5 Best Practices for Creating Stellar Customer Surveys

• Updated on: 2020-02-14
• Read original article here

Do you want to gather feedback from customers and learn more about their experience on your website? The information you’ll find on a feedback form can quite literally shape the direction of your business. The purpose of these forms is usually to learn more about your target audience or to entice visitors and turn them into customers.

As you learn about your current customer base and build your audience, you may have to change elements of your business. Utilizing what you’ve learned, you can create new offers and engagement opportunities that will help you retain existing followers while winning the favor of people who have never heard of your brand.

We are going to take a look at several tips you should keep in mind when creating a customer survey. You can use some or all of these tips if you want to improve your conversion rate, traffic, and engagement.

If you just purchased something from a company, would you be likely to take their satisfaction survey if it included 50 questions and could take up to 20 minutes? Our guess is you would pass, even if you were satisfied with your shopping experience.

Consumers spend plenty of time online, with the average social media user spending two hours and twenty-two minutes across all platforms each day. Despite how much time people spend browsing, they are unlikely to commit to a survey if they feel like it will take too long to complete.

Ideally, your feedback form should take a couple of minutes or less. Create a list of questions and categorize them based on the theme that they follow. For instance, all of your design questions should go on a separate feedback form.

There’s no doubt that short, direct forms will help you generate more responses. You may have to split test different components of your survey to get a good balance between gathering information and user accessibility.

Incentives are a great way to get more people to interact with your survey form. In most cases, marketers offer an exclusive discount on future orders to consumers that take the quiz. You might be tempted to offer a free product, which is common in the supplement industry. The problem with this tactic is you may inflate your reviews with artificial five stars from consumers that want to score a free product.

The reviews might look nice at first, but they are meaningless if consumers feel like they have to leave your business positive feedback to get their incentive. Honest reviews will help you grow your business by giving you information on customer pain points and goals.

If you want to grow your social media following while simultaneously gathering feedback, consider hosting an online giveaway. Create a rule for the content where consumers have to answer a few quick questions about their industry and the problems they are facing. Now you’re learning more about your target audience while promoting positive engagement on your social media profile.

Email and social media marketing experts are likely familiar with the idea of segmenting their lead lists. Generally, segmentation occurs when you can identify multiple personas that come to your website. Each persona has its own interests, goals, and issues.

Once you understand that people have different desires, you can use that information to create thoughtful segmenting opportunities. For instance, if you run an online pet shop, you might consider asking customers what kind of pets they own. Now you can segment the people who participated and send them content that is relevant to their interests.

Research shows that segmenting your leads, particularly as it relates to email, can have a massive impact on your traffic and engagement. When you properly segment your leads, you could double your conversions.

There are around 4.3 billion people online today, and 3.7 billion have smartphones. When you’re creating forms for your website, social media profile, or email, always keep your mobile users in mind.

Users will quickly leave your email or sales page if images load incorrectly or take too long. Always optimize your pages to load as fast as possible, even if you have to create a mobile-only version of your website.

Focus on creating intuitive designs on both your website and feedback forms. If someone has to fumble through your questions while praying that they don’t hit the back button again, there’s a good chance they will leave your survey before they are finished.

Overall, a smooth design and quick loading times for mobile users will help you improve your response rate and engagement.

Finally, use what you learned to create better surveys in the future. Google Analytics and your social media statistics can help you learn about new opportunities to improve your feedback questionnaires. Pay attention to your user engagement and conversions as your split test and make changes to your contact forms. There’s a lot you can learn from your audience, you just have to put in the effort to convince them that your survey is worth their time.