We received an email from the Wall Street Journal recently as part of a campaign to encourage their subscribers to complete a survey. Everything is wrong with it, and it’s a great example of how not to solicit feedback from your customers.

See for yourself:

First, there are some obvious but minor offenses: The visual design is terrible. What’s with the bright blue text? And the light blue background on the logo? If you’re going to send HTML email, do it with style. And couldn’t they have merged our name into the form letter? But there are some more fundamental problems here which we’ll address.

Dear Newspaper,

Please pay attention to these rules of user engagement:

Be polite.

It’s a no-brainer, but people respond much better and more often when they’re addressed nicely. Being blunt and businesslike may be an efficient way to do business, but when you’re bargaining for your customers’ valuable time and giving them nothing for it, you should at least butter them up a bit.

Ask or encourage, don’t demand. “We’d appreciate it if…” or “Would you like to help us…” is much better than “Please do this.” Note that the word ‘please’ here doesn’t do anything to make the request polite — it just makes it sound even more superficial and curt, since everything else about the letter screams rudeness.

Write from my point of view.

This letter is all about what the WSJ wants, and it operates under the completely erroneous assumption that what I want corresponds with what the WSJ wants. Ha.

I, quite understandably, want my business to be successful, want to finish this last piece of code, want to respond to these emails, figure out why my USB hub isn’t working, finish writing this blog post, to get to the bank before it closes, and to make a quick dinner. I could care less what the WSJ wants. This letter is like the annoying friend who comes whining to you when they, very reasonably, get fired for being late every day and losing an important file one too many times, but who isn’t there for you when your mother dies. The WSJ is asking me to do them a favor out of the goodness of my heart, but they don’t even bother to acknowledge that there is, without a doubt, a hundred more important things of my own that I could be doing.

How could this be improved? Simple: ‘We understand that you’ve probably got more important things to do, but completing this very short survey can really help us improve our service to you.’

Offer reward.

Why should I spend ten minutes on your survey? What’s in it for me? How about $10 off my next year’s subscription? This rule is the more concrete corollary of the previous one.

If there’s no promise of anything but a “Thank You!” page waiting at the end of your survey, don’t expect heavy participation.

Sometimes, even the illusion of reward is enough — automatic entry in a drawing, for example. People know they probably won’t win your sweepstakes, just as they know the chances of winning big at a slot machine or on a lottery ticket are small, but there’s a chance, and everybody loves chances.

Don’t deadline.

Your users are busy people. Giving them a deadline and expecting them to complete your survey by then is just asking to get ignored. It sounds imperious and as if you don’t care at all about the fact that the recipient probably has many other deadlines that they consider far more important.

Of course, there does have to be a deadline — you need to cut off submissions and aggregate the data eventually. Handle it like this: First, set it more than eight days in the future (much further, in fact). Second, just don’t tell your readers when it is. There’s no need to create a false sense of urgency with brusque statements like “Please complete it by October 22nd.”

Make it quick.

Ten minutes is a long time, and exactly the sort of length that seems too long to bother with. And it’s probably not even accurate. Anything above two or three minutes is actively discouraging participation.

If your survey does take more than a few minutes, though, there’s no reason to lie. Like the deadline, just leave it out your estimated time. Better to risk people leaving in the middle of a survey than not starting it all.

Explain yourself.

Why are you conducting this survey? “To help improve The Wall Street Journal” is too vague. What about your services are you improving? Why should I care? Again, this ties in with writing from the recipient’s point of view and thinking about what’s in it for them. Just referring to your survey as an “important project” doesn’t necessarily make it one to me. You’ve got to convince people what you’re doing is important, and every bit of communication you have with your customers is a valuable opportunity — make the most of it and don’t make them regret they gave you their attention.

If all you’re doing is running an annual survey to ensure the relevancy of your advertising and there’s really nothing interesting or exciting about it, well, there better be some nice prizes.

And besides, everybody loves to talk about advertising — you might be surprised at the responses you get by allowing your users to sound off about it.

Be brief.

You can be friendly, honest, and sufficiently explanatory without being overly verbose. Leaving out details like deadlines and completion times can help. Ask nicely, offer reward, and let people do your survey on their own time, on their own terms.

The rest is results.

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