Do you want to learn how to uncover the words your visitors need to see before they convert?
Would you like to discover exactly how your customers feel about you, your products and your services and use that knowledge to write compelling copy, craft irresistible designs and create a delightful user experience?
Because if you’re going to get people to do anything, you need to help them see themselves on the page.
And there’s no simpler way to do this than by running visitor and customer surveys.
A survey helps you get to know the real reasons people take action and dig into their actual experience.
Then you can use these insights to optimize everything you do.
In this live training, I shared the reasons I love customer surveys (and won’t take on a client unless they agree to run them). Then we walked through everything you need to know to set up your first one: from the tools to use to the exact process you can use to collate and analyze your survey data.
Here’s what you don’t want to miss:
- Discovering how to use customer surveys to increase conversions
- The different types of customer surveys you can run
- How to analyze survey responses to uncover compelling insights you can use to create better copy and design
- My go-to questions for visitor and customer surveys…
And more!
Table of Contents
Grab Your Free Competitor Analysis Worksheet Here
Grab Your Free Survey Worksheet Here
Watch the recording below:
Transcript, slides and notes available below:
So, the cool thing is that we are talking today about customer surveys, and I’ll get into it real soon, but customer surveys are probably one of the biggest tools that I use today to increase conversions for my clients. It’s something that I will not…I will not take any project on without being able to do a customer survey or a visitor survey on my clients’ websites. And my students also know it’s a must, you have to conduct them. And what I want to do today is tell you about the ways I use customer surveys or visitor surveys, and I’m gonna give you the exact roadmap and a template for using them yourself. So, we also have a free worksheet you can use with all the questions that we ask and all the rules and stuff like that. Okay, so let’s get started.
Two Types of Surveys You Need to Run
Okay. So, when I talk about surveys, I don’t mean surveys to discover the age of your customers or their geographical location, their gender, their household income, or if they like the design of your website. Those are not the type of surveys that I’m referring to. My goal, when I run surveys, is to go deeper. It’s to identify the reasons behind your customers’ or your clients’ decision-making process. So, when I talk about surveys, I mean conducting a survey solely to find the messages, the messages that you should be using on your website, or your landing pages, or your emails for that matter. Surveys that will reveal what to say and how to say it on your page. So, we’re talking about surveys to reveal what hesitations people have about your solution, what pains they’re experiencing on a daily basis, what features users love the most or what features visitors are most excited about. I use surveys to find out what the messaging hierarchy should be on a page, the order of what we should say on a page, what objections need to be addressed, what anxieties people had before converting.
And basically, there’s just so much you can find out, like how your solutions impact people’s lives and much, much more. So, when we get started with surveys, there’s really two types of…well, there’s actually many types of surveys that you can run. But you can and should run surveys on two types of people: your website visitors, and your existing customers or your clients. You can definitely create surveys for customers who are more long-term paying customers and people that just converted, but I’d start with the first two. Visitors who haven’t taken any action with you yet and customers who have been…who are either new customers or who have been with you for a long time, the more the merrier. Now, when I do visitor surveys, that means I’m doing a survey on the website, and I like to use Hotjar. It’s really easy to set up and launch, and you can actually do it for free, even with the free version. It will just say that it’s promoted, that it’s by HotJar on the bottom. But it’s just a really cool tool to use.
Now, the goal of surveying your visitors is to find out their intent, what motivates them to come to your website, what their biggest pain is, what their hesitations are right now, you know, from taking action with you, and what they’re missing from your page. Now, it’s a really cool way to just kind of really identify what people are looking for. And I think it’s so imperative to understand this because most companies, most brands when they run a survey on a website, they focus solely on, “Do you like the website?” or “What almost stopped you from buying today?” All sorts of questions that don’t really give you enough information. So, my goal is to use surveys to really understand who these people are. Now, one thing that I’d suggest with a visitor survey, is to segment it. Because if you don’t have a lot of traffic, that’s one thing. But when you have quite a lot of traffic, we don’t want to interrupt their journey or be too intrusive.
