Okay, so you’ve made a successful sale. All your hard work at chasing the customer with relevant and valuable information, personalized marketing efforts, and a hassle-free purchase experience has finally paid off.
It’s time to move on to the next prospect already getting nurtured in your sales pipeline, right? Wrong! Your previous customer’s chapter is yet to close because you have one more thing to do. And that’s a post-purchase survey.
You might have spent hours perfecting your e-commerce platform, implemented stellar strategies, and been mighty proud of what your site offers today. But can you be sure your customer thinks the same and will definitely return? If your answer is ‘I guess so’ or ‘I don’t really know’, a post-purchase survey is what you need.
Fortunately, you don’t have to look far and wide for a complete A to Z on it. We’ve got you covered. Keep reading, and by the end of this article, you’ll learn everything there is to know about post-purchase surveys, including how to make one!
What is a Post-Purchase Survey?
Post-purchase surveys are surveys you float to your customers after they’ve made a purchase from your e-commerce business. These are specially designed to collect customer feedback immediately after the customer has placed their order.
These help e-commerce businesses understand how satisfied their customers are with their offerings and buying journey and shed light on the factors that influenced them to make a purchase. Further, it can also help businesses learn how likely customers are to recommend their platform to others. Here are some types of post-purchase surveys:
- Product Feedback Surveys: This examines how effectively an offering meets the customers’ needs.
- Customer Experience Surveys: This is typically shared post check out and is used to collect feedback on aspects of the online shopping journey.
- Market-fit Surveys: Popular with SaaS and subscription-based offerings, this aims to understand how services can be improved to better fit the customer’s needs. The feedback from these is usually to inform product upgrades, plans, and package-related decisions.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys: These are focused on understanding how likely customers are to recommend the e-commerce platform to others.
Learn More: What is Post Purchase?
Purpose of Post-Purchase Surveys
Creating and floating a post-purchase survey can be a significant exercise, which we will be getting into further in the article. But if you’re wondering—is it worth it? We can confidently answer—Yes, it is!
You see, post-purchase surveys help you essentially hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. These help you understand what your customers truly feel about your e-commerce platform’s offerings as well as the buying journey. This intel offers you significant benefits, such as:
Driving Customer Satisfaction
Your customers have come a long way by the time they complete a purchase. And through their journey, they have engaged with a ton of content, explored your website a couple of times, checked out your offerings, and, of course, completed the checkout stage.
Through these stages, they have observed and formed opinions and ideas. Getting access to these can help you gain unparalleled insight into who your customers are, what their pain points are, where your platform can improve, and more. In other words, it can help you understand what you need to do to optimize your customer’s experience and, by extension, their satisfaction with your business.
Identifying Customer Pain Points
Post-purchase surveys give you a chance to ask your customers to pinpoint the issues they face through their shopping journey. This is invaluable as it allows you to address bottlenecks, and leakages in your customer journey before they start truly draining your revenue bucket.
Ask your customer to rate specific parts of your shopping journey, such as website experience, checkout process, etc., and you’ll be able to find exactly what’s working and what’s not for your customers.
Facilitating Personalization in Marketing Initiatives
Your offerings might not be niche and might attract a variety of customers from a variety of backgrounds with a variety of pain points and goals. At such times, it can be extremely hard to personalize your customer experience for your audience.
But a post-purchase survey helps with this. You see, it allows you to collect data from your varied customers and segment their feedback based on who you want to market to. With this data, you can develop personalized marketing strategies that truly speak to your perfect buyer persona.
Driving Customer Loyalty
When you get insight into how your customers feel about your website, offering, and overall experience, and then use that intel to improve your site to meet their expectations, it’s safe to say—you’ll be rewarded for it. How?
In brand loyalty. Think about it: if you’re satisfied with a platform and know they listen to you and are actively trying to improve your interaction with them, wouldn’t you choose them over others? And when you’re happy, you’re bound to tell your friends and family about it too! In short, floating a post-purchase survey is a sure-shot way to drive your platform’s customer experience and revenue—all in one go.
Challenges in Conducting Post-Purchase Surveys
Post-purchase surveys can also be tricky. Here are some challenges that you might face when creating these surveys as well as interpreting their findings:
Balancing the Need for Information with Conciseness
Post-purchase surveys help you gain targeted feedback from your customers. But as an e-commerce business, with a lengthy and non-linear shopping journey, you’re likely seeking your customer’s views on a load of aspects.
