Use a Satisfaction Questionnaire to Understand the Quality of Your Subscriber List
Do you own a blog or website with an opt in subscriber list? Then you should be using a satisfaction questionnaire to improve your understanding of the quality of that list.
Does Size Really Matter?
These days, it’s common for Internet marketers to boast of the size of their subscriber list as a sign of their success. Unfortunately, many of these lists turn out to be of very low quality. That is, they often contain a high percentage of unresponsive and unengaged subscribers.
Why? All too often, that large list is composed of e-mail addresses from anyone and everyone that has ever interacted with the blog.
A satisfaction questionnaire for blogs
Over time, there’s been no systematic culling of the list to identify and drop those who never even bother to open the e-mails they are sent, let alone, to click through to the intended page to read, view or download your fresh article, video or other content.
And, of course, if they won’t open their emails, you can forget about them clicking through to an offer.
While most e-mailers pay attention to their readers’ ‘open’ rate, few actually do anything to improve those rates.
How to Use a Satisfaction Questionnaire to Improve Your Blog
You can easily implement a customer survey that will help your readers teach you how to improve your blog. While your auto responder can provide many objective statistics about your list’s deliverability, using a satisfaction questionnaire can provide a far richer qualitative understanding of your readers’ perspective.
Consider the question, for example,
“How likely would you be to recommend [insert name of blog here] to a friend or colleague?”
Use a 0-to-10 rating scale, where the lower end is “Not at All Likely to Recommend” and the upper end means “Extremely Likely to Recommend“.
Then follow up that question with an open-ended one that asks…
“And what would it take to get your rating to attend?”
The feedback you get from these two simple questions will immediately put you on a path toward improving the quality of your blog’s subscriber or e-mail list. When you understand what your readers are looking for, you’re far more likely to deliver it.
How to Analyze the Responses to Your Satisfaction Questionnaire
First off, find the percentage of respondents who gave your blog a 9 or 10. These subscribers are your ‘Promoters’.
Now find the percentage who gave it a 6 or less. These are the less satisfied ‘Detractors’.
Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The result is a key metric to follow over time. It’s called the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Next, sort the responses from your from high ratings down to low. You can scan the data, noting how the open ended responses differ between those who are most likely to recommend your blog and those who are less likely to recommend it.
Pay Attention to Those Open-Ended Comments
You’re looking for themes and patterns in your responses.
Are there items that come up over and over — across all rating levels? What is the most common comment among those who rate your blog very highly? How about among those that answered the question at the low end?
By making the decision to collect and analyze these data, you’ll get a measure that can be tracked over time and valuable insights about what actions to take to improve your blog. The net result – more engaged readers and a much higher quality subscriber list.
Not a bad return for spending 30 minutes to write a simple customer satisfaction questionnaire.
My Goal for The Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire Blog
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Good example of using Net Promoter Score. Have you seen this simple guide to Net Promoter in comic book format? http://customergauge.com/2007/05/2-minute-guide-to-the-net-promoter-score/
Thanks Adam. The comic strip format is a great way to explain the Net Promoter Score.
Andy