This Survey Can Set You On The Path to A High Converting Store
Hey I’m Shane, welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you’re not subscribed you join 1045(!) people that are right here:
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It’s easy to forget but there’s real people on the other side of every metric. People with their own life, desires, and emotions.
Understanding who these people are is essential to creating a high-converting store.
Far and away the easiest way to learn about your customers is through a well-designed survey. So today I’m going to give you everything you need to send out your first survey in less than 30 minutes.
I guarantee this will be worth your time. Let’s get started.
The Setup
Before we get started, we need to segment our customers, decide how we’re going to incentivize respondents, and write our promotional email.
Segmenting your customers
The first step is deciding who we’re going to survey. You could send a survey to your entire list and get a ton of responses. But if you think about it, all of your customers are different. At the very least, some of them have purchased within the last 30 days, and others not for over a year.
For our purposes, we want to talk to people that have their last purchase fresh on their mind. So we’ll make sure to segment our email list by ‘placed an order in the last 30 days’.
It may also be interesting to segment by first time buyers. People who are repeat customers are in an entirely different mindset than people who buying for their first time. So in your email tool you should create a new segment for ‘placed an order in the last 30 days AND order count == 1’.
Incentivizing respondents
With that segment in place, we can start thinking about how we’re going to incentivize people to participate. If you’re strapped for cash there’s nothing wrong with just asking people to respond. You’ll probably get 1-2% of recipients filling out the form just because they like your brand.
If you can spare a small amount of money, my favorite approach is to raffle off a few gift cards. Literally as simple as “Fill out the survey to enter for a chance to win 1 of 3 $50 gift cards”
The best part about gift cards is that you are really only spending the COGS on that $50, not the full $50. With this incentive in place you’ll see something like 2-5% of people respond.
Writing a good email
The best approach here is to keep it simple. Plain text with a couple links to the survey. Here’s a template that you can copy and paste + modify for your own audience
Subject: Quick Survey for a chance to win a $50 gift card! 🎉
Hey___,
I’d love your help.
I’m asking our very best customers if you would be able complete a very short survey and give some feedback about our products, the website and your entire experience as a { your brand } customer.
It’s very short and should only take a couple of mins to complete. In return we’ll enter you into a raffle to win one of 3 x $50 Gift Cards that can be used to purchase anything on our store!
Click here to take part
Here’s all the info and instructions to enter the questionnaire - it really won’t take long (just a couple of minutes), and will make a huge difference for us, and above all make sure we can create & develop more amazing new products for you!
Thank you!
– { brand name } team
*Anywhere you see an underline, add a link to the survey*
Great, with those things in place we’re ready to send the survey out. Now we just have to actually create it.
Creating the Survey
What type of questions should you ask?
Multiple choice questions are great for collecting demographic data or simple yes/no questions. The problem with multiple-choice is that we’re assuming we know the answer to the question we’re asking. By limiting the potential responses, a multiple choice question can only confirm what we think could be true.
On the other hand open-ended questions, where we let people write out a custom response, give us the opportunity to be surprised by what we learn. We’ll include both types, but most of the value comes from the open-ended responses.
As far as questions to ask, you’ll want to get creative. I’ll give you a solid starting point but take a minute to think about your customers. What do you want to know about them?
If you’re a skincare brand, maybe you want to know if they have dry or oily skin.
If you sell baby clothes, maybe you’ll want to know if they have boys, girls, or both.
If you sell a razor, maybe you may want to ask what they struggle with when shaving.
Let your curiosity run wild.
Here’s a solid set of questions that you can build on top of:
What is your age group?
Under 18
18-24
25-34
35-44
45-54
55+
Did you buy our product as a gift for someone else?
Yes
No
What made you first start searching for these products?
Was there a specific problem you were trying to solve or type of product you were looking for?
What was your biggest challenge, frustration or problem in finding the right product? In general, not only on our store.
Please describe your decision making process that led you to buy from us
Did you consider any other brands before buying from us? If so, which brands did you consider?
What was it about our products and/or company that made you decide to purchase from us instead of another brand?
What was your biggest fear or concern about buying from us?
...and what persuaded you to overcome that fear or concern?
What could we have done to make your decision easier?
Was there anything about using our website that you found difficult?
How did our products meet your expectations?
Imagine describing us to a friend—what would you say? It would really help if you'd write it out just like you might send a text.
What products should we offer that we don't already?
Would you be open to having a short 15 minute phone call with someone on our team in the future?
Yes
No
To actually build the survey with these questions, you’ll want to use Google Forms.
But instead of making you set it all up yourself, I’ve created this template survey for you that you can duplicate.
When you open that link you’ll be able to edit the template survey. PLEASE don’t do that. Instead, head to the top right corner and select ‘Make a Copy’.
Once you’ve copied it over to your own account, make sure you add any additional questions you’ve come up with and fill in your brand name where it says { your brand }.
When you’re ready, all you have to do is hit that big ’Send’ button, choose ‘send via link’, and grab the link to the survey:
Now you can add that link to your email campaign and you’re ready to send!
Analyzing responses
Once you send the survey the responses will start rolling in quick. Give it a good 24 hours and you’ll have received 90%+ of all responses.
Google Forms is great because it automatically creates a spreadsheet for you with all of the responses. Just click on the green sheets icon to open it up:
With a long list of responses, where do you even start? Personally, I like to open up a Google Doc and put it side by side with the survey responses. For all of the open ended questions, I’ll add two sections:
Thoughts
Interesting responses
I’ll start reading through the responses and copy/paste any responses that are particularly long, weird, or insightful under the interesting responses heading.
At the same time, I’ll just record anything that comes to mind under the thoughts category. This is usually something like:
“Huh, I’m seeing a lot of people say that they started looking for these products because they had [some] specific problem. That’s not something we talk about much on the site or in our marketing, but maybe we should?”
I usually read through around 200 survey responses for each question. You’ll start to notice some patterns emerging and reading any further will probably just burn you out.
Once I’ve read through the responses, I’ll copy the entire column of responses and drop them into this text analyzer. The analyzer finds any repetition of words or phrases among your responses. I usually just scan through the output until I find anything interesting.
For example, with one brand I found a lot of people used the exact phrase: “I hope I’ll never have to use it but” — which we used as inspiration for an ad using that same phrase which ended up being a top performing creative for the month.
For the multiple choice questions, you don’t even have to leave Google Forms. They’ll generate a chart for you that shows what % of people chose which response.
Putting your analysis into action
At this point, I can’t really help you.
The questions in the survey are designed to give you fresh ideas for marketing campaigns, website improvements, and product development.
You have the data, you’ve read through it and learned about your customers, and now you need to decide what to execute on.
That’s all for this week’s issue. If you enjoyed it, please let me know on Twitter. I’m still considering getting a sponsor for the newsletter so if you know anyone that might be interested, tell them to reach out!
Have a wonderful weekend.