Template

Feedback request email

One question, sent close enough to the thing it is about that the answer is worth having. Everything else is a survey.

One question about the report you built

Takes about twenty seconds, and I read the replies.

Your Product

One question

You built your first scheduled report on Tuesday. Before it becomes routine, I want to ask about the part I cannot see: was there a point where you nearly gave up?

Not the feature request version. The specific moment, if there was one, where the next step was not obvious.

Reply with one line

If there was no such moment, that is a useful answer too, and one word covers it.

Alex, Your Product

Your Product Inc, 1 Example Street
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A worked example of the blueprint below. The brand, the names and the numbers are placeholders; the structure is the part to copy.

The blueprint

Rebuild it anywhere

Subject lines (5 options)

One question about the report you builtshown above
Did you nearly give up anywhere?
Twenty seconds, one question
What nearly stopped you on Tuesday?
A quick question, and I read every reply

When it fires

Trigger: Fires on the event you want feedback about, not on a schedule: the first time somebody completes the action, closes a ticket, or finishes a setup.
Timing: One to three days after the event. Close enough that they remember the details, far enough that they are not still in the middle of it.
Conditions: Send it once per person per topic, and record that you asked. The second request about the same thing is the one that gets marked as spam.
Skip anybody with an open support ticket. Asking how it is going while somebody is waiting on an answer reads as not knowing your own systems.

The body, block by block

The specific thing they did
Name it and date it. A feedback request that could have been sent to anybody gets answered by almost nobody, because the reader has to work out what it is about before deciding whether to answer.
One question, and only one
The single thing you would change your plans over. Two questions halve the response rate and the second one is always the weaker of the two anyway.
The narrowing sentence
Rule out the answer you do not want. "Not the feature request version" gets you the friction story instead of a wish list, and the friction story is the one you can act on.
The effort estimate
Twenty seconds, one line, one word. State the size of the answer you want, because a reader who thinks you want a paragraph writes nothing.
Permission to say nothing happened
Make the null answer explicitly acceptable. Without it, the people with nothing to report simply do not reply, and your responses skew to the unhappy.
A person, and a reply address
Replies are the format. A form gets fewer answers than a reply does, and a form sent from no-reply gets fewer still.

When to use it

When a specific person has just done a specific thing and you want to know what it was like. That is the whole scope. Feedback requests work in inverse proportion to how general they are, and the general version, sent quarterly to everybody, is a survey with a lower response rate and a worse sample.

The reason to send it as one question with a reply address, rather than as a link to a form, is that you are optimising for the answer being written at all. A form is a page load, a set of fields and a submit button, and each of those loses people. A reply is a thing somebody can do from the notification. You will get fewer structured responses and considerably more usable ones, and the usable ones arrive from people who would never have filled in the form.

What kills this email

Sending a survey and calling it a question
"Quick question" followed by a link to eight fields is the version of this email that trains people to ignore the next one. If you need a survey, say survey, say how long, and accept the lower response rate honestly.
Asking weeks after the event
By then the reader remembers that it was fine, which is not information. The friction they hit on Tuesday is recoverable on Wednesday and gone by the following month.
Sending it to the whole list on a schedule
A request that is not about something the recipient specifically did has no hook, so it gets answered by the people who always answer. That is a sample of your most engaged users telling you the product is good.
Asking and then doing nothing visible
The second request to somebody whose first answer went nowhere gets no reply. If you cannot act, at least tell the person what you did with it, even when the answer is that you decided not to.

When not to send it

Do not send it while something is broken for that customer. A feedback request landing during an outage or on top of an unanswered ticket reads as an automated system that is not connected to the one they are waiting on.

Do not send it to somebody who has already answered the same question. Record the ask, not just the response, or the people who helped you get asked twice and the people who ignored it get asked once.

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