
There’s no better way to refine your marketing strategy than by learning directly from your customers. Feedback helps validate your assumptions about pricing, offers, current sales funnel and messaging—ensuring your marketing truly resonates.
By applying user insights, you can fine-tune your email marketing strategy, for better engagement and conversions.
Three Types of User Feedback to Gather
There are several types of user feedback you can use. The following are three of the most popular and effective for improving your email marketing strategy.
Your website serves as your digital storefront and customer service hub. A website experience survey helps you understand how visitors interact with your site and identify any navigation or usability issues.
A website experience survey will help you uncover how your visitors perceive your website, so you can find any problems they have, fix them, and improve your website’s experience.
There are several ways you can approach a website experience survey. The main goal is to find any roadblocks they encounter, such as an unclear navigation menu, and use that information to guide your website optimization efforts. Some questions you can ask to create this survey include:
Did you find what you were looking for today?
What other information would you like to see on this page?
Is there any way we can help you find what you need?
What, if anything, surprised you while browsing our website?
What did you find difficult, if anything, about using our website today?
What prevented you from making a purchase today?
Likert Scale
You can also use a Likert scale or a numerical scale to measure satisfaction with specific features, such as your homepage or navigation bar.
Source: Simplypsychology
You must understand your website experience surveys aren’t popups—the latter focus on promoting some type of offer, like a discount, whereas the former may show up in a pop-up fashion (although not exclusively so, as you will see later on), but focus on getting answers from your visitors.
As the name suggests, a customer satisfaction survey aims to measure how satisfied your customers are about your brand and your products. A customer satisfaction survey can ask any questions — or use rating scales — to measure your visitors’ satisfaction with your brand and products.
Source: ProProfs
Consumer brands tend to ask their customers to share their products and then fill a Likert scale to measure their level of satisfaction regarding the products, service, and store.
Two seemingly simple but highly effective surveys that measure your customer experience are:
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Measures how well your product or service meets expectations.
An NPS survey segments the answers depending on the numerical rating scale the customer selects. Customers who answered between zero to six are called “detractors,” whereas those who answered between seven and eight are “passives,” and those with nine and ten are “promoters.” Then, the net promoter score is defined by resting the percentage of promoters by the detractors.
NPS results categorize respondents as:
Detractors (0–6)
Passives (7–8)
Promoters (9–10)
Source: Measuring U
With an NPS survey, Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters.
A CSAT survey does a similar job to an NPS survey but focuses on the satisfaction the product the customer bought generates.
Source: Fitsmallbusiness
The experience a customer goes through after they buy a product determines whether they become a one-time customer or a loyal one. The experience depends on the type of business you run—SaaS, ecommerce, consulting—and how your product fulfills their needs. You want to measure their satisfaction by using a post-purchase survey.
In this type of survey, you seek to learn more about how your company met their expectations, how useful they found your product, and whether they had any issues receiving and using it. You can ask questions like:
Did you get our product on time?
Have you searched for any alternatives after buying/signing up with us?
What results have you found with our product?
How satisfied are you with our product?
How much does it take you to use our product?
You can use this information to improve your existing marketing strategy and guide your future product development efforts.
To collect user feedback, you need to add any of the feedback forms mentioned before on your website. Companies such as SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Zonka Feedback will help you add feedback tools to your website by adding a code snippet, although some Wordpress themes already allow you to add basic forms on your site to survey your visitor
The question isn’t how you add these tools on your site, but which ones you should use and where you need to present them.
There’s a lot of user feedback you can gather, so instead of trying to acquire as much diverse type of data as possible, focus on the main challenges your email marketing strategy currently faces. It could be a low visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate, low open rates, low CTR, high unsubscribe rates, and more.
Pick one problem you want to fix and work your way back: what data do you need from your customers that could help you decipher the cause of this problem?
With your surveys, you can find:
The content they are expecting to get from your company.
The satisfaction level they get from your emails.
The reason they signed up for your email list.
What other email lists in your industry they have signed up for and study them for more ideas.
Based on your decision, you then need to develop your survey. Pick one of the three options mentioned before, and create your survey. Add the questions you saw previously or add your own.