Segmenting Your Surveys
So, I like to set these visitor surveys in a way that either only appears to people who are visiting the website for the second time, which means I’m giving people who are on the website for the first time a minute to process what’s going on, or people who have scrolled a certain amount of the page or that they’ve been a certain amount on the page or they’ve seen certain amount of pages. So, this is a screenshot of Hotjar, which is what I use to run visitor surveys on my website, to answer your question, Christie. And you can see here this is just a screenshot of how they…how you can segment these surveys on your website. So, you can decide what devices to show it on, you can, of course, decide what page to show it on. And what’s really cool is you can also decide when to show it. So, does it show immediately after the page loads? Is it after a delay of a certain amount of seconds?
So, for example, if you know that the majority of people spend 30 seconds on your homepage, you might want to set the survey to appear after 40 seconds, for example, just because you know that the people that stay longer are probably more interested in the website. You can decide to show it to someone only when they’re about to leave the page, or you can decide to show it when someone scrolls halfway down the page. To me, I usually go for when someone scrolls halfway down the page, just because I know that that usually means that someone is more interested, he’s more engaged or she’s more interested in what I have to offer. So, for me, those are kind of my go-to’s when it comes to visitor surveys.
Now, with customer surveys, the goal is to reveal the outcomes, the big changes people experience with your solution and the value that they get. You can discover your value proposition, the most…basically, the most valuable part of your offer, and so much more.
Now, we’re just scratching the surface here, but it’s a beginning, it’s something to start with. Now, what you see on the screen right now is a screenshot from Typeform. It’s the tool that I like to use to run surveys for my customers. This means that we’re essentially sending an email out to people and inviting them to answer a survey. And this means that we’re not doing it on the website, so I like to use Typeform. You can also use SurveyMonkey. It’s a great tool and offers great reporting. I use Typeform just because I feel like it’s the easiest way for people to answer, and it’s really simple and it works really well on mobile too. Now, because you can do so much with surveys, let me give you an example of how we’ve used them recently. We recently did some work for an online parenting program along with Momoko Price, a brilliant conversion copywriter. They have a very big list of students who have taken that course or are currently taking it. And they’ve also got many, many people coming to their website on a daily basis to learn more about their services or read their blog posts or take the tutorials.
How we used Customer Surveys to Increase Conversions
So, we created two surveys. The survey we conducted for the website visitors was segmented to people who aren’t customers, obviously, and that they visited the website more than once. And here are some of the questions that we asked them. So, one of the questions we asked is, which of these describes you?
We had multiple different options, but these are the options we actually offered. So, “I know I need help. I’m just looking for the best solution,” “I’m considering this company for the first time, not sure if I need it,” or “I know I need this company’s program, I’m just here to enroll.” Those are the three main answers we got. We got additional ones, but those are the three ones, the ones that people answered the most. Now, we used the answers here to identify where people are in the buyer journey. I’ve spoken about this before, but it’s called stages of awareness. And what’s really cool is that when you understand where a person is in the buyer journey, it helps you understand what type of messaging you should be showing on your page.
So, for this company, we’re actually working on their homepage. And what’s really cool here is that it helped us understand that most people are problem aware. They know they have a problem, they know they need help, they’re just not sure what would work best for them. And other people felt…were saying that they do know of other options out there and now they’re trying to figure out if this is the right solution for them. So, it helped us craft the right message for the people that were coming to the website according to their user journey.
Now, another question we asked is, what one problem are you hoping to solve with this company?
So, we got multiple answers, “My child isn’t listening,” “Yelling,” “Sibling conflict,” “Back talk,” “Power struggles,” “Difficult behavior,” “Tantrums,” and etc. But we used the answers to basically rank the pains, the daily struggles and the challenges that prospects deal with so that we could craft a more meaningful message on the homepage.
