I can't believe some marketing teams skip this

Welcome to Evidently—the bi-weekly newsletter where a first-time VP of Marketing shares the (sometimes) ugly truth of what it’s like to do this job. If you’re just joining, I’ve talked a lot about reflecting, leading, and running so far. Hop into the archives if any of those verbs speak to you. Today, though, is all about customer census surveys.

Every summer since I joined UserEvidence, we’ve added over 50 new customer testimonials and stats to our evidence library.

It’s all thanks to our census survey; one big, cross-functional pulse check that goes out to our customer base and tells us where things actually stand. Product feedback, sentiment, NPS, and a chance to refresh your entire customer evidence library in one motion. To me, this is a non-negotiable annual marketing motion. But, shockingly, few marketing teams actually make it a priority.

For this year’s send, I got an even deeper masterclass on what goes into nailing a census survey by working alongside our new Senior Customer Marketing Manager, Brayden McCleskey. A customer census is an art and a science, and legitimate tradeoffs need to be made considering how much feedback you want from just one survey. This should be a high visibility project with input from multiple departments and leadership. Today, I’ll walk through some of the most important parts to get right so you can go back and nail your own census.

The planning matters as much as the send

Before anything goes out, bring together a cross-functional group to set priorities. What does Product need? What does Sales need? What does leadership want visibility into? Every team will have multiple questions they want to include, so expect the initial list to be longer than is feasible. We try to keep our census surveys to ~13 questions (depending on display logic pathing). 

One important note here because there will be too many cooks in the kitchen: Have one kickoff meeting with a pre-read where each department can share their priorities for discussion. This is the main moment where teams are brought together but you need to maintain clear ownership to make the tradeoffs post-meeting. For me, since we’re a smaller company, we work directly with our cofounders on final tradeoffs and what feedback is most important. This may look different at a larger company, but the smaller working group is key.

Question design alone is its own beast. Getting the wording and answer options right to actually bring in accurate, usable responses is easy to underrate and hard to do well. Even harder if you haven’t done the previously mentioned cross-functional work to align everyone on the survey’s desired outcome. If you’re struggling here, check out our survey templates resource for ideas.

Consider narrowing your list

We changed our approach to targeting this year. Instead of a full blast to everyone in our customer base, we narrowed the list to active users in an editor role. I.e. The people actually using the backend admin of the platform, not just consuming the evidence it produces. Smaller list, sharper responses.

We also ran our census this year as two separate surveys, since our advocacy and evidence product lines are at very different maturity stages. Advocacy is earlier and more feedback-driven right now, so those questions leaned more exploratory. Evidence is more mature, so those questions went deeper on outcomes. Splitting them made it easier to ask better questions for each, instead of one generic survey trying to gauge two very different customer experiences. If you're a multi-product company, this is worth considering, even though it adds more complexity to your list management.

One thing I wouldn't repeat: we launched during a holiday week. It still worked out fine with a 10%+ response rate, which is strong for a survey this long, but I wouldn't recommend it. We also treated the send like an actual campaign instead of a one-and-done email. Something like this is worth sending more than once. A single blast and a shrug is not a strategy. We’re marketers after all… act like it.

Experiment with incentives

We incentivized participation this year with a $25 gift card. But the unique twist that actually got people talking, thanks to Brayden, was letting respondents opt for a donation in their name. Some people don't care about $25. Just knowing the feedback they were already willing to give would also do some good in the world turned out to be a nice extra pull.

Some other ideas for incentives that we’ve used or seen others use before:

• Swag or branded items

• Eco-incentives (e.g. plant a tree for every survey response)

• Prize drawings

Whatever you go with, just be intentional about how you position your incentivized ask. The FTC ruled banning fake reviews and testimonials back in 2024, punishable by upwards of $50,000 in fines. Meaning you can offer rewards for completion but you can’t tie them to positive sentiment.

You can say: “Complete our survey for a $25 gift card.”

You can’t say: “Share your positive feedback for a $25 gift card.”

Move fast when responses start coming in

Our survey went out on June 30th. By July 6th, here’s everything we’d shipped from the survey results:

• 16 customer assets published in our UserEvidence library

• 18 new G2 reviews (held our 4.8 out of 5 rating) 

• Enablement on new assets in our July 6th team all-hands meeting

• 15 hand-raisers to partner with us on LinkedIn thought leadership content

• 47 additional hand-raisers for other advocacy activities (like webinars, blog features, customer stories, etc.)

All of this output in a week’s worth of time. That early momentum matters. It brings visibility to customer marketing and lets people know this stuff is exciting and should be used. It also builds momentum for the rest of the feedback yet to be published. Not to mention, advocates are most willing to act right after they volunteer. I’ve lost opportunities before because months went by between survey and ask. Be prepared to hustle after your survey goes out.

Marketing should own all of this

Customer evidence should always be a core output of a survey like this, which makes customer marketing or product marketing the natural owner. We're the ones with the standing relationship to customers and the reason to treat the whole thing like a campaign instead of a one-time data pull.

It's also just a good excuse to build real cross-functional muscle. Product wants the feedback. Sales wants the proof. Running this well means marketing becomes the connective tissue between all of it. The census is an important reputational moment for marketing just as much as it is an important feedback moment for the company.

All of this feels like a lot to consider and I’m barely scratching the surface. Brayden is putting together a more inclusive deep dive for this week’s send from The Outpost. If you’re interested in more of the specific tactics, list logic, and “what not to do” lessons we learned from our census survey this year, highly recommend subscribing. Otherwise, let me know if your team’s learned anything interesting from running your own surveys. Always down to swap and crowdsource ideas.

—Al

3 things I’m digging this week:

• Starting from square one with surveys just got a little bit easier thanks to these 7 plug-and-play templates. Each one incorporates best practices based on the survey type, saves you time, and reduces the risk of errors. An especially great resource when working towards building a more robust customer evidence program, beyond census surveys.

• How to not be boring - PostHog is getting a lot of deserved love for their marketing lately. This is a great post on brand and I recommend many of their marketing posts.

• Terignota - One of the most interesting brands in trail running right now. Terignota is about affordability and financial transparency, sharing margins and business notes consistently. I’m curious how it’ll play out long term but they’re already well-loved in the community. I’m trying out their half tights right now and quality seems good at less than half the price of competitors. Always love seeing challenger brands go to work.

UserEvidence, who?

UserEvidence is a customer evidence platform that helps B2B marketing teams generate verified proof points that credibly prove the value of your product.

Using custom surveys at key moments throughout the customer journey, you can capture case studies and testimonials, as well as competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data.

Turn happy customers into your best sellers with UserEvidence.