Journey From Shopping Surveys To E-Commerce Conversions
Communication with your customers play a key role in every business activity be it online or offline and tends to influence the business fortunes to a great extent. It would not be a hyperbole statement to say that “Knowing your customers well is the key towards your conversions� as it provides you an opportunity to understand the mindset and preferences of your customers. Customer surveys is one such effective medium that is focused towards improving the site traffic and conversion rates for your online store. To make the optimum eCommerce conversions through this communication medium, you need to first understand the various aspects of customer surveys for their effective use in your business activity. Types of customer surveys In- session requests- These type of surveys are asked from customers either through the middle of the shopping session or at the very end of the purchasing activity on an eCommerce site. They are one of the most basic types of customer surveys that deals basically about the performance and the user experience offered by the site. As, these surveys appear in between the online shopping process so they are mostly closed by the shoppers as they hinder the purchasing process. One of the main benefit of using this type of survey is that they provide valuable information about the usability and user experience to site owners for better conversion rates and product sales. Exit surveys-
These type of surveys are focused mainly on a particular type of question like why the customer is leaving the particular site or what is stopping customer from making an online purchase. With these type of surveys, the efforts and focus are basically directed towards eliminating the possible loop holes in a particular online process for effective conversion rate optimization. Post- purchase surveys- Once, customers have made a particular online purchase, eCommerce stores try to get insight of their mind regarding their purchasing behavior for improving their user site experience and conversion rates. Moreover, they also try to get a fair idea about whether the shopper would like to recommend their online store to their near and dear ones. These surveys are more interactive and try to get a detailed information about the various aspects of the site that directly or indirectly affects the performance of a website. Although, you may select any of these survey but the questions asked needs to be legitimate and prior to your concerned business segment. Here are some of the areas where you need to give a little stress for getting the optimum performance out of your eCommerce website. 1. Ask only relevant questions- Surveys are undertaken to understand the shopping behavior of a user and not to terrorize the people. In order to keep your targeted customers connected to your store, do ask them relevant and legitimate questions. Don’t just ask anything in the garb of surveys which may completely alienate them from your online store. 2. Provide your customers a simple mechanism to share their thoughts and opinionsAny individual filling out the surveys does not have much time to write everything about his/her experience in words and would more prefer answers in simple yes or no. For improving your customer engagement, you need to follow a tick mark kind of approach for getting necessary feedback from your targeted customers. 3. Try to make your surveys more interactive and realistic rather than sounding mechanical- You are getting feedback with the sole aim of making your website more engaging and for providing a seamless online shopping experience to your targeted customers. Try to bring the humane side of your business into light and show customers
that you care about them and is working diligently to improve their user experience drastically. After asking few questions, you need to leave few lines in the end to get detailed comments from your customers about their online shopping experience and how would they rate their overall experience towards your online store. 4. Gather the personal details of your customers in a tactical manner rather than forcing them to reveal their personal information- If you want to know more about your customer like their particular region, interested areas and other such personal information, try to get all these details in the name of a contest, eligibility criteria for a special offer or discount and other such freebies. By luring customers towards a offer, contest or gift, eCommerce stores can effortlessly get personal details from their customers without any hiccups.
Moreover, you can also take the help of web analytics tool like Mocking Fish that can provide you clear insight about the onsite behavior and activity of your site visitors. This Mocking Fish tool has features like insight heat map, scroll heat map and click heat map that can provide a detailed information about the click activity, scrolling behavior, interests of the customers, device used for surfing, location of customer, browsing time and other such crucial information. 5. State the purpose or motive behind your survey- Nobody would like to engage in an activity without having a clear information about the purpose behind that activity. State your audience clearly about why those questions are being asked from them for getting their active participation. Encourage customers to spend around 2-3 minutes on your survey for getting their valuable feedback and opinions regarding website usability and performance. How to make your surveys more productive in nature? The foremost aim of customer surveys is to get valuable suggestions that could help in improving the performance and productivity of a business. Here is a list of things that needs to be followed for deriving maximum productivity and profitability for your business entity.
1) Make optimum use of the real estate of your website- For improving the usability of your website, it is important to analyze the conversion potential of various site elements like call- to- action statements, headlines, body text, banners and other such components. If you have observed that your site elements are not performing according to your expectations, it is time to avail the services of an effective A/B testing tool that can provide you required response of your targeted customers in terms of the conversion rates. Website owners can test the two different variations of their site elements on their targeted customers and can eventually decide which is the ultimate winner page for their particular eCommerce website. 2) Try to gain social followers for your business entity on various platforms-
The increasing might of the social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linked in, Pinterest, Instagram and other such platforms have shown that social networking sites are the next generation business hubs where buyers and sellers can directly communicate with each other. Provide various social buttons on your site and persuade your customers to login on their social accounts and share their opinions, feedbacks and shopping experience with their near and dear ones. But, don’t push them for this exercise by making social logins an unnecessary part of your online shopping process. 3) Ask the contact information of your customers with a valid reason- Contact information like email address, phone number and other such details are a personal matter of every user and they would only be interested to reveal these details if they are getting a proper reason behind this exercise. Make this task more engaging and valid by asking email addresses and phone numbers from customers for providing free ebooks, newsletters, discount offers and other such benefits. Show them the benefit of sharing their personal details for getting their active participation in the whole process. 4) Don’t ask monotonous questions which may sound that you are just doing the formality of getting your customer feedbacks- Make your surveys more interactive and interesting rather than sounding monotonous as it may fail to evoke required response and participation from your targeted customers. Asking repetitive questions from your customers is one of the prime reasons why numerous online users shun out these customer surveys.
5) Choose your questions carefully and include more closed ended questions- Due to the busy schedule of the customers, nobody would like to write multiple lines in response to your questions. Therefore, make the task of customer surveying a bit easier by focusing more on closed ended questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. Further, you can include ratings question in your surveys at appropriate places for getting a fair idea about your website and its user experience. 6) Select the nature and type of your customers while sending out the survey invitations- For optimizing the performance of your surveys, you need to be completely aware about whom you are sending out your survey invitations and whether that individual is directly related to your nature of business or not. For example, if you are dealing with men’s grooming products, there is no point in asking women’s customers involved in your other business about the quality of your grooming products and what they would actually want from you. Selection of the wrong customers for your survey will not give you any benefit and will only add up to your disappointment and a complete wastage of your time and efforts. 7) Bring your customers attention towards your survey- How will your customers fill out your survey if they are not actually aware about the same? In order to encourage your targeted customers for filling out your survey, you need to send reminder emails to your customers at a regular interval of time. But, remember not to fill your customer’s inbox with your bulk email messages regarding urgency about filling up of survey forms as it may irritate them completely. So, understand the complex world of customer survey thoroughly for improving your site usability, customer engagement, site traffic and conversion rates. Once, you have learnt the art of utilizing customer surveys for your eCommerce site, you can be sure of getting bumper sales revenue and greater customer interest in your online store.