Effective website surveys are powerful marketing tools that can be leveraged for multiple purposes, for example:
- To measure customer satisfaction;
- To understand exit intent;
- To assess product-market fit;
- To fine-tune user/buyer personas;
- To gauge shopping experience, etc.
Regardless of the purpose, they help you collect real-time data from the right audience to fuel up your business with valuable insights.
How do you make the most out of effective website surveys?
In this guide, we’ll tell you what site questionnaires are and what benefits they can offer, explain how to craft the right website survey questions, and share other tips for making your data collection effective!
What Are Website Surveys?
It is a selection of questions used as a tool for collecting qualitative and quantitative data from site visitors. Most often, the aim of such questionnaires is to gather users’ feedback on their experience with your site, product, or service to obtain valuable insights for informed decision-making.
What Is the Value of Website Surveys?
Nowadays, the chance to stand out from the crowd takes making strategic and consequent decisions that are based on factual data. Questionnaires give you an opportunity to acquire answers to all these questions directly from your customers and users, which makes them an irreplaceable growth tool.
There are a number of perks you can reap out of leveraging online questionnaires and effective website surveys:
- Real-time response that makes data collection fast and timely and enables you to react to important data quicker.
- Data extracted directly from your target audience, which increases its relevance.
- An opportunity to match questionnaires to specific stages of the sales funnel by placing them strategically across your site. This can help you find prospects and understand why they proceed or hop off your funnel at different stages and improve conversions.
- Higher response rates.
Best Practices Mastering Website Surveys
1. Optimize for Mobile and Desktop Experiences
First, you should ensure that your website doesn’t have any technical issues and provides a smooth user experience. It includes visibility of the needed pages for search engines and users, proper loading speed, mobile-friendliness, etc. For mobile optimization, consider using Google Search Console – the tool will give you a quick report into your site’s work for mobile users. For loading speed, try using a website audit tool by SE Ranking – the tool will help you detect slow-loading pages in no time.
Based on the results of these tests, optimize your site to ensure that it works correctly for all users, both on desktop and mobile, and no errors will hinder their experience. A mobile-friendly and fast-loading site boosts the likelihood of survey completion and also aligns with best practices for search engine rankings.
2. Choose the Right Survey Type for Your Website
There are several types of website surveys:
- Link-based – Questionnaires that are accessed through a URL to a third-party platform, meaning they are redirecting users. They work best when added to social media posts, blog posts, email signatures, etc.
- Microsurveys – These are very short questionnaires distributed across different pages to maximize touchpoints with your customers. They are good for the customer support page (satisfaction-related questions), order confirmation page (assessment of order convenience), etc.
- Widget-based – These questionnaires are integrated into your site easily through widgets to ensure real-time feedback. They can come in the form of pop-ups, collapsible pop-ups, slide-ups, and bottom bar surveys. They are good for landing, product, and checkout pages.
- Embedded – These are integrated straight into your pages with the help of coding; they might be good for many purposes but are harder to implement than widget-based questionnaires.
3. Determine the Best Strategic Placement on the Website
Depending on the type and purpose of your survey, you can place it pretty much anywhere on your site and a strategic approach to its placement can help you capture more data and empower your business more.
For general in-page and exit questionnaires, and other forms of effective website surveys, it’s a good idea to place them on high-traffic pages to ensure greater exposure. For more specific questionnaires that are bound to the sales funnel, you should put them on pages that mark key user journey points, for example, a checkout page.
If you’re using pop-ups, spend extra time determining the perfect pop-up timing. Ideally, set it up for user triggers that align with your goal, such as certain time spent on a page, cart abandonment, etc.
4. Formulate the Right Questions in the Right Format
To create logical website survey questions that drive responses and bring you expected insights, you first need to determine your goal and make sure you keep it in mind throughout the process. Once ready, form questions that will help you attain that goal.
For example, if you are making a website feedback survey, it would be logical to ask visitors to rate their experience with your site from 1 to 10 or ask them about any issues (e.g., technical or navigational) they encountered in the process. If making a website exit survey, ask visitors what makes them leave – in this case, a good practice is to provide several answer options, for example, “I didn’t find what I was looking for,” etc.
Feel free to use both open-ended and closed-ended questions, whichever you see fit. Most importantly, keep every question and answer option (if applicable) logical and straightforward and make your questionnaires short. This can help you encourage better responses.
5. Design Your Survey
After defining the questions you want to ask your users, you need to work on the look of your survey. Here’s an overview of the core design decisions and tips you want to keep in mind in the process of effective website surveys:
- Redirects – Sometimes, companies build questionnaires on third-party platforms and redirect users to those platforms instead of embedding surveys into their own sites. This is a risky practice because it hinders user experience and makes your surveys less convenient to complete. On top of that, users rarely enjoy being redirected to other pages for no reason, so it might also affect your image.
- Static vs. dynamic – Static questionnaires are those that remain unchanged for all respondents, whereas dynamic change according to the specific answers provided. Dynamic design tends to be more interactive, which is why it is known to produce less user fatigue, make your questionnaires shorter and more targeted, and help drive better responses.
- Branding – Lastly, when planning the design of your questionnaire, you need to keep the colors, patterns, and overall look of your site to ensure that it won’t look out of place once you launch it. At the same time, you need to make it a bit contrasting to the page in the background to ensure that visitors notice it.
6. Offer Clear Incentives
Though website questionnaires tend to deliver fairly high response rates, the volume of information you get back might still be insufficient for deep and beneficial analysis.
To get more respondents (and, respectively, more feedback), you can leverage additional tricks, such as offering appealing incentives to everyone who kindly answers your questions. For example, you can reward respondents with additional discounts, early access to your newly launched products or services, exclusive access to the insights from your questionnaire, gift cards, prizes, and so on.
7. Ensure Privacy and Transparency
When creating an online survey, you become liable for ensuring that you are aware of and adhere to relevant privacy and data protection regulations. Hence, it’s pivotal to ensure the transparency of the feedback collection process and law obedience.
The general golden rules of privacy and transparency include:
- Whenever possible, make your questionnaires anonymous and avoid requesting sensitive info to limit personal data collection.
- Always promptly review and analyze the obtained information and delete it to ensure that you don’t store any sensitive data for longer than needed.
- Get very transparent about the entire process of data collection, use, and storage in a detailed privacy policy.
Please, note: Though these are the universal standards, we encourage you not to act on privacy blindly and request personalized legal advice to ensure that you handle all law-related matters correctly.
8. Test and Optimize
Before letting it go into full swing, give your newly-designed questionnaire one or several rounds of testing. You can do it purposefully by recruiting testers, setting up a testing goal, and measuring the results based on set metrics, or you can give your survey a test launch on a site (let’s say for a week or month) and analyze the response you receive. Use the results of testing to refine your questionnaire strategically and ensure more responses and more qualitative data.
Once it’s tested and refined, launch your questionnaire, but don’t stop there. Data collection and analytics is a never-ending process, so don’t hesitate to experiment with different formats, question types, and placements in the long run. Constantly review and improve your surveys to ensure they remain effective and keep serving your evolving needs and goals.
Summary
As you now know, site surveys hold enormous power in terms of business growth and sales. With their help, you can learn your audience better and find strategic ways to improve your marketing to match prospects’ needs.
Now, you have a comprehensive guide to crafting excellent questionnaires that bring the desired results. Use the tips we shared with you to collect crucial data with ease!