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Here's one tip on how to conduct a survey and the questions you need to ask.
Today's issue takes about 6 minutes to read.
Peep the scenario
Your website isn’t where it’s supposed to be as far as conversions go.
So you decide to do some customer research to get further information about your customers and what they do.
You find that conducting a survey is a must-have tool in your qualitative toolbox.
And you'd be right.
Customer surveys give you a ton of valuable information about your customers, the pains they’re going through, and almost any other piece of information that you feel would be important to know.
Quantitative info is going to tell you what, where, and how much. Which is great.
But customer surveys (qualitative info) are going to give you the 'why'.
This information can be vital to boosting conversions, revenue, repurchase rate, and honestly, any other metric that you're trying to improve.
Be prepared to have your socks blown off.
My stupid simple process for conducting a customer survey analysis
👉🏿 First, to get started, you're going to need to understand what questions you'd like to ask your customers.
To make this stupid simple for you I'm going to give you the template of questions that I like to use for most of my projects.
This is just a template and you should make changes based on your target audience.
Also, these questions are more geared towards traditional eCommerce. If you're in B2C or Saas you're going to want to switch up these questions a bit.
Here are the questions that I like to use for my surveys...
How did you first hear about Company X?
A friend told me about it
Google Search
Heard it suggested in a comment/forum
I saw an ad and clicked it
Other
What is ONE problem that you think Company X eliminates or lessens for you?
What is ONE benefit that Company X gave you and you value the most?
What 3 adjectives would you use to describe Company X
How many brands did you look at before buying from us? Which ones?
What made you choose our site?
How did you choose which products to buy? What matters to you?
What kind of doubts and hesitations did you have before completing this purchase?
What questions did you have that you couldn't find answers to?
What was the hardest part about finding the right product to buy on our site?
What's the #1 thing you'd mention to a friend if you wanted to convince them to give us a try?
These 11 questions will give you a tremendous amount of information about your customers.
You'll know the pains they went through, the benefits your products give, your competitors, and the words they use to describe your business/product.
Great stuff!
👉🏿 Now that you have your questions, you're going to want to put these questions into a form for your customers to fill out.
At 92DREAM we like to use Typeform because of its beautiful aesthetic and user experience.
But you can also use Survey Monkey, Google Forms, or any other form platform that best suits you.
👉🏿 Next, you're going to need a way to reach out to your customers to get them to fill out this survey.
Most eCommerce businesses are using Klaviyo for email, but you can use whichever email platform you're already using for marketing.
To get people to fill out these 11 questions, you're going to want to incentivize them.
If you just send this email out without giving something to your customer then you will find that it's really hard to get enough people to fill out your form, and it'll be hard to get the right information.
To make this stupid simple for you I've created a template that you can use to send to your customers.
This is the same email template that 92DREAM uses for customer surveys.
As a first batch, I like to try and find a pool of customers with the
following segmentation (using Klaviyo or whichever email platform you're using)...
500-1,000 customers
Customers that recently bought within the last 30-90 days.
If you have to go past 90 days, then it's going to be hard for the
customer to give you accurate information about why they bought and the real pain they went through before purchasing.
We try to look for 300-500 responses.
We find that amount gives us enough of a sample size to glean real user insights...
I like to start by sending the email to 1,000 customers and from there we'll send another 500 to try and get to the number of responses that we're looking for.
If you can't make it to 300, I still feel that it's ok. You can still find great information in that survey.
You'll just have to understand that you don't have enough of a sample size to be 100% confident with your results.
👉🏿 Last, it's time to look through all of that data.
In Typeform and Google Forms, you can export your results to a Google Sheet.
This is ideal because once you're done you can easily share the results with the rest of your team instead of sending a downloaded CSV.
Now, traversing through all of this data can be cumbersome but once you're into it, it becomes really easy.
What you're going to do is go through each response and find the patterns.
I want to stress the importance of reading each response because if you start to skip just 1, you run the risk of losing valuable information.
Don't be lazy!
The patterns will help you understand what 80% of your customers are thinking and feeling (think of the 80/20 rule here).
Going through this information is usually mind-blowing for everyone involved as it shows information that you have never seen or heard of before.
To make this step stupid simple for you I already have a video where I go through the process of how to find these patterns.
In this video, I'm talking about review mining (which was episode #002 of our Stupid Simple eCommerce newsletter), but if you fast forward to 2:05 you'll find the section where I talk about how to find the patterns.
Click here to view the video (fast forward to 2:05).
At the time of writing this email, it is now August 2022.
This is the perfect time to start to understand your customers better as Q4 is approaching fast.
You're going to want to have this research part done so that you can be prepared for the big sales months of November and December.
Aaaaand that's a wrap folks!
See you again next week.
When you're ready there are 3 ways I can help you:
Work directly with my team to help transform your business into a high-growth brand.
Take my free 3-Day Conversion Breakthrough Challenge to learn how to mine reviews and further beef up your messaging.
Follow me on LinkedIn to hear me ramble about all things eCommerce.
