More Email Invitation Mistakes

In the last article, we looked at the problems with a survey email from an insurance company. The biggest problem was the appearance of a spam link, which – while not spam – was simply an ugly looking link that could easily have lead the reader to some type of scam. Note that many health insurance customers are likely to be elderly and potentially ill, and may not be able to differentiate between a real and spam link.

That was a poor link choice. But the link alone wasn't necessarily an issue, because spam looking links are somewhat common. What made it bad was the next problem:

You can send a spam looking link with a warning that the survey is coming, or you can send a very professional link without warning, but you should not send a random email to a customer without a realistic looking link. You're asking for people to ignore it or not trust it, and there's bound to be a personality type (tech savvy, for example) that is going to completely ignore that link believing it to be spam. The way this was sent out was definitely not ideal.

From there, we get on to another problem – there is no incentive. The customer has zero reason to click on the link, especially for a survey that is likely to take more than 10 minutes. Or perhaps there is an incentive, but it's certainly not explained in the email.

The researcher simply expects people to read the email and click on the link and do the company a favor. You really need to have incentives with your research – especially if you're an insurance company which raises rates every 3 months for no apparent reason. The reader was given absolutely no reason to fill this out for the company, and that's a serious problem.

It would be foolish of us to say with certainty that this was not a good survey invitation email, because we don't know what type of research the researcher did beforehand or what kind of success they had. But there are some fairly clear flaws with the way this email was presented. We reviewed the survey as well and also found some flaws there. Overall, we're going to have to rate this type of email fairly poorly, and advise you to look at a better way to introduce a survey to potential participants.