Your relationship with customers doesn’t end at the point they make a purchase. As a matter of fact, it’s just the beginning.
The post-purchase experience you provide to your customers cultivates loyalty and can lead to repeat purchases. It’s a win-win situation.
Furthermore, your customers are valuable sources of meaningful information and insights that can help your business grow and thrive. Their feedback paves the way for you to make necessary improvements to products, marketing, and more.
But setting up a post-purchase survey can be tricky, especially when you have just started your entrepreneurial journey.
We’re here to guide you through the process and show you how to set up a post-purchase survey that drives results.
Let’s begin!
What is a Post-Purchase Survey?
A post-purchase survey is a data collection method that helps you understand your customers' experiences and their overall impressions of your products and brand.
The survey can help you gather valuable information that you can use to enhance your solutions, processes, and marketing strategies.
You can ask your customers if the product or service they purchased meets their expectations and, if not, what you can do to make things right. You can also ask them to rate your products, which is a great way to build social proof.
Post-purchase surveys can also gather feedback on your sales process and how easy or difficult it was, allowing you to improve your checkout flow. You can even ask your customers if they will continue purchasing from you and recommend your brand to their friends or family.
Source: Digital Marketing Community
The results of your survey can help you ensure continuous improvement by laying the groundwork for enhancing your acquisition and retention strategies.
6 Benefits of Conducting a Post-Purchase Survey
Conducting a post-purchase survey may seem like a time-consuming activity. Your customers have already purchased from your site. So, you may wonder if there’s a point in reaching out to them.
The reality is that conducting a post-purchase survey has numerous benefits. Let’s take a look at how post-purchase surveys can help your business.
1. Customer Insights
One of the key benefits of conducting a post-purchase survey is that it teaches you about your target audience.
The key to ensuring lasting relationships with your customers is that you meet their expectations. You may have done your research beforehand and have some idea of your audience’s preferences.
However, what you think your customers want may be different than what they expect you to deliver.
A post-purchase survey provides valuable insights into your customers’ needs and pain points.
As a result, you can constantly improve and provide a better customer experience tailored to your target audience.
2. Continuous Improvement
Your customers have first-hand experience with your products or services. They are the best source to identify your strengths and weaknesses.
Reaching out to your customers and requesting their feedback helps you identify areas for potential improvement.
By focusing on the pain points of your customers, you can guarantee higher satisfaction rates and an increase in referrals to your website.
3. Customer Retention
Reaching out to your customers and asking their feedback about your products or services can go a long way.
Customers love to feel listened to — it makes them feel valued and included in your brand’s story. If they see that you’re genuinely welcoming their feedback, they’re more likely to establish a strong bond with your brand.
When your customers feel appreciated, they’ll keep coming back to your business for more. In this way, surveys not only boost retention but also help you unlock upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
4. Brand Advocacy
Listening to what your customers have to say strengthens your relationship with them and cultivates loyalty. Using post-purchase surveys, you can personalize their continued experience with your brand.
It’s easy to transform satisfied customers into brand ambassadors. When you meet their expectations, it fuels your social proof, as the customers are likely to recommend your business to their social circle.
Brand loyalty can also help you grow your business and attract new customers without much effort. Your customer base fuels your leads and helps you score more conversions with referrals.
5. Sentiment Analysis
Conducting a post-purchase survey helps you learn about your audience’s sentiment. You get an inside look into the good or bad things your customers have to say about your brand.
With sentiment data, you can track trends in customer perception as they move through your buying process. Proactively address your customers’ concerns about your brand’s reputation or image and establish fruitful customer relationships.
6. After-Sale Experience
Your business’s responsibility doesn’t end after you’ve shipped out an order. It’s vital that you offer effective customer service well past the purchase. Conducting a survey can help you determine whether the support you’re giving to customers is up to snuff.
Ask your customers whether they need any assistance from your customer service team once they’ve completed their purchase or received their product. You can also find out whether any customer service they’ve already received was satisfactory and helpful. This feedback can help you identify and resolve any hiccups in your customer service process.
Source: REVE Chat
Customer support personnel represent your brand. So, the way they interact with your customers is of critical importance.
A seamless after-sale experience helps you boost customer retention and allows you to generate more revenue consistently. So, it’s vital that you hear directly from your customers how that experience is playing out for them.
How to Set Up an Effective Post-Purchase Survey
There’s a lot to consider when you’re setting up your first survey.
The following best practices will help you design a post-purchase strategy that yields the right results.
1. Set Clear Goals
The insights gathered through a post-purchase survey can be applied to a variety of use cases, enabling you to achieve a range of goals. Therefore, it is essential to define your goals clearly before conducting a post-purchase survey.
Here are a few examples of clearly defined goals that can inform the structure of your survey:
- Increase customer satisfaction: A post-purchase survey enables you to gather customer feedback and make necessary improvements to the solutions you offer. In this type of survey, you can ask questions about customer satisfaction that pinpoint your weaknesses as customers share their concerns with you.
