Use Online Surveys to Understand Your Customers

If you knew what a customer was thinking when they visited your website or after they made a purchase, would your business improve? Of course! Customer feedback is key to any business. Using online surveys can help you collect the customer data you need.

What Types of Questions to Ask

Always include a Net Promoter Score question at the beginning of your survey. The Net Promoter Score question was developed by Fred Reichheld and Bain & Company in 2003, and helps determine brand loyalty with one simple number. 

The higher the score, the more likely your customers are to recommend your brand by word of mouth. A lower score can indicate your brand needs improvement, and when combined with other brand survey questions, such as standard multiple choice or open text input, you can hone in on how to improve your brand image. 

Choosing the Right Survey Tool

You want to choose a survey maker with enough tools to get the job done. Look for features like variety of question types to get granular data (advanced question types such as Net Promoter Score and Max Diff help), multiple ways to distribute your survey, and of course, enough reporting tools to dive into your results. 

Distributing Your Survey

How you distribute your survey will depend on what data you want to collect. For example maybe you want to collect feedback about your website layout, products offered, or ease of use. In this case you could use an embedded survey, or a pop up survey. Most survey tools offer this option, and only take pasting one line of code into your website to setup. 

If you want to collect data for customers who recently made a purchase you could send email invitations to your survey. Most platforms give you the ability to email a list on contacts directly from their software, or can even assist in including a custom link inside your own email tool. 

QR codes offer yet another way to collect responses. You can include a QR code on purchase receipt or on a printed ad to capture customer feedback with little effort. You could also share your survey on LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other social network, depending on where your audience is most active. 

Analyzing Results

Looking at a typical survey report, you’ll see the answers to each question. You might see people are happy or unhappy with a product or service. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. To really get actionable insights with your data, you need to take it a step further. 

Cross tabulation analysis will enable you to spot hidden trends in your results. For example if you asked a Net Promoter Score question, and a question asking for the customers age range, you can then cross tabulate both. You might find a younger demographic or an older demographic prefers your product more. 

This type of feedback is the key in making useful decisions. With this knowledge in the above example, your marketing team could now focus on a certain age range, and not waste time or money elsewhere. Of course there are millions of other demographics you can ask, and then cross tabulate for even more insights! 

Tips on Creating Your Survey 

The most important factor a successful survey is offering an incentive to customers. Offer a 5% discount on their next order. Most survey platforms allow you to redirect them to your own website upon survey completion, which could generate a coupon code. Doing this not only encourages feedback, but helps to promote a second purchase. 

You also want to keep your survey brief. No one wants to be asked tons of questions! Generally 5 – 10 questions is enough to capture all the data you need. 

The Long Term Plan

Now that you understand how to use surveys for your business, you can develop a long term plan on how to use data to improve. Establish benchmarks, come up with creative questions to ask in future surveys, and embrace a philosophy that allows customer feedback to flow freely!