Inavero Blog

Learn From an Adobe Online Survey Failure

Even the big boys with large research budgets fall victim to poorly executed online satisfaction surveys.  I received a satisfaction survey in my personal GMail account for Adobe.  The survey invitation email failed in several key ways.  First failure, almost zero text in the email and GMail hides images by default on emails from people outside my contact list.  Here is what I saw when first opening the email:

Second failure, once I allowed images to be shown for the third-party email address that Adobe was using, the image was basically just text in image form.  On top of that, none of the links worked.  This is due to the use of an image map, which isn’t supported across all email applications.

In our many years of doing online satisfaction surveys we know that the email survey invitation is critical to gaining a good response rate from your clients and customers.  This email from Adobe provides a good example of common mistakes that lead to low response rates.  These two main failures will drop the response rate significantly for Adobe.

A few easy changes would make this campaign much more successful:

1. Take all of the text out of the image and include it in the email as actual text, so email recipients with blocked images actually see something in the email when they open it.
2. Take the Adobe logo and make a single image of just that, and include it in the email.  Making sure to set the alt text so the email recipient knows what it is even if images are being blocked.
3. Personalize it!  They know who I am, so include my name in there somewhere.  We find this improves response rate as well.

Many things were done right, including:

1. Company name was in the subject line.  We find this improves open rates on the emails.
2. Plain text version of the email was included as well, which helps avoiding spam filters.
3. All of the proper CAN-SPAM stuff is in there, like unsubscribe instructions and such.