But customers unfortunately don’t want to answer a bunch of questions. In fact, they’ll probably drop the survey altogether if they foresee having to spend more than 2 minutes on it. And so one of the biggest challenges of post-purchase surveys is finding that balance between gaining customer feedback and keeping it concise.
To tackle this, consider focusing on one single goal for your post-purchase survey. And then create your questions around that one goal. Further, frame your questions for objective answers like Yes/No. Customers are more likely to answer if they have to choose between two options, rather than think and type.
Tackling Response Bias
85% of people say they’re more likely to give feedback when they have had a good experience, while 81% say they’ll do it in case of a bad one. In other words, customers who have had an average experience will most likely skip your post-purchase survey altogether. For the simple reason that their emotions, opinions, and ideas regarding your e-commerce platform aren’t extreme.
Timing the Survey Right
When it comes to your post-purchase survey, timing is indeed quite crucial. It plays a key role in gathering accurate customer feedback. You see, if you share it too soon, your customers may not have yet experienced your offerings, and platform thoroughly to share informed views, leading to skewed and incomplete insight.
On the other hand, if you delay sharing the survey too much, customers can forget details and be less inclined to share feedback about something they don’t remember anymore. And so, you need to once again strike a balance between the two and time your survey for the moment when your customer is most engaged and well-placed to offer constructive and actionable feedback.
How to write a Post-Purchase Survey?
Okay, so we’ve discussed what a post-purchase survey is, why you should integrate it into your post-purchase initiatives, and the challenges you need to dodge while doing so. Now, let’s get our hands dirty and understand exactly how to go about creating a post-purchase survey with a step-by-step guide:
1. Specify Your Survey Goal
As discussed earlier, you must strike a balance between gaining customer feedback and being concise. One way to achieve this is by determining a goal for your post-purchase survey. This ensures you stay focused and reduces your pool of questions to only the most important ones. Some common survey goals include:
- Understanding friction points in your checkout process that could be compromising your shopping experience.
- Learning what your customers think about an offering to understand how best to improve it and drive its popularity.
- Understand how to personalize your customer experience by asking them questions such as the type of car they drive, if you’re selling car accessories, or how often they travel if you offer traveling gear.
Ascertaining a goal for your post-purchase survey helps you create focused and targeted questions that ensure you get concrete answers.
2. Add an Incentive for Your Customers to Complete the Survey
Your customers are busy individuals. And once they have what they need, their patience runs thin. But try as you might, you might one day have a post-purchase survey that isn’t short, and there’s no way to shorten it.
At such times, you can consider incentivizing your customer to fill it out. Think discounts, offers, etc. Offering these encourages your customers to take those extra 10 minutes and fill out your form. They get the discount, and you get the feedback and repeat purchases.
3. Add Survey Questions
The next step is adding questions to your post-purchase survey. Keep your survey goal in mind while crafting questions, and don’t shy away from experimenting with question formats. You can use different types, such as:
- Numbered Ratings
- Objection questions that only have a Yes/No answer
- Multiple-Choice Questions
- Open-ended questions that require customers to type in their answer
A word of caution: try to limit the number of open-ended questions and prioritize those that require customers to click on options, move a toggle, or check boxes. That said, aim to include one comment section that allows your customers to share views that your questions might not have requested.
4. Design and Create Your Survey
The world is your oasis when it comes to designing your survey. You can choose to have it pop up on the order confirmation page, have it already added at the bottom, or even send it via email, WhatsApp, or SMS.
Whatever you decide to go with, be sure to keep it crisp, targeted, and well-timed.
5. Launch and Refine Your Survey
The last step of creating a post-purchase survey is going live! Start sharing it with your customers and prepare to get some valuable insight into how your offerings and platform are performing.
And more importantly, track how your survey performs and make adjustments to questions, their length, design, and number to ensure your survey doesn’t lose relevance with your customers as time goes on.
How to analyze Post-Purchase Survey data
Collecting post-purchase survey data is great—but what you do with it is what really matters. Think of it as gathering treasure; now it’s time to sort the gold from the pebbles.
Start by categorizing responses into trends—are customers raving about your fast shipping, or is your checkout process causing eye rolls? Identify common pain points and prioritize fixes.
Next, segment your audience—first-time buyers may have different concerns than loyal customers. Use sentiment analysis to gauge overall satisfaction (because a ‘meh’ response is still feedback!).
