27 powerful survey questions for your website audience

Of the types of consumer research available, surveying your website visitors is among the best when pursuing powerful in-the-moment feedback and improve customer acquisition. But when it comes to creating a survey template, deciding which questions to include can be quite the hurdle. Here are 27 starter questions segmented by potential survey goals, beginning with better understanding your first-time visitors.

Great questions will help you get the most out of Lucky Orange Surveys.

First-time visitors

1.  What are you trying to accomplish today? 

You've invested in driving traffic to your website. Start by figuring out if that traffic is actually in-market for your products or services and are your target audience. This is likely a multiple choice question with answer options specific to your business (Get a quote, Compare prices, Contact customer service).

2. Have you shopped with any of our competitors before?

Any variation of this question attempts to monitor the competitive landscape and pick up on trends of new customers comparing your options against competitors in the same space.

3. How did you hear about us? 

Learning where your customers come from is key to developing an optimized marketing strategy. Getting more people saying they heard about you from a friend? Consider leaning into a comprehensive referral program. Never seeing responses indicating they heard your radio ad? It might be time to discontinue your radio spots.

These are the types of survey questions that can guide much larger business, marketing efforts and marketing incentives.

4. Is there anything missing from our products/services?

Identifying shortcomings (whether they're real or just perceived) helps in product development, competitive analysis and marketing campaign planning.

5. Offer a discount

Whether through a promo code or a rewards program, providing a discount to first-time customers answer can lead to an immediate boost in conversion rates. Of course, you need to avoid offering too many regular discounts as customers may start to wait out until the next sale comes.

Returning customers and existing customers

6. What products/services have you purchased from us in the past?

Depending on your business model, return customers may be repeating the same purchase or evaluating new options. Determining which products are the best at bringing people back can help determine future product lines. This question can be really valuable if you don't have a system in place to track information on customer purchases and customer interaction.

7.  Would you be interested in _______ if we offered it?

Whether you're evaluating new service levels, product lines or payment types, figuring out where the interest lies is a great start. Keep in mind your responses are only coming from your existing audience, so whether they agree or disagree with the new product idea shouldn't be an immediate limitation on where you take your product or service roadmap.

8.  How do you prefer we communicate with you?

You can apply learnings from this question to your overall communication strategy including evaluation of site chat, SMS and any other relevant marketing channels. Depending on available technology, you may also be able to directly adjust an individual's communication preferences based on their response.

9.  On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?

Known as the Net Promoter Score question, this is a common method for judging the success of various customer satisfaction efforts. You'll receive responses that can be categorized into those who have issues with your brand, those that are happy with what you do and those that will actively promote your brand and expand your reach with their own voice.

10. Which of the following words would you use to describe our products/services?

In this line of questioning, you could also ask which words customers would use to describe specific aspects of the product like quality, reliability or responsiveness. You can also switch the phrasing to ask if they've experienced any issues with your product or service.

Visitor intent

11. What are you trying to accomplish on our site today?

This question is fundamental in understanding where the visitor is in your conversion funnel. If the majority of your visitors are in the consideration phase, you can adjust your messaging to prioritize building brand confidence.

12. Have you been able to accomplish this yet? 

A simple yes/no follow-up question allows you to spot broad trends in your site's ability to meet visitor goals. Be careful about where you ask this question as those who've just arrived on your site likely haven't accomplished their goal. Consider a trigger that waits until visitors view over three pages before asking these questions.

13.  If no, what's preventing you from accomplishing it? 

Here we spot more specific issues. This is a place to offer multiple choice answer options like, "product not available", "site too confusing" or "can't find shipping information". You can keep it broad or dial in response options more specific to your website. Take these answers and create A/B tests as part of your broader conversion optimization strategy.

14.  What do you think about the information on our website?

Consider formatting this so your question includes a sliding scale of response options. You could orient the sample answers around depth of information, quality of content, product description details or even more subjective elements like color and layout.

Avoid an open-ended question here since the topic is highly subjective.

