Need to boost your actionable feedback? Simple, personalize it!

Written and contributed by Michael Nadelman, Customer Success @ Qualaroo

As a business with an E-Commerce presence one of your top priorities is to provide your customers with an online environment that is both informative and easy to navigate.

In other words, your goal is to optimize your website’s conversion rate. This task often requires businesses to identify elements of their website that act as barriers to purchase, and a successful method to accomplish this is to simply talk to your customers!

The merits to this approach are well-documented: by asking your customers for feedback, you eliminate the guesswork and gain actionable insights that help you make informed changes to your website.

How do we get our visitors to agree to give us feedback?

In an environment with so many distractions and calls to action monopolizing our visitor’s attention, how are we going to make an impact?

Let’s focus on the role personalization has in connecting with our customers, backed by psychology.

A psychology experiment measuring customer feedback suggests that the secret to increasing your response rate lies in personalization. In this experiment, two groups were prompted for feedback with postal questionnaires. Both groups were randomized to avoid bias.

The first group was given a generic questionnaire with their personal information type-printed on the envelope and cover letter. The second group was given a questionnaire with their name and personal information written by hand, and were provided a hand stamped return letter. In the end, the group that received a more personalized experience elicited a higher response rate.

If personalized questions help collect more feedback, how do you bring that experience to your customers? Focus on who you want to target. By segmenting your audience the right way, you can ask questions catered to their unique experiences.

Here are two effective ways to ask the right question to the right person at the right time:

1. Use Custom Properties to segment your audience and ask the right people, at the right time.

While keeping your goal in mind, think about who from whom you want feedback from. Are you curious as to why certain visitors do not make a repeat purchase?

Create a Custom Property that tracks all visitors who have actually made a purchase, and avoid asking any visitor who hasn’t made it as far as your confirmation page. Want to take it a step further and only ask customers whose purchase is fresh on their minds? Create another custom property that tracks how long ago your customers made a purchase, and ask only customers that made a purchase within the last 30 days.

With Custom Property targeting by Qualaroo, you can ask “How was your experience purchasing with us today?” rather than “How was your experience today?” Although the difference seems small, this personal touch may be the difference between successfully capturing their response and losing their valuable feedback.

2. Use the Identity API Call to differentiate between Known and Unknown Users

Are you seeking to understand why certain visitors do not sign up before leaving your site? Use the Identity API call to target a survey to all visitors who aren’t already logged in and ask them!

Because these visitors don’t have extensive experience on your site, you can focus your questioning around why they didn’t make a purchase. You might learn that the steps to sign up aren’t intuitive, or that your homepage does not provide enough information to warrant a sign-up. Conversely, you can target more specific and in-depth questions to signed-in users who have had more experience with your website. You can ask these users if a specific product page has enough information, or gauge if they are a promoter, passive, or detractor with an unobtrusive NPS survey.

With Qualaroo’s Identity API, you don’t have to ask unnecessary questions to the wrong audience.

Think about who your customers are, and how you can communicate with them to create a more meaningful interaction.

By creating a message reflecting their unique experience, you will increase your response rate and ultimately the amount of actionable insights you gain.