From 6 to 19% : 3 key ways to improve your response rate on feedback surveys
Everybody agrees that feedback is essential to improve and find the right product market fit but gathering feedbacks is often complex, time consuming and frustrating.
At moka.care, we support companies in taking care of the mental health of their employees. It’s crucial for us to know if the support that we offer to our members (employees supported by moka.care) is at the level of excellence we expect.
We noticed that we had a low number of survey responses following members’ sessions with practitioners. One of my first mission as a Product Manager was to find and implement quick wins to increase the feedback rate from 6% to the maximum possible.
Why feedback is so important ?
In the B2B world, there are two main reasons to gather as much feedback as possible: to prove and to improve.
Prove: the best way to demonstrate value
At moka.care, we need to be able to demonstrate our value to the companies working with us. When a company partners with a service to help their employees take care of their mental health, naturally you want to be sure that the service genuinely helps your team.
That’s why we created a survey to send our members’ following their sessions. It was designed to gauge member satisfaction, but also to know if it helped them and the impact of taking time for their mental health.
Demonstrating your value with strong data and real stories is impactful to your current and future partners
At moka.care we are very proud to have a 100% post session satisfaction.
Improve : find the real pain points of your users
When you are in the core of the product development, it can be difficult sometimes to realize what are real pain points of your users. And when you’re not sure what they are, the feedback you’ve collected will be your most important tool.
In our surveys we included an open question to let our members tell us what we can do better or put in place for an even better support. By doing that, we can have qualitative and quantitative data about which features are the most important to develop in the future. It can help us drive our discovery or prioritize initiatives.
Full process analysis is the key
Now that we agreed on why feedbacks are importants, we need to discover how to find simple and effective actions to improve our response rate.
In order to do that, the first thing is to analyze our feedback process in it’s globality.
If your feedback process is automated, first verify that you are sending as many request for feedback as you planned. Take your data analytics tool and check that you have the same number of users validating the conditions for a feedback than mail sent.
As feedbacks are mostly sent through emails, observe the 3 following KPIs :
- Delivery rate : It would be unfortunate to lose answers because emails aren’t deliver properly. Most of the time your mailing tool will tell you the reason of the non-delivery.
- Open rate : Mailchimp estimates that mean opening rates are between 15% and 30% given the industry but you can make so much better.
- Click rate : Now that your user received and opened the email you want him to click on your survey and that’s the most difficult part.
In the rest of this article, we are going to see how you can optimize open and click rate by rethinking your feedback process.
Ask to right person at the right time
I think we all agree that taking time to give a constructive feedback is a big effort when you are on the user side. How many of you always gave feedback after buying a shirt online or going to a yoga class ?
Feedback personas
As Product Managers, we have to acknowledge that and determine specific “personas” whose feedback we need. Having feedbacks from all your users, no matter how they used your product, is not necessarily interesting. If you sell clothes online you will want to have feedback from those who made a purchase, but maybe not those users who visited your website once.
At moka.care, members with the potentially most instructive feedback are those who booked a session with one of our hundred practitioners.
Timing
Like in many other fields timing is key to optimize your feedback process. You need to find the timeslot where your user will take time for you.
Have you ever receive a feedback survey for an item you bought 2 weeks ago? If the answer is yes, I bet you haven’t answer to that survey unless you were very disappointed.
The timing is important for two reasons :
- If you ask at the right time you will increase the number of feedback. Most people are okay to give feedback to a company that they like but in a specific timeframe when it’s still fresh for them. At moka.care, we decided to ask for feedbacks one hour after the end of their individual session. Just after taking some time for them with a moka practitioner, they are more likely to take 5 minutes for us.
- If you ask at the wrong time (a lot of time after the use of your product) you will be more likely to only have negatives feedback. As giving feedback can be perceived as time consuming and useless, only not satisfied users will take the time to answer you.
To easily find the right person and the right time, try to integrate feedback into your customer journey mapping. After all, it’s a touchpoint like the others. And for each, ask yourself if the users will be inclined to give you insights at that part of his journey and when will be the best time to ask him.
By sending feedback requests to the rights personas and at the right time in your customer journey, basically concerned users, you will boost your opening and clicking rate.
In the right way : optimize your feedback requests
When you’re sure to ask feedback from the right cohorts at the right time, you will have to deep dive in your feedback process to optimize it.
In order to do that, the best place is your mailing tool. By analysing your feedback touchpoints in your email funnel, you will be able to find some quick actions to improve your overall conversion rate.
Boost open rate
From a marketing point of view, open rate mostly rely on sender identity and subject line. Play with those 2 and maybe do some simple A/B testing to find out what matches the most with your users.
Use a clear subject line in your email to let know to your customer what this email is about but avoid to be too straightforward too. A we discuss before, giving a feedback is a time consuming and anoying task for most users. If your subject line is something like “We need your feedback”, you’re most likely to have a very low open rate. Rather than that, use a subject line related to the customer journey.
For example, at moka.care, our subject line is “Well done for this first step” for feedbacks asked after a session with a practitioner.
Use a nice sender identity, that looks “human”, as your user must not feel like it’s a fully automated and impersonal process :
- Try to avoid using no-reply addresses that looks impersonal but also that prevents users to answer to you if they are not okay with you asking for feedbacks.
- You can also name your address, like “Alexis from moka”, to make it more “human”.
Boost click rate
Sorry to disappoint but :
- your user will not click because you tell him that it will “only take 5 minutes” or because he’s curious …
- you will not have a click rate over 20% by asking yourself if the best way to embed the survey is a link or a button …
Make answering your survey easier than deleting the email
To do so, the key is integration.
Since the beginning, we have used Typeform to construct easy and user friendly surveys.
And you know what? Typeform already knew that integration is the key because they are offering a feature to create a snippet code to embed in your emails.
Conclusion
As we have seen, having an optimal conversion rate on your feedback process rely on three points :
🧍 Determine who’s your “Feedback persona”
⏱️ Identify your feedback touch points in your customer journey
📧 Create a simple and effective email integrating your survey
With those small optimizations we were able to boost our conversion rate from 6% to 19% in only a week !
Article written by Alexis Colonna for moka.care
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