Not surprisingly, the four key places to collect feedback coincide with points throughout the Constant Contact Cycle I showed you in Chapter 2. Outlined below are the most important places you should be collecting feedback. I also show you the types of feedback you should be looking for in each place.

You can make your web site a lot more engaging and interactive by simply adding an online poll to your home page and using your emails to invite people to visit the page. A poll is nothing more than a one-question anonymous survey where the question and the possible answers to the question are displayed on your web site.

When someone first joins your email list and receives your welcome email, this initial connection is a great point to learn more about your new subscriber’s interests and how he or she found you. Using your welcome email to link to a short two-question survey is sufficient to provide you with great actionable information without overwhelming a new member to your community.

Every communication you send should include at least one link that provides you with feedback from your readers. In addition to using feedback to help you write content as we outlined above, I believe all communications should also include a link to a series of one-question surveys that help you keep a finger on the pulse of your customers.

The best time to get feedback on a customer’s experience is immediately after he or she has interacted with you. As time passes, our memories of our experiences start to deteriorate. Eventually, only those people who had an extraordinarily positive or negative experience will remember anything about the interaction. Therefore, strike while the iron is hot and ask your recent customers for feedback on their experience while it is still fresh in their minds. Invite them to take a survey by adding recent shoppers to a separate email list and emailing them an invitation to take your post-purchase survey.