So, we wanted to show empathy to their situation and show prospects that we understand them and their specific challenges. So, it’s a really cool way of just, you know, telling someone, “Hey, we know what you’re dealing with on a daily basis, we know how hard life is, and we know that you’re dealing constantly with children that are not listening or that you’re constantly yelling or that your kids are constantly fighting.” And that really does make people feel like you understand them and know them really well. So, another question that we asked people, again, visitors off the website, “How do you currently deal with parenting problems?”
So, many people said they were yelling. A lot of people were saying they don’t, they just don’t know what to do. Time outs, consequences, asking repeatedly and such and such. So, this is a great way to identify what people have tried so far to solve their problem. And it’s really cool because with the answers to these questions we could craft more relatable messaging on their homepage.
We could build a sense of trust and we can emphasize the different solutions they’ve already tried that aren’t working, showing prospects that they need a better system to deal with these issues. So, essentially, when someone comes on to the website, I’m gonna show you how we actually did this, and what copy and what design we did. But essentially when someone comes to this page, they will now see themselves in there. They will be able to see, all right, I did…I have been trying X, Y, and Zed. These are the methods that I’ve been trying and they really aren’t working, you’re right. So I do need a different solution. Now, in addition, and these are just a few examples, we asked five questions on the homepage. These are just examples of three questions. But in addition to this visitor survey, we also ran a customer survey.
Now, we reached out to the huge Facebook group and we asked people to help us out and answer a few questions, and the answers were amazing. It was really cool to see how many people were so interested in helping out and giving us their take on everything. So, here’s some of the questions that we asked. The first question was, what’s the number one pain that has been eliminated by this program?
So, two, you know, two biggest things people said, it has eliminated power struggles between my child and I, and it’s eliminated yelling. Now, this question has helped me…it basically helped me understand the biggest pain that our customers struggled with before enrolling in this program. And it helped us shape the messaging hierarchy. It helped us understand the value that we can offer. Our goal is to use a copy formula called PAS, which means pain, agitation and solution. And for that, we need to understand what the pain is. So, these are the pains that people experienced beforehand, and we know for a fact that they were eliminated by this company’s program. So, it’s a great way to understand the value proposition that we have and the emotional triggers of people of what they really cared about at the end.
Another question we asked is, what’s the number one benefit that you’ve achieved from this program?
So, we got all sorts of answers: a calmer home, less yelling, better relationships. And this was basically our way to be able to highlight the specific values that parents can gain from taking this program, and highlight the positive outcomes they can achieve. Another question that we asked is, what, if anything, convinced you to purchase this course? This was a really important thing for us because we were debating what type of call to action we should have on the homepage. Should we ask people to take a webinar, to see a free webinar and a free class, or should we just send them immediately to the course information? Most people said that what really convinced them was the free webinar, the video, that free session that they watched. So it was a no-brainer for us to know what CTA we should be adding to the website. So, instead of sending them to the pricing or the course curriculum, we can feature that free class.
Uncovering your customers’ hesitations
Now, we also asked customers what their biggest hesitations were going into the course and what almost stopped them from enrolling.
The answers to these questions helped us focus on what really needed to be addressed and answered on the homepage. Because many times we create websites and we just put in the information we think people care about. But when you understand the hesitations people had beforehand or their concerns, you can then address them with your design, with your copy and other ways. Finally, we also ask people what one word they would use to describe the program, which gave us loads of high-converting, relatable adjectives and nouns to describe the service. Now, one of my favorite outcomes of these surveys is that after you identify these biggest concerns and these hesitations customers had before enrolling, we could turn to these surveys and grab word-by-word testimonials, addressing these pains and how the course helped them overcome them.
