Customer surveys: improve your eCommerce store with feedback from your target market

One of the best ways to stand out from your competitors is to know what your customer wants and offer it to them. Getting inside the minds of your target audience is a golden ticket to sky-high sales and customer loyalty. Why? Because instead of fumbling in the dark, you have exact and clear feedback from your buyers. It's like they are offering you the key to a vault with a huge sum of money for free!

A customer survey is a questionnaire for buyers from your eCommerce store. It is usually short and takes up to five minutes of your participant's time. Giving an incentive for completing longer surveys is recommended. A chance to win a voucher for your eCommerce shop or a discount on their next order could encourage your customers to take part.

As we mentioned in our article about building your brand value, you should send a customer survey once every 6-12 months. It is also worth sending an email to customers after every purchase for a product review and to rate their customer experience.

There's a reason why we receive surveys from the brands we buy from. Big brands such as Hollister, Glovo, ASOS, and Cabify, for example, send follow-up emails to customers to ask for feedback and reviews. The data they collect from these answers is invaluable for improving their offering and understanding their customer's purchasing experience.

Reasons to send an eCommerce survey:

Create a detailed buyer persona

Better your marketing strategy

Improve engagement rates with online adverts

Identify trends such as a popular product

Improve your eCommerce website

Segment your buyers into specific groups that will be easier to sell to

Categories to cover with your questions in your survey:

Website functionality

Product range

Product quality

Purchasing experience

Delivery

Customer service

Competitors

Here are some questions you can use in your customer survey. Asking customers to give a rating as an answer might be a good way to design your questionnaire. Clicking from multiple choice will be seen as quicker and easier than writing a response to each question.

Demographics questions

At the beginning of the questionnaire, don't forget to ask demographic details such as their age and where they live, to help you build a buyer persona. In other words, the type of person you are selling to. This will allow you to understand who your customers are, their needs, values, and expectations from your brand.

1. Age (consider listing age ranges to choose from)

2. Gender

3. Ethnicity (to understand cultural backgrounds)

4. Location

5. Education

6. Marital status

Scale questions

These questions ask for an answer on a scale of 1 to 10 if 1 is poor and 10 is excellent.

1. How would you rate your overall experience on the website?

2. What was your first impression of the website?

3. How easy was it for you to navigate the website?

4. How do you rate the product information and images on our website?

5. How do you rate the ease of purchasing?

How likely questions

Answers to these questions are on a scale of highly unlikely to very likely.

1. How likely are you to recommend [website] to your friends?

2. How likely are you to make a purchase again?

How satisfied questions

Responding to these questions uses a scale from highly dissatisfied to very satisfied.

1. How satisfied were you with the customer service?

2. How satisfied were you with the speed of delivery?

3. How satisfied were you with the range of products on the website?

4. How satisfied are you with the quality of our products?

5. How satisfied were you with the ease of payment?

Yes or no questions

1. Did you find the products you were looking for?

2. Did you feel secure sharing your card payment details on our website?

3. Did we offer your preferred payment method? (If not, please give details)

4. Did you contact our customer service?

5. Was your query/issue resolved by our customer service representative?

6. Were the delivery costs reasonable?

7. Would you be interested in a delivery subscription?

8. Would you be interested in signing up for our email newsletter for discounts and our newest products?

9. Would you be interested in giveaways or competitions from us?

10. Have you purchased gift cards from us?

11. Are you following us on our social media channels?

Dropdown questions

Answers are from a choice in a dropdown menu.

1.How did you find out about our website?

2. How often do you shop with us?

3. What are some items you would like to see on our website?

4. Compared to our competitors, how is our website?

5. Which of our competitors do you purchase from regularly?

6. Which of our competitors have you purchased from in the last 3 months?

Open-ended questions

These questions let customers write an answer to give more details.

1.Do you have any suggestions to improve the website?

2. How would you like us to improve our service?

3. Is there any other feedback you would like to give?

Choose how to get your customers to take part in your survey. You can send a post-purchase questionnaire to those that made an order within the last week. This means they have a fresh experience of ordering from you and are more likely to have feedback to share. You can also have a pop-up on the homepage asking for visitors to take part.

Ways to distribute your survey:

Email

Your home page

Your order confirmation page

Social media

Reviewing the data you have collected from your customer responses is the most crucial part. You should be using survey or email marketing software which will usually have an analytics panel. According to Customer Thermometer, a response rate of 5-30% is considered normal.

Take note of the following statistics:

What was your response rate?

Which buyer persona was the most responsive? (How old are they, where do they live, are they mostly male or female?)

What were the most popular answers?

What were the most popular complaints?

Compare new data with past data

Make a visual presentation of the results with graphs for a better look at the data. What are the trends you have noticed from your customers? With this information, you can fix their complaints and give them the best online shopping experience.

Customer surveys for eCommerce stores is an easy and affordable way to gain insight into the thought process of your buyers. It takes out the guesswork when deciding how to serve your customers. In the process, you will have updated records of their demographic information.