Taking care of customers' needs is integral to succeeding in ecommerce. In a brick-and-mortar setup, you have the opportunity to interact with your customers, engage with them personally, and understand their pain points. In ecommerce, everything happens online, making it difficult for you to hear, understand, and truly connect with your customers.
Surveys can be pivotal to your business as they help forge deeper relationships with your customers. With surveys, you can ask pointed questions and get feedback on the most important aspects of your business. Customers feel valued when their opinions are sought after and their feedback is taken into consideration. Make use of these inputs to reimagine content development, and drive educated marketing and sales outreach programs. When a product/category receives negative feedback from many customers, it implies something should change.
In the absence of a survey, you have to play the guessing game—Should I price the product differently? Is there an issue with its image and description? Are the shipping costs high? Is this even a right market fit in the first place? With surveys, the issues become clear as daylight. You can collate all the points and rank the issues in order of importance. For instance, if shipping cost is the biggest concern, then it's time to evaluate the delivery partner. If customers aren't sure how to us the product, you can consider creating a "How-to" blog or an explainer video.
Surveys also increase customer engagement, which drives sales. An engaged consumer makes purchases 90% more frequently, and spends 60% more per transaction. The more a customer is engaged, the greater the chance they develop loyalty towards your brand. Failure to create engaged customers can cost your business dearly. Stand out from your competitors and boost your ecommerce sales with surveys.
How to use surveys for ecommerce
Web experience
A poor web experience can negatively impact your sales. Studies suggest that an optimized website positively impacts conversion rates, leading to more revenue. On the flip side, a bad web experience leads to loss in ecommerce revenue. Therefore, it's important to ensure your customers have an optimized web experience as they navigate your ecommerce store. Create a survey to find out whether your visitors had a good experience. Include questions about site navigation, website load time, catalog, product display, and checkout process. Receive feedback and course correct based on user feedback.
Tooltip: Use the survey in multiple ways.You can use it to get feedback from your customers, and offer casual visitors discounts on purchases upon completing the survey.
Product feedback
Customers care about your products as much as, if not more than, you do. After all, they pay for it. So, consider using surveys to receive feedback about their experience. Surveys can include questions around product quality, pricing, value for money, packaging, ease of use, and so forth.
Do your customers feel the product is affordable?
Are they satisfied with the existing features or are they looking for more?
Are the product details clear enough?
Is the product easy to use? etc
Ask both closed-ended and open-ended questions to get the best feedback possible. The common practice is to keep open-ended questions to a minimum, as to encourage survey completion. A close-ended question is typically a (Y/N) or a multiple choice question. An open-ended question requires customers to write responses in a textbox.
Surveys to conduct market research
Starting a new business or expanding an existing one requires solid market research, with a lot of questions hanging in the air—identifying a target market being the primary one. Even if business owners identify their market, finding the product market fit can be daunting. In his book, “Milkshake Marketing,” Clay Christensen states, 19 out of every 20 new products that launch, fail. That's a sobering statistic which indicates businesses fail to understand their market truly.
Here's where market research surveys help. They are a reliable and affordable way to gather information about your market. Finding answers to questions like, What is my total addressable market size? Who are my customers? Are they men, women or both? What age group do they belong to? etc., can help you truly understand your market.
Delivery experience
There are many stakeholders in an ecommerce value chain. There are merchants, customers, delivery partners, and payment and shipping providers to name a few. The biggest challenge for a business owner is to ensure a seamless customer experience across this value chain. If there is a slip up from even one of the stakeholders, it's going to impact the customer experience negatively.
Use surveys to hear about the delivery experience from customers. Did the product reach them on time? Was the delivery partner professional?, etc. All this is going to help you decide whether the delivery experience is smooth.
Customer rating
Use surveys to ascertain customer satisfaction and their likelihood to recommend your brand to their peers. You can ask them to rate their experience on a variety of things from purchase, support, and delivery to web experience. You can make it score-based requesting customers rate you on a scale of 1-10 or emotion-based, asking whether they had a positive or a negative experience. A high rating or score suggests a positive experience. A lower rating or score should set off alarm bells. This exercise is useful because it gives you a measure of your brand's popularity and insights into your brand champions and detractors. Read this blog to understand the different types of customer satisfaction surveys.
Zoho Commerce and Zoho Survey: More bang for your buck
Do you want to harness the power of surveys and scale your ecommerce business? Do it with Zoho Commerce and Zoho Survey.
Integrate your Zoho Commerce store with Zoho Survey with a single click to create different types of surveys.
Create feedback surveys to measure customer satisfaction and product experience.
Use abandoned cart surveys to understand why your customers did not complete a purchase.
Embed pop-up surveys on your website to get insights on your website performance, navigation, ease of use, etc.
Have survey polls and quizzes on your web and social media pages to drive customer engagement.
Design milestone surveys in the form of questionnaires at each key moment in the customer journey. For instance, send a time-based milestone survey 30 days after signing up to check on your customers.
Do you want to harness the power of surveys and scale your ecommerce business? Do it with Zoho Commerce and Zoho Survey.
Integrate your Zoho Commerce store with Zoho Survey with a single click to create different types of surveys.
Create feedback surveys to measure customer satisfaction and product experience.
Use abandoned cart surveys to understand why your customers did not complete a purchase.
Embed pop-up surveys on your website to get insights on your website performance, navigation, ease of use, etc.
Have survey polls and quizzes on your web and social media pages to drive customer engagement.
Design milestone surveys in the form of questionnaires at each key moment in the customer journey. For instance, send a time-based milestone survey 30 days after signing up to check on your customers.
Putting everything together
Scale your ecommerce business by collecting, analyzing, and implementing customers' feedback. Using surveys can make it easier for you to get a snapshot of your customers' feedback. Leverage Zoho Commerce and Zoho Survey to create a variety of ecommerce surveys as described above.
While surveying, ensure you have a decent sample size to arrive at a meaningful inference; decisions based on a small sample size can go wrong. Ensure to widen the scope of the questions, too. Biased questioning can shift focus from the details that truly matter. Tap into the power of surveys and scale your ecommerce business!