Good Practices and Considerations in Conducting Email Survey for Fashion Retail Industry

Correct and up-to-date market information is key to marketing strategy formulation and campaign planning. Email survey is often used by fashion retailers as a tool to capture the market information. It is particularly important for the email survey to capture the market information from a mass market in a short period of time. However, there are many cases that fashion retailers get poor quality result from survey rather than high-quality and reliable results with actionable findings. This paper intends to discuss good practices in conducting email survey for the fashion industry. It refers to a consultancy project administered by the authors to discuss issues and considerations on conducting email survey. A mixed-mode approach, of which email survey with telephone follow-up, incentives, and onsite face-to-face interview, was adopted to achieve a cost-effective survey with adequate response rate and high representativeness. The details about conducting email survey, which includes incentive, design, database, and follow-up action and facilitated the email survey are discussed.