Skip to main content

Subject Lines for Survey Emails (That Work)

It’s the end of the year, so that means companies everywhere are going to be sending out their year-end satisfaction surveys, a big part of any email marketing initiative. We’re about to send our own. We’ve got a big survey all built out with SurveyGizmo (which integrates with Mailchimp), and it’s ready to send out.

But when I was writing my subject line, I wondered if I should mention how quick the survey is to take. I’ve seen "One-minute survey" used before, as well as iterations of "Short, 4-question survey."

So I pulled up our Subject Line Tool (it’s like Google’s Keyword Tool, but for email), typed "survey" and here’s what I found...

A search on the word "survey" shows how other subject lines with the word "survey" performed for other Mailchimp users:

Click here for a bigger version of this image.

Hmm, I think you can pretty much say "survey" any way you want in your subject line and get good results.

Words to avoid

But performance seems to drop when you add the word "minute." Or "member." Here are some of the worst-performing subject lines with the word "survey" in them:

Click here for a bigger version of this image.

"Member" and "minute" perform poorly in survey-related subject lines.

Not the most scientific study, I’ll admit, but it’s food for thought. If you’ve got subject line writer’s block, our Subject Line Tool is an awesome way to get your ideas flowing. Here are more details on how to use it.

In order to get scientific, you could do what I’m about to do: run an A/B test on 2 different subject lines.

Also see: Does "Sale Ends Friday" perform well?

Big news: We recently launched a Facebook Mailchimp interface that allows you to create ads through Mailchimp.