Surveys are a great source of information for your business. They can give you all the ins and outs of your business, marketing decisions, and your product.

In this article, we'll go through the most current ways of using surveys to scale your e-commerce and how each can be achieved with Survicate.

Cart abandonment is a common problem for all e-commerce businesses alike, and surveys can effortlessly help you understand the reason why your visitors are not moving toward the final step of the purchase. For example, if you have a Shopify store, you can easily trigger a survey when your respondent is about to leave the cart page.

While there might be various reasons why a visitor would abandon your cart, the common ones include unexpected delivery costs, issues they might experience in the UI, or price comparisons of other vendors. You can consider including these common options as selectable and an "other" option to let your visitors give their own reasons. You can also include a Contact form in these surveys to generate more leads.

While talking about an e-commerce experience, an easy-to-use website is a crucial determinant of how likely your visitors are to purchase from your store. Therefore, along with asking questions about your product or customer satisfaction, you should also consider asking how easy it is to navigate your site, how fast your site loads, and other aspects of your website elements.

It is a common oversight of online stores to fill their pages with various items - related products, discounts - that make it hard for users to navigate and sometimes can't even use the store at all!

Additionally, your website's mobile experience will always differ from the desktop experience. While you might be rocking on one platform, you might have some issue-prone features on the other. In Survicate, you can run surveys depending on the platform visitors are viewing your website, mobile, or desktop. This way, you can understand your website's performance across platforms.

You can use surveys to learn more about your competitors and what your current customers think about you compared to other brands. This way, you can determine your niche and improve your brand accordingly. By spotting the companies that are your strongest competitors, you will be able to unveil the reasons why you lose against other companies. This, in turn, will let you understand what your company needs to revisit or add to stand a chance.

Don't forget to include supplementary, follow-up questions to each closed-ended answer to your survey. This means that if you ask your first question with several options, you won’t just end up with a percentage of the most common answers but understand the why and how. You can easily achieve this by applying survey logic to your questions. For example, if your clients just responded that you were too expensive and they went with a competing solution, you can easily ask them which solution they chose over you and evaluate your pricing.

The foolproof way of evaluating your marketing efforts is by asking your customers for more information about how they found your brand. This way, you evaluate your email marketing, word of mouth, and SEO efforts and focus on low-performing areas to increase attraction to your website. You can use this data to improve low-performing areas and understand where your clients come from.

We advise you to ask further follow-up questions based on where they have found your company; for example, if they have answered via Social Media, you can ask which channel; or if they said via Google Search, you could ask them if they remember what they were looking for. In our templates library, you can find a ready-to-use "How did you hear about us" survey. You can add this survey, modify it to fit your brand within seconds, and start collecting insights in no time.

Microsurvey is a term used for surveys that contain only a few questions and should take no more than a few minutes to complete. If your survey is long and repetitive, your respondents will likely leave your survey, which could halt your research. Remember that each question added to your survey causes about a 10% drop in the completion rate.

🎯 Request the minimum effort from your respondent

Resist the urge to ask too many open-ended questions. Remember that it's especially hard to type long responses on mobile. Therefore, while we advise you to have at least one open-ended question for respondents to redact their inquiry, make sure that it's a question that could be answered with a short response.

⌚ Conduct surveys at the perfect timing

If your survey questions are related to experiences of a particular product, or if you want to evaluate specific moments of the customer journey, it is important to ensure that the survey reaches the customer once they have a chance to experience these things.