Amy Schwartz
Product Marketing Manager
Customer engagement is the lifeblood that fuels every thriving business—yet finding effective ways to incentivize customers to participate in surveys and provide valuable feedback can be a challenge…and not to mention, often result in unenthusiastic feedback. Traditional methods like offering a generic Amazon gift card or discount code often fall flat and fail to generate the testimonials that companies need to differentiate their offering.
Postal and UserEvidence are the ultimate customer engagement combo that can revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers. By offering unique and personalized incentives from local businesses, like chocolate greeting cards by Sweeter Cards, businesses can generate a wealth of customer responses and reviews. In this blog, we'll take a closer look at how our marketing team used Postal and UserEvidence to generate 300 customer proof points and 90 G2 reviews using chocolate bars as incentives, and how you can replicate these results for your own business.
The objective:
The objective of this survey was to increase customer engagement and generate valuable feedback. By using a non-traditional survey incentive, this campaign stood out in the inbox from standard surveys and created a more engaging and memorable experience. The ultimate goal was to generate as many responses as possible and gather feedback that can be used to improve the Postal platform.
Additionally, the campaign aimed to generate reviews on G2, further enhancing Postal’s reputation in the market.
The play:
Step 1: Design an engaging survey that doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to complete.
This was arguably the hardest part of the entire customer survey process. Building an impactful survey that doesn’t deter customers from completing because it’s too long, yet still delivers insightful feedback isn’t easy. Below is the framework that we used.
Introduction
Fortunately, UserEvidence autofills fields based off information you already have based on the lists you use. Customers started the survey by filling in data about their company name, industry, size, role, title, and seniority if this wasn’t already autofilled.
Main Content
The main content in this survey covered various questions about how customers were using the platform, which features are most useful, impact to pipeline, ROI, and areas they’d like to learn more about. Obviously surveys of this nature vary by company and industry, so we won’t get into the weeds in this part of the survey.
Conclusion
Lastly, we gave a respondents the option to remain anonymous and asked if they were willing to participate in any other advocacy programs (G2 reviews, case studies, video testimonials, content collaboration, etc). This gave us the ability prioritize which accounts to focus our efforts on for case studies and other customer content.
Built in follow-up offering chocolate in exchange for a G2 review
After completing the survey, we built this landing page in UserEvidence to appear for survey respondents to give them the option to earn a Sweeter Cards chocolate bar in exchange for providing us with a G2 Review. While the offering was no earth shattering amount ($15 dollars including shipping per chocolate bar), it was incredibly successful—almost ⅓ of the survey respondents went on to redeem their chocolate bar and provide a G2 review.
Psychology can explain the success of this follow-up: people are naturally inclined to go out of their way to do something when their headspace is already geared towards that ask. Respondents were likely inclined to complete the G2 review because it would be an easy lift for them mentally, given they could recycle their thoughts from the survey into written format. As for the chocolate bar—that served as the reward, and a delicious one at that.
Here’s what that landing page looked like:
After clicking, “Leave a Review”, users would be directed to G2 to login and complete their review.
Step 2: Build targeted list based on product usage.
We selected 1,567 customers to send initial survey invitation to based on their activity in the product over the last 30 days.
Step 3: Distribute survey with enticing subject line and offering.
Like any campaign, launching the survey with an engaging email subject line and copy was critical to success. One of the primary levers that converted to survey completion was the $500 drawing. Below is the subject line and copy we used.
Subject line: Postal would like your feedback
Email copy:
👋🏼 Hi Amy,
As a heads up, Postal is working with UserEvidence, an independent research firm, to collect feedback from our customers. On our behalf, UserEvidence will be emailing you a link to a short online survey in the next 24-48 hours.
As a thanks for your time, upon completion of the survey, you'll be entered into a drawing to win $500.
Your feedback helps us improve our customer experience. If you have any questions, please reach out to lauren@postal.com. Also, if you want to take the survey early, you can access the survey by clicking below.
CTA: Take Our Survey
Thanks,
Lauren Alt-Kishpaugh
VP, Marketing
Postal
Reminder emails were sent to those who received the original but never opened it.
Step 4: Let the results roll in.
Once respondents completed the survey and submitted their G2 review, UserEvidence cross referenced people who submitted both within the specific survey campaign timeframe and sent them their chocolate to redeem from a Postal MagicLink. The redemption experience looked like this:
The impact:
Since launch, we’ve generated over 300 customer proof points out of the 1,567 active users we’ve sent this to. That’s almost a 20% survey completion rate off a cold email. Out of those 300 responses, 90 of them converted to G2 reviews with the timely offering of a chocolate bar (30% conversion rate).
Cost breakdown
Total cost of campaign: $500 + (90 G2 reviews x $15 chocolate) = $1,850
Typically, generating 90 G2 reviews would cost at least $500 more (assuming the incentive would be a $25-50 gift card) and require sending to at least 2-4 times more contacts.
The takeaway:
Typical customer surveys and G2 campaigns that offer generic offerings such as $25 Amazon gift cards are going to cost more money and not convert as well as more meaningful items, such as chocolate bars from Sweeter Cards.
By using a powerful customer advocacy platform like UserEvidence, it removes unnecessary work from the respondents plate which ultimately builds rapport with your brand. Not to mention, memorable items from local business will always outperform gift cards. The process and workflow of this customer advocacy campaign can effortlessly be replicated within your organization. Get started with Postal to access the largest B2B gifting marketplace and send items sourced from thousands of small businesses around the world.