Your surveys must be simple to use and ask the right number of questions. Avoid asking more than five questions to avoid overwhelming and boring your respondents.
Finally, decide on the trigger you will use to present your survey. You can use:
Time on site — e.g., presenting the survey after 30 seconds on site.
Number of visits — e.g., presenting the survey exclusively to first-time visitors.
Site section — e.g., presenting the survey to visitors on your product pages.
Behavior — e.g., presenting the survey to exiting visitors.
Since you will be using this information to improve your email marketing strategy, use triggers that are more likely to appear to an email subscriber by syncing your survey tool with your email marketing provider and targeting only your email subscribers.
Alternatively, check your analytics tool, see where you get the most email subscribers, and show your surveys only on these pages.
To improve your email marketing strategy, the best way to do so is by sending email surveys. The workings of sending email surveys are almost identical to showing your surveys on your website.
You decide on the user feedback mechanism type you want to use, you create the survey, and you send it to your list; the only important difference is the segment you will send your survey to. You want to pick a segment that’s most likely to give you the information you need to improve your email marketing strategy.
Email surveys are an effective way to collect targeted insights. Segment your subscribers before sending surveys. For example:
Subscribers with low open rates.
Subscribers with high engagement.
Subscribers inactive for 30 days or more.
Your survey will depend on your segment choice. For example, suppose you decide to send your survey to those subscribers with lower-than-average open rates. In that case, you should focus your questions on their dissatisfaction with your current email content. You could ask:
What type of content are you expecting to see that you don’t see right now?
What would you change from your email content?
What do you like the most about our email content?
What do you dislike the most about our email content?
After you created the survey and the segment, you need to write your email. In that case, all you have to do is write a subject line that tells them you are sending them a survey and explaining why you are doing so. You should also give them an incentive, like access to a giveaway.
Source: Lyft
A professional-level email marketing tool like SendX will make this entire process easy to execute.
Your current social media following is a goldmine of information you can use to improve your email marketing strategy. Comments, replies, and reactions all give you a strong indication of how your customers feel about your brand.
Your social media audience can also provide valuable feedback. You can collect insights through:
Social listening: Monitoring comments and discussions for patterns.
Direct surveys: Sharing feedback links across platforms.
Since your social media followers may not be email subscribers, you need to be creative when creating your survey. Once again, focus on the causes of the email marketing problems you are trying to solve instead of asking direct questions about your email marketing strategy. Some questions you can use include:
What’s your favorite email newsletter?
How many newsletters do you follow?
What brands in [your industry] do you like the most?
These indirect questions can surface incredible insights that you can use to work on your email marketing strategy.
Once you have acquired enough user feedback, you need to analyze it, a task that’s not as easy as it seems. For surveys that use scales and pre-written answers, the analysis is relatively simple, but if you use open-ended questions, you will have to read through many answers before finding any valuable insights.
To start, you want to categorize all the answers — which is especially important if you use open-ended questions — into groups and organize them by frequency and importance.
Through your segmentation, specific segments will start to appear. For example, you may find a group of highly unsatisfied customers who have high expectations, whereas another segment will be the exact opposite.
You want to find common patterns in the answers and start taking notes. Every insight should be related to your email marketing strategy, so by the time you finish with your analysis, you have a list of ideas to discuss and implement.
Collecting and analyzing user feedback is one of the most effective ways to refine your email marketing approach. The insights you gain will help you fix weak points, strengthen customer satisfaction, and achieve better campaign results.
Start with one feedback mechanism, analyze the results regularly, and apply what you learn. Over time, consistent feedback collection will transform your strategy and strengthen your connection with your audience.
1) What are the benefits of collecting user feedback?
Collecting feedback allows you to understand customer complaints, improve service quality, and refine your overall marketing strategy.
2) What are the types of user feedback to gather?
The three main types are website experience surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, and post-purchase surveys.
3) How can you collect user feedback?
You can add feedback forms on your website, send survey emails, or promote surveys on social media.
4) How should user feedback be analyzed?
Categorize responses by theme and frequency, prioritize key issues, and align insights with marketing goals for continuous improvement.
