Post-Purchase Surveys: Getting Feedback After the Sale
We are continuing our series on receipt best practices today by taking a deep dive into surveys. Not often thought of as an integral part of the digital receipt, post-purchase surveys offer a unique opportunity to gather real-time feedback from customers the moment after purchase when they are the most emotionally connected to your brand.
Although surveys are fairly straightforward in nature, there are a few key points that should be kept in mind while creating them to yield the best results.
- Keep it near the top
- Our attention is always most dedicated to things at the beginning or end of objects. Thanks to the serial position effect, a psychological explanation for our ability to best remember things at the beginning and end of a sequence, the positioning of important information is key. This also holds true for receipts, as customers will spend the most time interacting with items located at the top of the page. By housing your survey near the top of the receipt, customers will be more likely to engage with it. To further increase the likelihood of this, nesting the survey around your top banner and store details will connect both a future offer with the customer’s go-to-store to bring their sentiments about their experience to the forefront of their mind.
- Keep them Concise
- One of the largest complaints about including post-purchase surveys is a high open rate with a low completion rate. This is often due to customers being willing to provide feedback but being overwhelmed by the number of questions they are asked to complete. According to research conducted by Survey Monkey, in addition to the decreased time spent answering each question as surveys grew in length, they saw survey abandon rates increase for surveys that took more than 7-8 minutes to complete; with completion rates dropping anywhere from 5% to 20%. The most important task when creating a survey is to understand the feedback or use case you are trying to solve with the feedback and tailoring your questions around that. Keeping the questions targeted, like asking about the customer’s experience in-store as restrictions have been lifted, or their thoughts on curbside pickup, keep the customer from getting overwhelmed from a vast pool of focus.
- Keep Response Types Short
- Similar to the point above, not only should the question count be limited, the expected response types should be kept short as well. Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, opening a survey of 15+ long-response text boxes would be enough to cause most to exit quickly from the survey. In a fast-paced world, no one wants to sit down and type long-tailed responses to numerous survey questions. Keeping in mind that most customers will be viewing their receipts on their mobile devices, short-form responses, like sentiment bubbles and scales are far more user-friendly.
- Use Incentives Strategically
- Often a strategy utilized to gain more form responses, many rely on the use of special offers for the completion of a survey. While this is a great way to guarantee the number of responses, it offers little to no aid to help the quality of those responses. Many view the survey then as a way to gain a reward instead of offering their true sentiments, leading to incomplete responses and no real feedback to utilize. By strategically thinking through what rewards make sense and when they should be delivered, you increase the likelihood that customers will provide true and honest feedback about their experience. While there may be a fear of a lower response rate, those that had a compelling enough experience, good or bad, will continue to provide feedback if the survey is located in their sphere of influence.
Implement Post-Purchase Surveys on Your Receipts Today
Are you interested in gaining valuable feedback from your customers during the highly emotive moment after purchase? Our receipt experts are able to provide you with key tips and tricks to ensure both high opens and completion rates on the survey as well as additional tips to drive engagement and repeat purchases. Click here to learn more about this product and how to connect with our team.
Check out our other topics in the series including best practices for both SMS and advertising on receipts.