Finally, act on insights—adjust strategies, tweak experiences, and keep improving. Data is your best friend—if you listen, it’ll tell you exactly what your customers want.
Best Practices for Post-purchase Surveys
While you have a roadmap to create a winning post-purchase survey, ascertaining the best questions that give you maximum insight into your customer’s experience is like balancing a pole while walking on a tightrope—one wrong move, and you go falling down or in this case—your customer drops the survey, and you get nothing.
So, to ensure you don’t succumb to that fate, consider implementing the following best practices for post-purchase surveys:
Keep it Concise
Research finds that when a respondent starts answering a survey, there is a sharp rise in the drop-off rate with every additional question up to 15 questions. That’s the case for a standard customer survey. You can best believe the drop-off rate is even harsher when the survey comes right after your customer has completed the purchase.
Aim to ask only one to five questions, with a majority of them objective. Further, inform the customer that the survey is short (whether by offering all questions in one go or indicating question numbers like 1/5, 2/5, and so on. If your customers know the survey is short, they’re more likely to complete it.
Leverage Templates
A post-purchase survey template helps you get things on the road faster. It gives you the framework, and all you need to do is tweak the dummy questions to make it more relevant to your survey goal and customers. Not to mention, it takes out the stress of designing the survey as well.
Begin with Low-Commitment Questions
Your first question should never be a heavy one. You need to ease your customers into your survey. So, start with a low-commitment one that is ideally an objective one. If you hit them with a multiple-choice question right off the bat, they’re likely to believe that the subsequent will only require more work, causing them to drop off quickly.
Minimize Close-ended Questions
Yes, objective or close-ended questions are easy to answer. However, they limit the data and insight you can gather from your customers. And so minimize their use. Perhaps only have the first question a close-ended one to start the customer off easy, and then move to multiple-choice and open-ended ones that can give you the maximum insight into your customers’ views, opinions, ideas, and preferences.
Optimize your post-purchase Survey for all Devices
Did you know that 68% of online shopping orders are placed on smartphones, 30% on desktops, and 2% on tablets? That means your post-purchase survey must be optimized for all device types. If your customer has to scroll unnecessarily on their smartphone to read the entire question or zoom in on their desktop to understand their answer choices, they’re going to hop right off.
Further, while optimizing your survey for all devices, make sure it is compatible with all operating systems as well.
Real-World Examples of Post-purchase Surveys
Here’s a look at some businesses that are nailing their post-purchase surveys:
Apple
Apple is easily one of the leading providers of high-quality and premium tech products, from phones to watches. And it leverages post-purchase surveys to understand how its products, buying journey, and overall experience are being received by its customers.
Apple keeps its surveys crisp and simple and focused on getting an answer to one key question. This targeted approach allows Apple to get a complete understanding of one specific area they want feedback on and helps improve it with reliable data.
For instance, in the following post-purchase survey, Apple seeks to understand how its Touch ID feature is faring with customers. All the questions are centered around this.
Doe Beauty
This online beauty retailer offering Korean Silk lashes gives customers a 10% discount as an incentive to complete a post-purchase survey. Here’s a look at their post-purchase survey:
Offering incentives to customers allows Doe Beauty to encourage customers to complete the entire survey while also driving repeat purchases and thus, revenue.
Conclusion
In the dynamic and ever-evolving world of e-commerce, understanding your customer’s post-purchase views is like having backstage passes to your favorite artist’s performance—exhilarating, insightful, and personal. By implementing effective post-purchase surveys, businesses can drive customer satisfaction, identify pain points, personalize marketing initiatives, and foster unwavering loyalty.
However, crafting these surveys requires a delicate balance—gathering insightful information while maintaining brevity, mitigating response biases, and timing the outreach impeccably.
To navigate these challenges seamlessly, consider leveraging LateShipment.com’s Post-Purchase Experience software. This all-in-one solution empowers e-commerce businesses to enhance customer engagement and retention through features like branded delivery status updates, predictive incident alerts, and personalized order tracking. By integrating such advanced tools, you can transform post-purchase interactions into opportunities for deeper connection and sustained growth.
Remember, in the grand performance of e-commerce, the sale is just the opening act. The encore—how you engage and learn from your customers after their purchase—truly defines the lasting impression of your brand. So, supercharge your post-purchase experience with LateShipment.com, and book a demo today!