So, essentially, I didn’t need to worry about certain…of how we would explain certain things about the program because the customers were already telling me everything, they were giving me all the answers. And then this way, it wasn’t just us trying to sell the program, it was the students who were actually selling the program that were addressing specific challenges. That’s called social proof. So, it’s really cool to use your customer surveys for writing better copy and for choosing the right words and even the entire messaging on your website. So, what do you actually do with all this information? So, let’s say that you have asked a bunch of questions. And by the way, for the customer surveys, I think we asked about 10 or 12 different questions. So, they’re longer because people agreed to answer them in advance.
How to Analyze Survey Responses
And what I like to do, and this is my personal thing. So what I like to do is, I create a Google sheet or an Excel file, and on the left-hand corner on the top, you’ll see there’s Master, and then I create different tabs.
So, Master has all the answers essentially downloaded from Typeform, everything that everyone’s saying. And then I create different tabs for the different questions that we asked. Now, it’s really cool because you can start reading through everything to start finding common patterns and themes between things. So, you’ll see that this is a different client. But the question that we asked is, what’s the number one thing you’d mention to a friend if you wanted to convince them to attend the conference? So, here all the answers are on the left, and on the right are all the themes that we found. And we aggregate them into groups, and that way we can start seeing numbers, we can start seeing percentage.
So, most people would recommend the content, most people would recommend the ROI or the atmosphere. This is just a snippet of it, we had 500 answers. But what’s really cool here is that you start to see these patterns. It’s easy to kind of sort out in Google Docs. And what’s really cool is you actually learn a lot by going through all the answers. Now, I know that this sounds crazy, but the best way to do this is actually manually, and I say this for two reasons. One is that rather than getting a tool to do it for you, and there are different tools that can aggregate all these answers for you, you actually get to see all the raw answers people give you and learn a lot from them. And the other thing is that you’ll be able to identify patterns you can use later, plus you’ll also get quotes and testimonials to use. So, for example, I highlighted here in blue and in grey some really powerful messages and things that people were saying that I could use on the website. And also, you know, finding people that I may want to interview and all sorts of stuff.
How to Turn Customer Survey Insights Into High-Converting Design and Copy
So, this is a really cool way of doing it. Now, let me show you what the outcome of something like this looks like.
So, if we go back to the parenting program company, we did all of these surveys and we tried to figure out the messaging behind it. Now we understand the highest value that customers find, we understand the pains, we understand what people struggled with, and what people are struggling with.
And now Momoko could start crafting our new homepage or a new variation, or a new AB test. So, for one thing, we said, “Get your kids to listen without yelling, nagging, or losing control. This company gives you the tools you need to finally put an end to exhausting power struggles with your children. No more tantrums, no more knockdowns, no more guilt. Become the parent you’ve always wanted to be. Take a free class. Start seeing results and feeling relief within days.” Here’s another one, “Everyone knows being a parent isn’t easy, but no one told you it would be like this.”
Or “You’ve tried everything: timeouts, reward charts, counting to three, punishments. Nothing works.” Now, all of this content, the images that you’re seeing here, the colors that we’re using, everything is all thanks to the customer surveys. Because we were able to really understand what people are going through on their daily basis and their struggles and how hard life is for them with this specific pain, we were able to really stand out. We were able to really trigger those emotions that they feel the most and show them to them on the page. And it really is such a cool way because at the end of the day, when you sit there and you’re thinking, “What should I write on my page?” or “What images should I choose?” or “What color should I use in my page?”, we sort of hope that things are just gonna fall on us and somehow we’re gonna come up with these amazing ideas. But when you run customer surveys or visitor surveys, you don’t have to make anything up. It’s all there in front of you. So, it’s a great way to actually reduce the amount of work you’ll be doing later.
My Favorite Survey Questions
So, let me share my favorite survey questions that I like to ask visitors on the website.
- Which of these best describes you?
- What do you currently use to accomplish a task or a goal?
- Is there anything you dislike or want to change about how you currently accomplish product or this task or the goal?
