Human beings, and particularly customers, can be complicated. On the one hand, they feel uncomfortable being asked questions by a stranger. On the other hand, we all love to feel interviewed.
ecommerce surveys are an analytic tool often overlooked in modern strategies which prefer to “spy” on shoppers’ actions from behind the scenes. However, the value of tried and tested traditional methods should not be underestimated, as customers often appreciate straightforward and honest brands and sellers.
Including a satisfaction survey about the shopping experience, the quality of the products, or the customer service provided is a fantastic way to get to know your average customer better, creating profiles and improving your business.
Listening is the first step to offering an unforgettable shopping experience. Often, your customer will know better than anyone what’s missing from your catalog, online store or service.
You don’t need to subject your customers to a full Proust questionnaire to get to know them well. You’ll see that with a few key questions, asked at the right time, you’ll obtain highly valuable information – quickly and at no cost to you.
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In the age of ever-increasing digital consumption, the only way to get to know your customers well is through the internet. Your best smile, gratitude and friendly manner will instead be conveyed through tools like a satisfaction survey.
Creating an online questionnaire couldn’t be easier, and there are a range of tools available for creating forms linked to an online store or included in a post-purchase or post-delivery email.
From free options like Google Forms, to services like SurveyMonkey: these automatically collect all responses, and can generate conclusions and extract patterns of the most common answers.
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You have two options when it comes to applying surveys in your ecommerce business:
The best tip: make a brief survey with a very simple design.
These means selecting questions well and applying A/B testing if you want to study which type of surveys your customers respond to best and ensure greater participation.
You don’t need to offer any incentive, like a discount coupon, for completing the survey. At times, this can result in rushed results from users who are only interested in the prize.
Extra tip: they might not seem very serious, but surveys on social media can be a great strategic tool. What launches does your audience expect? What’s trending? What colors, images or accessories do they prefer? Gamify surveys for your ecommerce site!
This should be a collective effort: listen to what information will be useful for your customer-service and sales teams, and let marketing prepare a proposal to be evaluated by other departments.
There are also specialist professional services available to provide surveys for brands, but as these are such a cheap and easy-to-prepare resource, you can get started on a small scale by yourself.
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Of course, this is a tool that offers conclusions for internal use, but you shouldn’t underestimate the value of using this data for your customers.
You can share results through an informative email, if the survey tackled a specific, seasonal topic, and make the most of this information for marketing actions such as social media posts, reports and press releases.
Below, we’ll suggest a series of useful survey questions that you can use for your online store, combining these according to your chosen method and the aim of your questionnaire.