3 proven methods for surveying your website’s visitors – and gaining valuable insights
A key element of putting together a strong online presence for your brand – including getting every aspect of your ecommerce shopfront right – is gathering the data and insights that will enable you to make targeted, informed changes.
One way in which you might seek to access such information, is the direct surveying of your website visitors and paying customers.
Surveys might seem an almost “old-fashioned” way of accumulating information. However, they can also be very powerful, giving you useful answers about your target customers’ experiences of your brand (and your store) that you might not have expected.
So, what are some of the most effective routes to using surveys to help diagnose potential issues with your e-tail store, thereby allowing you to get to work on fixing them? Below, we’ve set out three methods.
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Using exit survey tools for visitors who didn’t take a desired action
A particular visitor to your site won’t know why they abandoned your website, until they reach the actual moment of deciding to browse away from your site. That’s the moment when you will want to capture their thoughts, to help you minimise such abandonments in the future.
If you do decide to incorporate an exit survey into your website, then, it can enable you to ask the departing individual what the purpose of their visit was, and whether they were able to complete the purpose of their visit.
Bear in mind, after all, that they might have only ever intended to gather information about your products or services on this particular visit, instead of buying.
In the event of the respondent answering “no” to the second of those questions, you can use the exit survey to ask what prevented them from completing the purpose of their visit.
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Drawing upon on-page survey tools to target particular customer segments at specific moments
Inevitably, as a given customer makes their way around your site, they will be thinking certain thoughts at certain times that may not pass their minds once they have navigated to another page. So, the specific moment you launch an on-page survey can make a big difference.
When you do present an on-page survey to a visitor – perhaps in a relatively unintrusive place in the corner of the page, or even in the centre, obscuring the main content – you could ask them one or several questions.
You also have scope to modify the format of the answer – for example, by presenting an open text field, radio buttons, and/or multiple-answer checkboxes.
You can also decide to only make the survey visible to certain segments of visitors you would like to gain information from, such as returning visitors who have spent at least 60 seconds on the page.
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Incorporating a persistent ‘give feedback’ button into your website
If you fear the notion of constantly confronting your site visitors with annoying surveys, you will be pleased to know there is a much subtler way to request their thoughts when they visit.
We are, of course, referring to the “give feedback” tabs that are sometimes now incorporated into websites. You are likely to have seen such buttons in the past on sites, in the form of a statically placed button that remains in the same part of the browser window as you scroll up and down and go from one page to another.
Having such a button built into your own site can be a simple, but impactful way of gathering comments from users who are particularly motivated to provide you with feedback on an issue they may be experiencing.
Reach out now to Piranha Designs to learn how we can help your store grow
As a trusted and long-established specialist in website design, search engine optimisation (SEO), and programming services in Gibraltar, the UK, and Spain – to cite just some of our areas of expertise – we are well-placed to assist your business’s path to online success.
Enquire to our team today, and we would be pleased to arrange a free no-obligation discussion of how we can support your brand’s efforts to thrive and expand.