- What matters the most to you when you’re choosing this type of solution, like… The name of the service.
- Is there anything holding you back from trying this company or this product right now?
These are my favorite go-to questions with visitor surveys.
With customer surveys, I have other questions.
- How did you first hear about us? Because we want to understand where most of our people are coming from. Is it word of mouth? Is it a certain type of traffic? A medium?
- When did you realize you needed a product like X?
- What was going on in your world that caused you to come looking for it?
- What one problem would you say this product or company eliminates or lessens for you?
- What one benefit would you say you’ve gotten and valued most from using this company?
- Why did you choose this product over others or this service over others?
- And one of my favorites: If this solution was gone tomorrow, what would you miss the most?
It’s one of my favorite questions. I got this tip from AG Consults, which is a UX agency in Belgium. Good friends of mine. And it was eye-opening. Because when you ask this question, you get such amazing answers. You don’t actually hear the things you think you’re going to hear. Most companies think you’re going to hear stuff like, “Oh, I’m going to miss the customer service, and I’m going to miss this feature,” or “I’m going to miss that feature.” But in fact, what you actually get is real, raw valuable answers from people, like, “Oh, I’m really gonna miss how I don’t need to do this and this anymore,” or “I’m really gonna miss my conversations with that,” or “Oh, I don’t want to think about the headache I’m gonna have by losing this product tomorrow.” Another question I loved that Momoko asked was: “What’s the number one thing you’d mention to a friend if you wanted to convince them to give us a try?” Which is what I showed you before as an example for that conference.
4 Rules for Running Successful On-Site Surveys and Customer Surveys
So, these are my go-to survey questions.
In the worksheet that we’ll be sharing with you, you actually have all of these written down with a bunch more suggestions and ideas of how to implement them.
Grab Your Free Survey Worksheet Here
Just to finalize this, and I told you, this was going to be short and actionable. So, just to finalize this specific topic, I wanna talk about the rules of running a survey. Because when you run a survey, you really want to make sure that you are not making any crucial or critical mistakes that can cause…that can give you the wrong information. So, the first one is you want to set a clear goal for each survey. So, every survey that you run should have one goal and one goal only. So, for example, I want to know why people choose us or I want to know what features I should kill in my product.
That is one goal that you set for your survey and you make sure that you’re only trying to figure that out. Ask one thing per question. So, don’t ask, “Why did you come to the website and purchase X?” And also avoid words like “and” “or” in your questions. So, just make sure you’re asking for one thing. Don’t lead people to certain answers. It sounds pretty obvious but, unfortunately, I see quite a lot of people doing this. So, avoid, “X product is the best solution, agree or disagree?” I don’t think you want to lead people that way. Or “How would you rate our most popular plan?” which is essentially telling people that it’s the most popular one. So you don’t wanna lead people that way. And don’t plant ideas in people’s heads. Don’t ask, “How would you rate us versus a competitor?” and send them to your competitor to check them out. Or “How frustrating is our signup process?” All these kind of things would definitely lead people in a certain direction, which you want to avoid.
Your Survey Questions Answered
So, these are my rules that I follow when I do a survey. What I’d love to hear from you now and in the chat, is how many of you, who of you has run a survey in the past six months? So, how many of you have actually run a survey in the past six months? Let me know in the chat, I would love to know. Because I know that people love to talk about surveys, but most people don’t actually do them or are worried about spamming people, worried about getting in people’s way. So, let me know in the chat, which I will look at in a second. Have you run a survey in the past six months? Just so I can get a feel for that. And in the meantime, I am going to stop sharing my screen and come back on video so that I can look at your questions and see if I can answer anything. Okay, so let’s see. Okay, awesome. So, I see there’s a lot of people here who are…who have been running a survey, which is cool, and I’m excited to see that, definitely. I’m wondering why people don’t do it, I’m always interested in that.