- Boost conversions: You can conduct a post-purchase survey to improve your selling processes. For example, you may ask whether the checkout experience was frictionless. Asking about your prices may also be a viable strategy, enabling you to explore optimal price points and outmaneuver your competitors.
- Improve customer service: Through a post-purchase survey, you can request information that helps you offer personalized customer experiences. You can also inquire about your after-sale services and refine your customer support.
What you intend to achieve dictates the questions you ask in the survey. So, you should have a clear idea of your goals before building a post-purchase survey.
2. Prepare Your Questions
Once you have set clear goals, the next step is to prepare the questions for your post-purchase survey.
As mentioned earlier, your goals determine the questions you ask and the approach you take when gathering helpful information from respondents.
You can choose to use open-ended questions or provide options for respondents to select from. Each approach has its pros and cons.
Open-ended questions allow for detailed responses from your customers. However, organizing the data and analyzing it to identify relevant findings may be challenging.
On the other hand, the data you collect by asking multiple-choice questions is easy to organize and analyze. You can apply descriptive or inferential data analysis techniques and extract useful insights from responses. However, these responses will be less detailed.
You can consider leveraging different scales, such as the Likert scale or 11-point scale when inquiring about customer satisfaction or exploring their preferences.
Source: UserFeedback
When it comes to asking for customer feedback, every question that comes to your mind may seem important.
However, you need to make sure that the questions you ask align with the goals you set and help you collect actionable information.
3. Design Your Survey
It’s best to keep things simple when conducting a post-purchase survey. Don’t overwhelm your customers with complicated questions or surveys that just never end.
Visual appeal is also important when designing a post-purchase survey, but you shouldn’t compromise on functionality.
If possible, limit your survey to a single page. It may be annoying for your customers to answer the questions spread across multiple pages.
Make sure that you add your brand’s logo at the top of your survey. This makes the survey appear more professional and reminds the customer that they’re answering questions about your business. Plus, adding your brand’s logo to your survey fuels a strong brand recall.
Refer to your business’s brand style guide when designing the survey. The voice you choose to use when communicating with your customers, the font style, and the colors should all resonate with your brand identity.
Always thank your customers at the end of the survey for their participation, and ensure that the message stands out. This serves a dual purpose: to express appreciation for their participation and to ensure that their response is accurately recorded.
4. Select the Right Channels
You may want to consider using multiple channels when conducting a post-purchase survey. Your goals and participation rate generally dictate the channel you choose to reach your customers.
Email Surveys
Sending post-purchase surveys through email is an efficient and cost-effective way to gather useful information.
All you need to do is create a personalized email and include a link to your survey to start receiving responses.
Source: Really Good Emails
You can also consider reaching out to your customers for relevant information after they complete their purchase. You can ask about their buying experience with a survey included in the order confirmation email.
Mobile App Surveys
If your online business has a mobile app, you can take advantage of that channel to send post-purchase surveys as well. It’s a fitting way to reach out to customers who interact with your brand through an app or use it to buy from you.
Social Media
One of the best channels for interacting with your target audience and gathering valuable feedback is social media.
Around 5.04 billion people use different social media platforms worldwide. Therefore, leveraging social media platforms to conduct post-purchase surveys may be a suitable approach.
These channels facilitate social listening, enabling you to understand how your customers perceive your brand. You can ask for their feedback about your products or services and inquire about your after-sale support.
Pop-Up Surveys
You can also conduct surveys through website popups. All you need to do is add a compelling call to action that routes visitors to the survey page.
The best way to do this is with a pop-up survey on the order confirmation page. Once the customer has completed their purchase and received their order details, you can prompt them to complete a brief survey asking about their overall experience with the buying process.
SMS or Text Messages
It may sound like an unorthodox approach, but you can reach out to your customers and ask them for relevant information through SMS or text. It’s another cost-effective way to reach out to the masses. All it requires is that you add a link to the survey in the messages you send.
5. Offer Incentives
You can’t always expect a decent response from your customers when conducting a post-purchase survey.
People often skip filling out feedback forms or surveys conducted by brands, thinking it’s a waste of their time.
Even when you follow the best practices and keep the surveys short, your customers may end up giving you a cold shoulder.
In this case, incentivizing your post-purchase surveys may do the trick and help you receive an overwhelming response.
Source: WP Forms
You can offer your customers discounts upon completing the survey or a chance to score freebies. This not only helps you engage your target audience but may also lead you to score more conversions.
It also shows that you appreciate your customers taking time out from their schedules, which strengthens your relationship with them.
Use Post-Purchase Surveys to Fuel Your Growth
There you have it — all the necessary steps to follow to set up a post-purchase survey.
Leveraging the information collected from surveys, you can develop effective strategies to enhance your solutions and provide an improved customer experience.
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