How To Deploy A Post Purchase Survey To Boost E-Commerce Sales

Success in today’s overcrowded marketplace relies on fully understanding your customer needs, wants and expectations, with your ongoing dialogue and the relationships you build with your audience providing the insight needed to make improvements and boost sales. However, in contrast to many other types of customer, getting the same level of direct dialogue with e-commerce customers is much more challenging, as you typically don’t get as much contact with them unless they have an issue that needs resolving.

The problem with communicating across a predominantly digital interaction is that you only get a brief and narrow picture of your customers thoughts, which doesn’t provide enough insight into their overall customer experience. If you’re an e-commerce business, or the majority of your customers are online you need to find another solution.

From customer service and support to product use, there are a wide range of customer satisfaction surveys available, but the post purchase survey is a great option to look into if you’re an e-commerce business. Not only does it encourage your customers to provide more feedback, but the responses you can obtain offer a greater insight into their wider customer experience. Most importantly any issues the customer had during the checkout experience will be uncovered helping you to understand how to remove friction in the checkout process which will ultimately drive greater revenue.

How post purchase surveys help you connect with ecommerce customers

From their satisfaction with your product and any support they’ve received, to how easy and enjoyable they found their online experience, your post purchase survey questions can help you to gain a better insight into your customers’ buying experience. It can also provide an effective way of establishing an early connection with new customers, which you can use to further develop your relationship with them in follow up communications.

From post product purchase and delivery to after-sales support, whatever area of your customers’ buying experience you’re looking to target, you can structure your post purchase survey with a mix of closed and open-ended questions to get the information you need to develop your sales strategy.

However, there are a number of things you need to think about if you’re to maximise the impact of your customer survey and the value you can obtain from it.

1) Brand consistency:

According to studies brand consistency can help increase revenues by an average of 23%. So, maintaining brand consistency across all your communications and materials including post-purchase surveys is critical.

From your visuals and wording to your template design, logo, brand colours and even the invitation to complete your survey. Everything to do with your survey needs to be in line with your brand’s voice, if you’re to exhibit a strong and consistent brand identity.

It’s something we encourage our own customers to do. You can find out more about the support we offer in this area by looking at our survey branding and design features.

2) The human touch:

While brand consistency is vital, it’s also important to make sure your survey’s tone is conversational, so that they’re engaging and easy for your customers to complete.

For example, if you were offering multiple choice answers for a question, where you were trying to measure their satisfaction with a product they purchased, you might want to use more enticing language. So, instead of the words “highly satisfactory”, you might want to replace them with the option of “I loved it!” instead. Although this will still depend on how consumer or B2B focused your audience is, generally you should be looking to get more personality into your survey.

You might also like to consider embedding a video into your survey invitation to present a more human touch and encourage your customers to voice their opinion. All these activities help to add a voice to your brand, which is extremely important for building brand loyalty within an e-commerce landscape, where most interaction occurs between a person and a machine.

3) Consider the value of open-ended questions:

While multiple choice answers are great when you need quick answers to questions such as ‘how a customer found your store’ or ‘what is their preferred method of interacting with your brand’, they are not so good when you’re trying to gain a deeper insight into your customers’ buying experience.

In contrast, because they don’t restrict the answers you provide and encourage you to offer more in-depth written responses, open-ended questions help you to gain more diverse, insightful and valuable feedback.

Here are some great examples of open-ended questions:

• What did you most like about your most recent online shopping experience?
• What would be the one thing you would improve in our online store?
• Which other product from our store would you consider buying?
• What do you like most about the product you purchased?

For more information about open-ended questions you might like to read a blog that we wrote on this topic, which will provide more detail on how best to use them.

4) Timing is everything

When it comes to distributing your survey, timing is critical if you’re to gain the responses you need. However, it’s important to strike a balance between giving your customer enough time to experience using your product and approaching them for feedback about their shopping experience on your platform, while it’s still fresh in their mind.

Generally, it’s recommended to send your survey request anytime between 2 to 5 days after your receipt order, when the likelihood of a response is at its highest.

5) Think about changing your survey for frequent customers

Consider how annoying it could be if you were a customer who kept on receiving the same survey request with the same questions every time you made a purchase from your favourite online store. Eventually it might be enough to stop you returning, no matter how much you loved the site and the products on offer.

Therefore, it’s important to categorise your customer groups and think about sending surveys with different questions to your returning customers. When you consider that they already have a level of loyalty to your brand this also makes good business sense, as the questions you ask them could provide you with even greater value, such as their suggestions on how to improve your brand to include anything from your website to your products.

Even better, you might want to take a more personalised approach to sending them feedback requests and thank you messages. And for your most loyal and enthusiastic customers, you might want to think about turning them into brand ambassadors whose positive messages can provide a major boost for your sales. Ultimately, your existing customers are your most valuable resource, so it’s prudent to encourage their feedback and keep them onside.

Why the Post Purchase Survey is Invaluable to Your E-Commerce Sales Strategy

When you operate in an e-commerce environment, obtaining the views of your customers about all aspects of their customer experience is crucial. With so many alternative options available within a couple of short clicks, the average person won’t hesitate to switch to another platform if any areas of their business interaction with you doesn’t meet their standards.

That’s why investing in a post purchase survey is so invaluable, as it helps improve your understanding of your customers and the sales strategy, you’re able to develop as a result of this insight. The more you listen, the better your products, customer experience and sales. So, if you’ve not already implemented a post purchase survey, now is the time to get started.