Survey invitation emails: 9 best practices + templates

Do you want your brand to stay competitive, effectively retain customers, and focus on the right growth points? Then you should absolutely prioritize customer feedback. Conducting surveys is one of the best, time-tested ways to gain profound insights into customer experiences with your brand and learn from this data.

But what if your survey just doesn’t generate enough responses no matter how well you’ve designed it? Chances are, you’re just not advertising it right to your audiences. And here’s where survey invitation emails can make or break your whole data collection effort. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you 9 actionable practices and 4 templates to swiftly create attractive survey invitation emails.

Why Survey Invitation Emails Matter

So why can’t you just send out survey links to your recipient lists and wait for the results to pile up? The truth is, just like with any other marketing strategy, you need to convince customers to participate in the survey and make this action worthwhile for them.

Sending a survey invitation email is the perfect way to do this. After decades, email is still one of the most efficient outreach and communication channels. Many email types exist, and the topic of this article, invitation emails, is a well-known type for people. So you can kill multiple birds with one stone (aka survey invitation email):

• Catching customers’ attention. If you compose a strong survey invitation email, you’ll effectively grab and hold customers’ interest just long enough to motivate them to participate in the survey even if they don’t regularly do it. The email is the proverbial spark that starts a fire;
• Securing higher response rates. Needless to say, a quality survey invitation email should serve its main purpose of scoring you as many responses as possible;
• Building relationships with customers. Remember that survey invitation emails become part of your overall marketing strategy. You can use them to strengthen brand-customer relations by maintaining the right brand tone, communicating your brand mission, and fostering brand trust.

Survey Invitation Emails: 9 Best Practices

Now, what can you do to yield the benefits of survey invitation emails and really make them work for you? Of course, a one-size-fits-all approach to creating survey invitation emails simply doesn’t exist. But you can turn to these 9 tips and align them with your overall brand messaging and email marketing strategy. These practices will help you sustainably produce survey invitation emails that work.

1 - Start strong with a catchy subject line

Your subject line is the first thing recipients see when they receive an email. It is also one of the key factors determining if the customer will open the letter or not. That’s why you should come up with a killer subject line to get people interested in your survey.

What does an excellent survey invitation email subject line look like? Consider these crucial aspects:

• It is short and clear. You only have that much space to get your point across, don’t be wordy;
• It is descriptive. State the purpose of the email and let recipients know why you’re reaching out;
• It initiates engagement. It offers recipients to take clear action by opening the letter;
• It is personalized. If you can, personalize your subject line by using the recipient’s name or focusing the survey on a specific product they’re interested in.

The most effective and welcoming survey invitation email subject lines can be as long as 5-8 words – nothing extra.