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Long gone are the days when business owners needed to guess whether or not their customers were happy. Thanks to technology and data collection techniques, it’s never been easier to interact with website users and ask them about their experience.

 

Your website is the perfect place to foster engagement and to better understand the needs of your clients. In particular, utilizing surveys on your website can help you and your team uncover nuggets of data about your website, products, and services that you might have otherwise overlooked.

 

Because you know your website and business so well, it’s all too common to miss glaring problems that affect the customer experience. You could navigate your site in your sleep, but is the organization as evident to new visitors?

 

Fortunately, there is a simple way to assess user experience and gauge customer satisfaction. Similar to sending survey emails, utilizing surveys on your website has the potential to unlock a wealth of information that will help you improve customer relations and grow your business.

 

Regardless of the type of content on your website, you should be using a website experience survey to collect feedback from visitors. Every website can stand to benefit from learning how users feel about their experience. Website owners should not underestimate the quality of the user experience as one of the most critical factors for the success of their site.

 

While a website experience survey is an excellent place to start, it’s far from the only feedback that site owners can seek. Surveys are also an opportunity to inquire after customers’ thoughts about your goods and services. You can also ask about their needs and how your business can best serve them.

 

Getting feedback from your users and customers can increase revenue, improve brand reputation, deepen your understanding of the marketing funnel, influence your future product and service decisions, and help you eliminate problems. Don’t let the fear of negative feedback stop you from implementing surveys on your website. People who complain are doing you a favor since those criticisms can help you better serve your users and customers down the road.

 

How to Encourage User Engagement Through Surveys

 

There are a variety of ways to collect customer feedback on your website. Options include pop-up customer surveys, embedded feedback buttons, and live chats. Don’t forget to tell users why you’re collecting feedback, and make it clear that the purpose of the survey is to serve them better. One way to encourage users to take your survey is by offering an incentive. In exchange for answering a few questions, they will receive a gift, such as a coupon code.

 

Incentivizing your surveys will undoubtedly help to encourage user engagement, but even more important is asking the right people the right questions at the right time. For the best results, you will need to tailor your surveys to different devices, pages, and users. Spend time phrasing your questions since wording can dramatically impact response rates and answers.

 

For a website experience survey, here are a few questions you could ask:

 

►     On a scale from 0-10, how do you rate your experience on our site?

 

►     What problems did you encounter while using the site?

 

►     What did you like best about your experience?

 

If you’re unsure who your website is attracting, it might be helpful to ask users to identify their interests. For example, if you run a parenting website, ask visitors if they are expecting a baby or already have children.

 

What to Do With the Data You Collect

 

Collecting customer and user feedback through surveys is only the first step of the process. Before you even start, it’s helpful to have a plan in place for how you’re going to analyze the data. Website owners who don’t do anything with the data they’ve collected might as well not even bother utilizing surveys at all. Surveys are a vital part of a robust marketing data analytics strategy.

 

If the idea of analyzing thousands of responses has you feeling overwhelmed, there’s good news: Generally, looking at 30-100 answers is enough to illuminate the most pressing issues. For surveys that include open-ended questions, you might want to use a word cloud to see which words showed up most frequently in the survey results. Analyzing results is a subset of the process of data mining for your website. It can transform raw data into useful information that can serve as a roadmap for your business future.

 

With the results in hand, it’s time to tweak your site, your products, and your services based on the feedback. Consider A/B testing if the path forward isn’t clear. After you make adjustments, pay attention to Google Analytics and other platforms to gauge the success of the changes.

 

Then, once some time has passed, put together another survey to ask customers how they feel about the improvements. Utilizing surveys on your website is an on-going practice that is essential for understanding user and customer needs. Stop trying to read your website visitors’ minds and simply ask them for their thoughts by utilizing surveys on your site.  

 

Indiana Lee is a writer and journalist from the Pacific Northwest with a passion for covering business best practices, social justice, environmental protection, and more. In her off time, she enjoys hiking with her two dogs. You can follow her on Twitter @indianalee3, or reach her at indianaleewrites@gmail.com


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