15.  Is there anything missing on this page?

Depending on the visitor's intent, they may think you need more content links, additional images or a comparison tool.

Website issues

16. What were you looking for?

This is a great question to ask on your 404 page. You'll find broken links, errant advertising and even mistypes.

17. Did you face any challenges while using our website?

With this question, you're looking to spot navigation problems, overwhelming content sections, form issues or anything that prevents a visitor from getting the information they need.

18.  (Mobile-only) Does the website appear to function normally on your device?

Simply put, a mobile issue can be a disaster for your website. Let your visitors assist in your regular quality control exercises by getting their feedback.

19.  Do you think you have to click too much to get what you're looking for?

Responses to this subjective question will get you valuable insight into your architecture and linking structure.

20.  On a scale of 0-10, how would you rate the usability of our website?

Your audience may not consist entirely of website usability experts, but it's their opinion that truly matters. This question sets itself up for follow-ups about specific site features.

Behavior triggers

Depending on your site survey technology, you may be able to auto-invite visitors by their on-site behavior. Here are some specific examples of situations where behavior triggers may make for powerful site surveys.

21. Is there any shipping or pricing information we're missing?

For those visitors who've navigated your product descriptions and are looking through shipping information, there may be one piece of missing information they need to convert. As a follow-up, you can provide helpful links or contact information.

22. Is there something we can help you with today?

Use this broad question (which feels like the beginning of a site chat) to help visitors that appear to be lost. You could trigger this on a certain number of pages visited or total site visits without a conversion action.

23.  Are you enjoying our content? Is there anything you'd like to see us write about? 

Survey visitors who scroll through a few pieces of content can help determine future topics. These are the people who actually read your work and will find value in future content catered to their interests.

24.  Do you follow us on social media?

This is really a call-to-action disguised as a survey question. Make visitors aware of your social media platform and encourage them to follow with quick external links. This information is a step towards demographic surveys that help you better understand the types of people in your audience.

25.  Are there any products you wish we offered?

If a visitor navigates several product pages and doesn't add anything to their cart, they may have great thoughts on alternatives to offer.

26.  How did your purchase go today?

Get immediate feedback after a purchase to see if there are any hiccups in your current process. While these visitors made it through to check out, even small issues could be preventing additional conversions.

27.  What's the reason for your action?

This sounds quite aggressive, but what we're after here is a follow-up question based on a visitor unsubscribing from a list, giving a low NPS or CSAT score or canceling a subscription.

It's okay to ask for a reason here. This exit survey information is invaluable when it comes to optimizing your conversion funnel.

Regularly collecting feedback from your customers is essential to staying in the game and relevant. It’s a vital part of improving your customer experience and helping people throughout your organization make better decisions as time goes on.

Let’s quickly jot down all the great things that follow when you collect adequate feedback:

• You become more aware of your market performance

• It gives you a chance to get closely acquainted with your target audience

• It helps you to improve marketing strategies

• It lets you check the competitive landscape

• It increases customer engagement, which means more sales

• It helps you capture new markets

And, the list goes on and on.

If you don’t know how your customers feel, it’s high time you start collecting feedback the right way.

Read on to find out how.

What is customer feedback?

In simple words, customer feedback is insight, information and inputs that you receive from a customer about your product or services. However, there is more to it.

The feedback a customer provides is vital for your reputation in the market. The words they use to describe your product or service leave a lasting footprint of your brand in the digital space. Feedback will help you refine your marketing plan, improve the quality of the service you provide, and focus on areas that need work.

While positive feedback can be a great boost to your morale, negative feedback is a great opportunity to learn and become better.

Why do you need feedback from customers?

Feedback is the guide that steers your brand in the right direction. It tells you how the customer is feeling and thinking and gives you points to improve upon. But that’s not all. Here are few questions that are answered when you ask for customer feedback:

Is your product adding value?

Amongst all the other reasons, the one that tops the list is that customer feedback enables you to understand if your product/service is of any value to the customer.

