A “postbooking” survey was sent in an automated e-mail right after a reservation was made, and another was sent in a “welcome home” e-mail after the customer returned from the cruise. Hale says: “We just wanted to see what kind of results we would get. We were getting a 4% to 5% response rate initially, but with the welcome-home e-mail we were getting an 11.5% response rate.” By survey standards, that is very high. In a clever use of a simple control, NLG compares responses to questions like “Will you refer us to a friend?” before and after
