Although survey polls can sometimes be viewed as distracting or annoying – in most cases, the long-term value of information gathered (in terms of conversion insights) if applied correctly far outweighs the short-term loss in user experience.
By asking the right questions of the right website visitors and segments as they are live on your website, you are able to uncover deeper insights into your customer psychology. By applying these answers and insights into your overall website improvement and website conversion rate optimisation programme – you can see tremendous improvements in conversion rate. Far beyond purely your website conversion rate, these answers (once of an appropriate sample size and statistical significance) also reflect the true “validated” voice of your customer, as it is 
unique to your specific industry and market.
According to Gartner, 89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator. If you don’t understand what’s really going on in the head of your customer, how can you hope to possibly given them a positive customer experience (both online and offline)?
Getting in the head of your customer is especially difficult for purely online/digital businesses. For bricks and mortar style businesses, it can be as simple as picking up the phone or speaking to your customer when they come in store. For a pure digital online business, sometimes your customers may simply be faceless numbers in your Google Analytics dashboard (and it’s easy to forget that behind each of those numbers is a real human being with fears, wants, dreams, hopes and aspirations). As marketers, understanding these fears, hopes, dreams aspirations and wants is fundamentally critical to our success.
Sound easy? Not quite. In the last 6 years as a conversion rate optimisation agency in Australia, we’ve seen that even many of the highest traffic websites tend to either (a) underutilise survey polls, (b) not right the ask questions, (c) fail to do anything with the answers gathered, (d) do not test their resulting insights or (e) all of the above.
Asking the right questions, correctly analysing the answers, transforming them into scientifically validated customers insights, applying them and testing the result is a huge investment of effort requiring considerable skill – but it can also be one of the most powerful growth strategies that exist.
“You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.” Ross Perot
Here’s why and how survey polls can help boost your conversion rate:
- You need words to understand human psychology, not just faceless numbers
While analytics solutions such as Google Universal Analytics are fantastic for analysing the numbers in your digital business, including:
- where your visitors came from
- how long they spent on your site
- most visited pages
- at which point in the conversion funnel did they drop off
- which pages did they spend most time in and much more.
They do not allow you to gather qualitative feedback from your users about various elements of your website and their experience can help you streamline your funnel, thus boosting conversions. In short, surveys can reveal the ‘why’ behind the answers to the above questions.
- The right question(s) can unveil a wealth of insight
When conducting survey polls, don’t forget that you are dealing with humans who are bombarded with hundreds upon hundreds of messages daily, and have often have ‘hyper-ADHD’.
To write better survey poll questions:
- Keep the questions short
- Make them easy to read
- Avoid using complex questions where the user has to think a lot
- Address only one issue with each question and be precise
- No leading questions
- Keep the survey of suitable length, which can be answered within a few minutes
- Ask yourself – what website visitors/traffic will see this survey poll?
- Think about whether it’s appropriate for desktop only? Mobile only?
- Work out when the survey poll should appear – on first visit? Every time until completion? Even after completion? X seconds after load?
As part of our formal Conversion Audit (which is a comprehensive two week conversion research project), we have a large list of proprietary questions that we have perfected over the last 6 years (to get the most meaningful/impactful test ideas).
For example, one of our favourites is:
- ‘What’s the #1 thing that nearly stopped you from completing [conversion action] today?’
This survey poll should be triggered to only appear on the post-purchase or thank-you page. That way, you know for certain that all people who see and respond to the survey poll are indeed qualified (one of the biggest problems that beginners to survey polls make is not realizing that when you target ‘all website visitors’, inherently a portion of that traffic is not going to be qualified/match your target market at all).
Other questions we see commonly asked are questions like:
- What prevents you from buying from us?
- What would have made you complete the purchase?
- Looks like you’ve changed your mind. What stopped you from you completing your purchase?
- What other information would you like that will help you make your decision?
- What was missing on this page?
- Did you find what you were looking for?
A really good conversion rate optimisation strategist should know how to use specific questions to ‘shine light on the customer psychogram’ – thereby, revealing more and more about the exact personality of the website visitors you are attempting to persuade.
You can also think of it is a personality test in reverse where the goal is to ask questions to ‘guess’ the overarching ‘common’ personality types for each of your major customer segments.
Are you trying to persuade ‘frank’ people? Are they concerned about privacy? Do they have a sense of humour? Are they sincere? How important is tactfulness and diplomacy? Taking these validated insights into your conversion strategy and copywriting is a major secret weapon.
- Pick the appropriate timing/audience for survey polls
For example – when a user is about to close your website or is about to click ‘close’ – a quick pop-up survey can help uncover why he/she decided not to proceed further.
Some enterprises may make use of Single Page Applications (SPAs) for their sign-up flows. Knowing how to cleverly use JavaScript targeting to trigger a survey poll to conditionally activate at a specific stage or specific sequence of a sign-up flow can be a great way to intelligently target your survey poll only to customers from a specific segment.
If you target all website visitors – be well aware that you will have unqualified prospects in your survey responses. Therefore, think about how to trigger the survey poll at thank-you pages or post-purchase pages (to ensure you have only qualified responses in your sample set, to improve the meaningfulness of data collection).
- E-mail based surveys can also be great (not just website survey polls)
Through your time operating your business, you may have built a considerable database of prospects and customers.
Remember, these are people who trust your brand and have opted to receive communications from you.
As a result, you can rest assured they too are a valuable source of information.
As a supplement to pop-up surveys, consider the usage of e-mail based surveys to find out how their experience has been (you can choose to focus on pre-purchase, post-purchase, different areas of buying criteria or all of the above). Don’t be surprised if your respondents have tonnes of feedback (some positive, some negative) for you. As Bill Gates once said, ‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning’.
It is important to show these respondents (who are either past customers, current customers or prospective customers) that you care – by actually honouring their feedback. And where-ever possible, actually fixing the problem (there’s nothing more frustrated to consumers than giving customer feedback only to have it ignored).
Conclusion
The four tips discussed above are a good place to start as you venture down the path of having a thorough and customer-driven approach to website improvement and conversion rate optimisation. By applying these tools in the ‘conversion toolbox’, you’ll find that getting information and feedback is easier and as a marketer, that your appreciation and understanding of your customer deepens. If you get stuck or you’re not picking up the velocity and speed that you’d like in your growth, engage expert help.
James Spittal 
James Spittal is the founder of Conversion Rate Optimisation and A/B testing obsessed digital marketing agency, Web Marketing ROI. They help brands with high-traffic websites optimize their conversion rate using A/B testing and personalization.