Shortly after deciding that I wanted to start the Atkins diet, I located their website. If you sign up, you can access many helpful online tools. I elected to allow the Atkins website to send me email. Thirty days later, I was asked to take the Atkins survey.
Normally, I do everything I can to prevent a website from sending me a bunch of emails. Like many of you, I tend to consider those emails to be “spam”. My experience is that the emails that companies send to people who sign up to their websites are frequently filled with advertisements disguised as “special offers”.
This time, though, I made an exception to my rule, and have been receiving email from Atkins every once in a while since the day I first signed up. I will talk about what most of the emails consist of in another blog. This time, I want to focus on an email from Atkins that really grabbed my attention.
The subject line read “Share Your Atkins experience- 30 day survey!!” Yes, it really did use double exclamation points. This was unexpected. Could I really have been doing the Atkins diet for an entire month? It seemed unbelievable, but it was true.
Inside the email was a colorful picture of some boxes of Atkins bars, and colorful prose along the lines that one would expect with this sort of thing. Phrases included: “Your feedback is invaluable to us”, and a statement about how they wanted “to be the best partner we can be throughout your weight loss journey”.
Reading further, it seemed that the survey would ask my opinions about the Atkins food. I definitely had some opinions about it, and so, I decided to take the survey. You start by clicking on a big, red, button in the email that says “CLICK HERE to take the survey”.
To make a long story short, the survey wanted to know if I’d purchased any of the Atkins food products, and what I thought of them. It asks many questions about the reasons why I tried the Atkins foods. Each question gives you some multiple choice answers to choose from.
One question that I thought was particularly interesting was one that asked for the reasons why I didn’t think I’d purchase the Atkins food for much longer. One choice said something to the effect of that the food affected my stomach. Clearly, I am not the only person who has had an unfortunate gastrointestinal reaction to the Atkins foods, (or, in my case, a shake).
One question asked for the top three reasons why I specifically chose the Atkins diet. There is an “other” where I filled in: “To help me figure out if I had a gluten allergy”. I bet they don’t get that answer very often! The entire survey didn’t take very long to fill out.
When the survey ended, I was brought to a page for something called SurveyMonkey. This must be the company that hosted the survey. The page suggests I join SurveyMonkey, and explains the virtues of doing so. To be honest, I hoped that the end of the survey would give me a coupon or two for the Atkins bars. No such luck!
Image by Margaret Anne Clarke on Flickr