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Representative Web Surveys Require Good Email Lists of Customers

Some organizations, such as ecommerce sites like Amazon and EBay, are fortunate in that they have the email addresses of every single one of their customers. When they invite a random selection of customers to participate in a web survey, they can be assured that the results are truly representative of their customer base.

Most organizations are not so fortunate. A traditional B2B vendor might have the email addresses for perhaps half of its customers. A consumer brand might have email addresses for fewer than 10% of its customers. For these organizations, web surveys with random samples are only representative of the customers for whom they have email addresses. Such organizations must be very careful when presenting their results to not generalize them to all customers. Significant differences probably exist between the group of customers for which they have email addresses and the group for which they don't, especially since email addresses are typically collected as part of "loyalty" (frequent-buyer) programs. As a result, surveys of such email lists will overstate satisfaction, repurchase likelihood and willingness to recommend.

Organizations with unrepresentative email lists need to take the following steps for web-survey success:

• Describe the survey not as representative of all customers but of the target population for which the organization has email addresses.
• Work with the marketing department to increase the percent of customers and prospects who have provided email addresses.
• Conduct a telephone study or paper survey of customers for which your organization doesn't have email addresses to determine their demographics, firmographics and attitudes. This can be used to contrast this group with the group accessible by email.
• Conduct more-frequent surveys of members of the customer loyalty program. Such programs typically use email for most communication. 
• Don't put faith in polls placed on your corporate web site; such polls are unrepresentative.

What steps have you taken to make sure that your web surveys are representative of your customer base?