Let me know in the chat if you would like to run a survey but you’re not sure or you have some sort of a hesitation and you’re not…you know, you don’t really wanna do it, why won’t that work for you? What are you worried about? So, for…and I see a lot of people here, I’m just going through the chat now, just to see what I missed, because I couldn’t concentrate while I was looking at the presentation. For customer surveys, I use Typeform, and I will send you the link for that in a second. Typeform, and I use SurveyMonkey. So both of them are great in terms of running customer surveys, they’re really easy and they work really well on mobile, which, to me, is the most important thing. So, let’s see. All right. So, Kat asks, what is a sample size ideal for website visitors polling? How’d you know when to stop and switch questions? Okay, so, to be honest, and this might sound a bit harsh, but I like to get at least 200 responses to a survey. Now, let’s be frank here, you can’t always do that. A, you might not have enough traffic to get 200 responses. B, sometimes companies get really worried about spamming people or that it’s too much.
That’s also what’s good about Hotjar, once you’ve answered the survey once, you never see it again. But I like to get at least a couple hundred responses because you need to have enough information to aggregate it and to start seeing patterns. If you’re only getting a few dozen, it’s not really reliable or statistical information. So, I would run it for as long as possible. Now, when do you decide to switch questions? I guess there’s two options. One is, if you’re starting to see answers and the answers aren’t really adding up, like they’re not what you expected to see. Now, what I mean by that is not that, “Oh, they’re saying no about something. I was sure they were gonna say yes.” But if you’re trying to figure out, like, your value proposition and the answers you’re getting are like, “Oh, this isn’t working,” or “This is a bug,” or stuff like that, that means that the questions aren’t written in a good way or in a way that that really gets the right answers from people.
So, then I would stop the survey, reconstruct the questions and relaunch it. But other than that, I wouldn’t. I would just keep going until I get a couple of hundred answers for as long as I can. Plus, even when you do get a couple of hundred answers, why not continue…as long as it’s not too intrusive, why not continue to keep getting that information and seeing if things change? Because when you start making changes to your website, you’ll want to see if that’s affecting the survey too. That is answering your question, Kat. Patty says, “It is intimidating and asking the right questions, how they are worded.” I agree. I think that most people are kind of worried about doing surveys because they’re worried about how people will respond or if they’ll get annoyed, or what are the best questions to answer. So, hopefully with the worksheet and the questions that I just showed you, you will now have eliminated that issue because you now have a list of questions that you can ask people and use yourself.
And you don’t need to be worried about the answers people are gonna give you because this is the truth. This is the raw truth that will help you grow as a business. So, even if the answers are negative, that’s great, because now you know what you actually have to fix. So don’t be afraid to ask these questions. Nikki says, “Two instances where clients don’t want to run surveys. Not enough customers or traffic or website wasn’t up yet.” Yeah, that makes complete sense. I think when it comes to… Let me just make sure I have all the right names. So it’s Katya, not Kat. Zoom kind of made that really small. Again, when you don’t have enough customers, I get not reaching…not doing a customer survey yet, but you can definitely do a visitor. You could definitely do a visitor survey. Plus, you can also use tools like user testing, which helps you because you can put a screenshot of your website on user testing websites and they show your website to hundreds of people and you can ask them different questions.
So, if you don’t have any traffic and you’re just getting started and you don’t know who to ask, then you can use tools like that. Beth says, “I haven’t run any surveys yet, but the company’s only four months old.” This is a great time to start doing that, Beth. I really do recommend starting with customer surveys and visitor surveys as soon as possible, at least visitor surveys. Debb says, “We’ve used SurveySparrow.” I’ve never used that. I don’t think I’ve even heard of it. So, I’m definitely gonna check that out. Megan says, “I would love to run surveys but there is a lot of cooks in the kitchen, the questions, messaging and the concerns to reach out to our customers…” Oh, “We reach out to our customers too much because we do so much email now.” So, yes, and no. Like, I get that reply quite a bit, “I don’t wanna spam people,” “I don’t want to keep reaching out to people and asking them for stuff.” So, one thing you can do is offer an incentive, like, “Hey, you get 5% off your next purchase,” or “Here’s a coupon to buy coffee somewhere,” or whatever it is you can offer, a free trial or extended trial, extended free trial.
