Gather data on motivations with customer surveys

emma · June 16, 2022, 6:00am

Business benefits

Uncover customer's motivations, FUDs (fears, uncertainties, doubts) and collect product feedback.

Copy the customer survey brief template and start filling it out for your project.

Include your goals for the customer survey, the data you want to capture, the questions and targeting.

Pick your audience for the survey, depending on your goals and determine your incentive strategy.

The primary focus should be recent, first-time convertors, people who recently went through the process of purchasing from your or signing up for your service. Depending on your volumes, this could be within the last month or the last 6 months.

Other segments you could target include VIPs and lapsed customers. Data from different segments should be analyzed separately.

Based on your volumes decide whether to use an incentive. You can use an incentive to increase the response rate, especially if you have lower volumes.

Incentives include:

Contest: Enter to win X, Enter to win 1 of 3 X.
Percentage off next purchase.
Small cash reward, like a $5 gift card.

If you choose to use an incentive, make sure you add a question to the end of the survey asking participants to provide their email address or some other way to contact them, so that you can follow up with the incentive as needed.

Generally, we can expect a 1-5% response rate without an incentive and a 5-15% response rate with a modest incentive.

Example response rate math

Scenario 1

If you have a list of 10,000 email addresses of first-time purchasers over the last month, then you need a response rate of 2% to gain 200 responses:

10 000 * 0.02 = 200

You can probably get by without offering an incentive.

Scenario 2

If you have a smaller list of only 2,000 email addresses of first time purchasers over the last month, then you need a response rate of 10% to gain 200 responses:

2 000 * 0.1 = 200

You’ll probably need to offer an incentive to hit your response target.

Write questions that will help you gather the data that you want to capture.

Avoid closed questions and provide respondents with adequate opportunity to expand and provide context.

Example questions for e-commerce customers:

What matters to you most when purchasing [product name] online?
What made you choose [brand name] over other companies?
Where did you first hear about [brand name]?
How would you describe your experience on our website [brand name].com?
Was there anything that nearly stopped you from purchasing any products on our site? If so, what?
What questions did you have that you couldn’t find answers to on the website?
How else could we improve your customer experience with [brand name]?

Example questions for SaaS customers:

What specific need, interest, or problem brought you to [brand name] ?
What matters most to you in your search for [product name] platform?
Which other platforms did you look at before coming to [product name]?
What made you choose [brand name] over other competitors?
How would you describe your experience on our website [brand name].com?
Was there anything that nearly stopped you from signing up or scheduling a demo on our site? If so, what?
Did you have questions you couldn’t find answers to on our website?
How else could we improve your customer experience with [brand name]?

Create the survey in a tool like TypeForm and send it out. Calculate how many requests you’ll need to send to receive enough responses.

Typically, 200-300 open-ended responses will give you 95% confidence level that the answer strength of the signal is valid within ~5-10% of what is reported. If you use an incentive, you can send it to a smaller list of people, because you can expect a higher response rate.

Send the survey out to your chosen audience segment.

You may need help or approval from whoever is responsible for sending out emails in your business. Try to make sure the email looks and sounds as professional as possible and is on brand.

Example email templates

NO Incentive
Dear [FIRST NAME],

We are always striving to provide a better service for you – and we need your help. Help us understand your perspective. We’d greatly appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes to fill out this quick survey (insert survey link).

It’s only a handful of questions to help us provide a better shopping experience. Please fill it out in the next few days.

Your insight is much appreciated!

Thank you,
CEO Name / CEO

WITH Incentive
Dear [ FIRST NAME],