Old Title: Loyal Customers Buy Products, Open Emails and Even Answer Surveys

I have been re-thinking many things lately. Life, work, Chivaz, the way that I breathe…

Just to make sure that I am not going too far off the deep end (I mean I did just pick up and move my family to small town Oregon last month), I like to keep in touch with friends, family and my Chivaz Trip (remember, a group of goats is called a "trip").

I have worked in marketing for many years in Silicon Valley. At different points in my "career" I was helping manage communications with our "customers" via email. These email lists ranged anywhere between 50–5,000,000 subscribers.

Occasionally, we would run a survey through email and ask people what they thought about the product or potential future products ideas or iteration.

The response on these surveys came back generally as expected and the results always seemed a bit skewed. It is well known that people who answer a survey can all be grouped into the category of "people who answer surveys." Generally 1–3% of the people who we sent the survey to would start to answer questions and about 50–75% of those people would finish the survey, based on how long it was.

So we could send out an email to 100,000 people and expect to get between 500–1500 "skewed" answers. That is .5–1.5% for those who like thinking in in percentages). The information that we got from the surveys helped a bit, but we never thought that these answers properly reflected the audience as a whole.

At best, it was a nice data point.

There is a big difference when you run your own company and really care about every customer.

As I mentioned, I have been re-thinking some things about Chivaz:

— Should I make calf length socks? Should I create a subscription service? Should I change the materials in my socks or keep them the same?

I feel like I have a pretty clear answer to these things, but just in case, I thought I would send out a survey to see what people thought.

I am going to be very honest here, so beware…Generally people in marketing don't talk about numbers this low because they are embarrassed. People have found all kinds of ways to obfuscate real numbers to make themselves sound better. Things like "views, eyeballs, time on site" are all there to make people feel better about the fact that their numbers might not be overly impressive.

Chivaz has a very small mailing list. There are 861 people on it. Of these people about 230 haven't opened any of the last 5 emails that I sent out. So basically, I know that I am sending an email to 630 people.

In all honesty, I was hoping to get between 30–45 responses to my survey. If 10% of all email addresses I sent to answered the survey that would be 86 responses. I have never been anywhere near a 10% survey response rate. And believe me, I've tried. We've given out hundreds of dollars of prizes to random people just to answer 3 questions and still had under 3% response rates.

So anyway, I thought about eliminating the 230 people that don't open emails, but said screw it because MailChimp lets me have a free subscription up to 2000 people, so I don't really need to pare it down quite yet.

So I sent it out, you can see the results above. 299 opens! 35.2%, which is higher than my list average! Huh?? I don't get it. My subject line was pretty obvious. This was a survey no doubt. Anywhoo. With 300 opens (you see how I rounded up…marketing trick!), I thought, maybe I will actually get some data that I can use. Maybe 50 or even 60 people will take the time to complete it.

BTW, Survey Monkey lets you have a free account that will allow you to gather up to 100 responses per survey.

I was thinking, no problem! I would need more than 15% of the active email list (630 people) to get me over 100 survey responses.

Thank you tech companies for letting small companies like Chivaz do things for free! Being the cheap person that I am, I really appreciate these resources.

So imagine my surprise when SurveyMonkey emailed me to let me know that I had gone over the limit

Here is a problem that I never thought I would have.

121 responses WTF!

Survey Monkey won't even let me see all the answers unless I "upgrade" my account. Aargh! Normally I would just take the 100 answers and roll with it, but I could never do that to my customers. I am actually very interested in what everyone has to say. I have already started a few very fruitful conversations with people based on their responses to my questions.

On top of that, i have to pick a winner out of one of these responses, so I have to see all of the answers so that I can get all the different email addresses to choose from.

The above video didn't come out high res enough to show you that I was doing a random number picking between 1–121. #88 came up as the winner.I have to look up the email address for "responder 88" and get back to them. They won a free pair of Chivaz!

Why did I bother with this blog post?

Chivaz is a small "trip" of people. Yet, when I see how helpful all of these people are, I have a lot of hope for the future of the company. I have been trying to build this company one sock-wearer at a time. Each person who has purchased or worn Chivaz is still very near to my heart. Each of them supporting me doing something I love. Having 15% of a total mailing list completely fill out a survey just blows my mind. I really just wanted to say thanks and to show that having a small group of customers can be incredibly valuable.

I guess I am just putting this out there as a discussion point. Maybe you have a business, maybe you are in marketing. Are you seeing numbers like this? I want to know how to maintain this great group of people, even as the business continues to grow. Luckily, I am not at the point where I don't have time to write personal thank you notes on every package. But if all goes well, these things will begin to change. And then I may start asking some different questions.

Answers to go with the new title:

— Be authentic

— Cherish your customers

— Don't spam, ever, only send out email when it makes sense

— Be honest about why you are writing the survey and how their answers will help

— Give a small incentive, but not so big that it skews results

— Keep the survey short sweet and fun

Thanks! And stay tuned for the next blog post which will discuss the survey results!

— Matt