If you’re reaching out to your customers on a daily basis or a weekly basis, which is good, you should be doing that, I would review everything that you’re doing to see if you can use any of those emails to just get answers. Now, one thing you can do, Megan, by the way, which would reduce the pain of sending another email, is using your thank you page to survey people. So, once someone has subscribed to your list, or downloaded your product, or signed up to your whatever, or purchased something, on your thank you page, you can just ask them one question and say, “Thank you so much for taking this or for doing this. We really value your business. One question, why did you choose us?” Or whatever the question is going to be, ask them one question. People, it’s called “foot in the door” technique. People are far more prone to answer questions immediately after taking one action. They just feel more obligated to do it.
Okay. Eric says, “What shows your experience regarding the response rate of the survey?” I’m not sure that I understood the question, Eric. If you can clarify, that would be very helpful. I want to make sure I answer. Nikki loves taking surveys. I do, too. Patty asks, “Is it best to present your finding in person to clients and stakeholders versus an email with info? How would you present?” Always in person or on video. So, I don’t show…that screenshot that I showed you of all the percentage and that I kind of highlighted in blue in the Excel and the Google Sheet, my clients don’t see that. What they see is the lovely little tables that we have at the end and I explain on top what that meant. So, if 25% of people answered one thing, I explain what that means and how we’re going to use it. But I always do it via video or in a personal meeting, to clarify everything and to answer all the questions. When you send things via email, you’re missing the opportunity to sell them on everything that you’ve done, and you’re reducing…you’re kind of minimizing the work that you’ve done. You’ve done hard work, so I would definitely kind of do that in person.
Shia [SP] says, “If emailing surveys to existing customers, how do you introduce the survey?” Keep it simple, we want to hear from you. I like to keep it simple. And I say, “Calling all marketers, all shoppers,” or whatever, “We’re trying to optimize our website. And we would love to hear from people like you, customers like you. Do you mind answering five very simple questions for us? We’ll be eternally grateful. If yes, please click the link here.” That’s it. I wouldn’t go overboard, I wouldn’t start telling them stories, I wouldn’t spend too much time doing anything else. Keep it simple and short. Karen says, “What user testing services do you use?” Right. You mean… Well, I actually was talking about…hold on, let me type user testing. Here we are. I actually use user testing itself. So, here I’ll drop in the link for you. Do you think offering incentives skew the results because of the… Yes. So, that’s the minor setback with offering incentives, is that you don’t want to offer too good of an incentive, just because you don’t really want people answering stuff for the sake of answering and just skewing all the results.
So, if you can avoid, you know, offering something, I would. One thing that would be cool is if you can ask people to participate, and then when you are…when they answer, you can then write back and say, “Hey, thank you so much. Here’s a discount,” or “Here’s something as a surprise.” I’m sorry, Diego. Oh, okay. Sorry, I missed your question. Why shouldn’t we use Hotjar for customer surveys? Why is Typeform better for it than Hotjar? So, here’s the thing. I use Hotjar for visitor surveys because Hotjar is a plugin that you add to your website. So that would mean the people that come to the website get a popup, or a slide-in popup that comes in and says, “Hey, do you mind answering some questions for us?” When you’re doing customer surveys, you can do two things. You can either do them via email, which makes it easier. Or if you have a product where people sign into, you can do the customer surveys using Hotjar there. But most companies have a problem with identifying who’s a customer and who’s a visitor, who is a previous visitor, a previous customer.
