I received an email from United Airlines today asking me to participate in a study on the "Elite
Membership" kit they sent to me. I looked at the survey and thought - who put this together, their marketing intern. Actually, I think a marketing intern would have done a better job.
The four data points related to all items were (you could only pick one):
- Received it
- Read it
Received it and Read it
- Don't remember
So here is the question - can I read it if I don't receive it? It would not taken much brainstorming to figure out that this did not make any sense. Then it asked me about my membership card, and had the same four options. I don't know about you, but I don't usually do much reading of my membership cards when I get them. The second page of the survey asked how useful this information was to me. I can't believe that they really think much of the advertising they throw into their envelopes these days is very useful to anyone.
It brings me to my point. We assembled and sent out SubscriberMail's annual email survey in conjunction with the EEC this week. We initially sent a small sample to test questions and reports. When we got the sample back, there was a major back end issue with reports. We were able to reconfigure the survey and send it out correctly. If you are doing a survey, testing a small sample can give you great feedback on how to improve questions and what the reporting will look like. Don't trigger a survey without testing. Perhaps I was in the United test group - for their results sake, let's hope so.
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