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In today's blog, we'll touch on the power of onsite surveys and some tips to get the most out of them. But first, let's take a step back to cover the basics.
For the purposes of this blog, an onsite survey is a quick survey that asks website visitors some questions about their website experience. Other names for it include consumer survey, website feedback survey, or just a plain old website survey. Many companies have them pop up in the bottom right-hand corner of the site, or load them if you navigate away from the website. You can see some examples below:
Google Consumer Survey
Qualaroo Website Survey
PowerSurveyPlus CRM Add-on by PowerObjects
Onsite surveys are typically used to help with conversion rate optimization, or CRO. In short, conversion rate optimization is a fancy marketing term for improving the rate at which people "raise their hands" for your products and/or services.
In terms of your website, raising a hand usually means filling out a web form, engaging in live chat, or purchasing your products. It's a process by which someone is willing to give you their personal information or even their money—which may be very dear to them—in exchange for something. Once you have that info, they are "converted"—they're in your system, and by system, we of course mean CRM.
There's a special distinction to make before we get any further. When someone fills out an onsite survey, they are not actually raising their hand. An onsite survey is not typically a lead generator itself, even though it is technically a web form. Instead, it's designed to give you information about the visitor's experience so that you can improve and refine your website to get more people to raise their hand in the future. Onsite surveys can give you customer/prospect intelligence without asking the visitor to give away precious data such as their name and email.
You can ask anything you want in an onsite survey. Think of things that you may not be able to glean from analytics—this is typically more qualitative data such as:
Okay, now on to the good stuff!
1. Keep it simple.
They should be short and sweet. REALLY short and sweet. This is not an interrogation. People are doing you a favor by filling out this form (unless you've given them some incentive) so make sure you're not asking too much of them! It should be roughly 1-5 questions that visitors can fill out in less than a minute.
2. Don't box your visitors in.
If you have a question and offer a number of choices for an answer, consider leaving an area for an "other" answer that is not in your drop-down—a blank field where the user can enter their own answer. This may open your eyes to something you hadn't previously considered.
3. Get qualitative data you can't get through analytics.
In theory, you shouldn't need to ask them what type of device or browser visitors are using. You want to know more about their feelings. Did they have a good experience? What didn't they like? What did they hope to find, and did they find it?
4. Test your survey!
Not seeing anyone fill out your form? Try making changes to the form, one variable at a time. You could try changing the wording of a question. Or switch up a question type from drop-down to a multiple choice. Or make your survey shorter. Give each test some time and see how your response rate changes!
5. Consider running different surveys for different web properties or areas of your site.
If you have a very large site, the data you're looking for may vary greatly from area to area. Tailor your onsite surveys to the specific data you're looking for and you may get even more value!
Finally, consider using PowerSurveyPlus for your onsite surveys. This CRM add-on by PowerObjects pulls survey data back into CRM for you automagically—who wouldn't love that?
Happy CRM'ing!