So, it’s easier to just send out an email and ask them to respond or do it on the thank you page, as I mentioned before. But if you have a product and you clearly know that you can show the survey only to people who have logged in, perfect. Do that. It’s much better because you know these people are actually using the product, so it’s a great way of doing it. Moving on. Eric, if you show the survey to 100 users, how many normally answer the questions? What rate can I expect? It really depends on your target audience and who they are. I wouldn’t cap it at 100, I would just keep going. When you say showing the survey to 100 users, are you talking about customers or visitors? Because if you’re talking about visitors, that’s not enough. You just have to have it on the website all the time and hopefully get more than 100 visitors a month to your website. If you’re talking about customers, I would usually reach out to all my customers and expect about a third to answer. That’s the ratio. Not always the same.
Montrelle [SP] asks, “Do you worry about customers misleading you in their answers, maybe unintentionally? For example, if the product was perceived as embarrassing?” Okay. That is why the questions are so important, the way you ask the questions and what you ask, because you don’t want to ask people embarrassing questions. And when you know what your product is, and if it’s an embarrassing situation, you can give them examples. So, many times when we’re talking about maybe like a product for people who sweat a lot, or someone who maybe is embarrassed by the fact that they snore, I don’t know, you can use some questions where you give pre-answered answers so that it’s easier for them to just choose something. Plus, you can do it anonymously, and you don’t have to ask them for their information. So you wouldn’t lose on the idea of getting testimonials but at least you would get correct answers. So you can tell people that they don’t have to leave their information, but if they’re interested in getting a callback or something from you, please leave your name at the end and your email and we will contact you. So, that’s how I would approach it.
Okay, I think I’ve answered all the questions in the chat, let me just quickly make sure I haven’t missed anything in the Q&A box because that’s different. Okay. We have Hankian [SP], hopefully I said that correctly, says, “How do you get more people to take a customer or a client survey so your data is more reliable? Coupons, gift cards, etc. I feel people, in general, are a bit tired of taking surveys.” Definitely could be you. I suggest not kind of putting your issues on other people. But as I mentioned a second ago, I would definitely say that you should try and stay away from incentives and gift cards and coupons, just because you don’t want people to try to kind of answer in a skewed way. But if you are really worried that people won’t agree to do so, then definitely just offer something but make sure it’s not too big of a thing, like an iPad or something that people will just jump in and give you random answers.
Greg asks, “How do you recognize survey fatigue for existing customers? When does that set in?” Well, for existing customers, if you’re sending out an email, all you have to do is send it out once and that’s it. You never ask them again to do so. I wouldn’t. So, they shouldn’t experience survey fatigue at all. And it’s all about the timing of when you send things. So, you can send a survey within 24 hours of them converting and they shouldn’t have any fatigue from you because you’ve barely reached out to them. Katya, okay, I answered. Diego, answered. And how do you convince… Hankjan? I really hope I’m saying your name correctly. How do you convince people to do a survey when prospects think they already know their customers good enough? Oh, that is such a big question. So, I’m assuming that what you mean is that you are doing this for your clients, and your clients, you’re absolutely sure they know everything they need to know about their customers. That is actually a big issue, and I’ve heard it quite a bit from my clients myself, where they would say, “Oh, we don’t need to do a survey. We know everything.” And that’s great, that’s okay.
So, my first initial question will be, when did you last do a survey? How do you know? What do you know about your customers? Do you know the answer to these questions? Great. Let’s run a survey anyway to make sure this is updated data and that it’s correct. Now, I, as I said, I don’t take on clients that won’t agree to do a client survey, or a customer survey, or a visitor survey. Like, you have to do that, that’s part of my process. So that’s what I do. But I know how hard it is dealing with people that think that they know everything. I’ve had clients like that. You’ll be also kind of surprised by when you actually show the results to people, your client might actually say, “That doesn’t sound correct, I know them better than they know themselves.” So, there’s all sorts of things. All you can do is do your work as best as you can and AB test it later with your results.
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