It’s the parameter by which all your prospective clients will judge your brand.

Long story short, this is your holy grail for building a loyal customer base.

Is your marketing strategy on the right path?

Right behind this, is the fact that customer feedback helps you understand how well your marketing strategy is performing. You’ll be able to track whether or not it’s driving the right kind of traffic or how well your brand is performing in comparison to its competitors.

Is your customer retention rate high?

When you show customers that you care and you are here to listen to their woes, they will return and probably with a much better review. Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company revealed that a 5% increase in customer retention rate is likely to increase profits by almost 70%. So, listen to customers and keep them involved to make them feel more valued.

What’s your conversion rate?

It’s a daunting task to convert a potential customer into a loyal buyer, but if you know just what the market needs, then it shouldn't be an issue.

Customer feedback enables you to understand that market gap. You know someone is in pain, all you need to do is hand them a painkiller—your product or service.

5 steps to collecting feedback without bothering the customer

Out of 26 unhappy customers, only one would officially go ahead and give feedback. Even if the customer is not complaining through a direct channel, chances are that they do end up leaving to a point of never returning.

There are so many passive channels like social media and word-of-mouth through which a customer can end up damaging your sales. So, it’s always better to ask them for feedback directly, without getting in their way.

Follow the very effective A.C.A.F Customer Feedback Loop.

It’s simple, direct and effective:

• A – Ask the customers about their experience.

• C – Categorize their feedback into different verticals according to what’s relevant to your business

• A – Act on the collected feedback

• F – Follow up with the customers

Step 1: Asking for customer feedback

This step involves a few blocks.

Understand the customer satisfaction trend over a period of time

Imagine you bought a good car that you love — the way it looks, moves, the thrill it gives you, basically everything.

But it takes time to learn whether the investment was worth it or did you just burn all your hard-earned money.

Similarly, a customer might be extremely happy with your product today but have a different opinion, say three months down the line.

See how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are today and then measure their happiness quotient over a period of time.

The three most popular ways of getting this data are:

• NPS (Net Promoter Score) – on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied the customer is with your product/service

• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) – taken after a shopping experience on an online application, a live chat or reading an article

• Social Media Monitoring – a popular and highly effective medium of collecting feedback—you can use tools like Google Alerts, or Mention to track your mentions of social media sites like Facebook, Yelp, Quora, and many more.

Identifying issues related to customer services

Now the car that you have, is a top model that comes with an added feature of voice control. You're definitely excited about that feature because that's the whole reason you chose this particular model.

Imagine getting a customer call at 3 p.m. when you’ve just come back from a long day at work asking you about this feature and then asking you 20 multiple choice questions about this same feature. Would you be as excited to talk about voice control, then?

Our guess is, no.

There are times when these feedback phone or video calls can get extremely annoying to a point where the customer stops purchasing your product, in order to avoid going through a meticulous feedback process.

Employ simple methods to understand the pain points with your customer feedback channels.

Apart from NPS and CSAT, which are promotion-based, we have a third way of collecting data relevant to customer service which is CES (Customer Effort Score) which is more focused on the customers having a hassle-free and convenient experience while providing feedback.

Unraveling issues in the product and working on them

This point concerns the higher-ups like founders, co-founders, VPs, and project leads who deal directly with products.

It deals with questions like:

Is the product doing well in the market?

Was the new feature well-received?

While NPS remains the common method to attain necessary data, there are two more ways you can achieve what you want:

In-App Surveys

You see a small pop-up when you shop from your favorite website, asking you to rate the application? That’s a form of in-app survey that takes five seconds to complete but works wonders. Combine this method with NPS and you have yourself a winner.

Like Steve Palmer, Customer Success & Growth at Knack says,

”NPS is important but we’re interested in more than just a quantitative score. For these reasons, we prefer the Net Promoter Score combined with custom survey questions.”

Feature request board

A public-facing feature request board is a great way to get customers actively involved in building your product. It’s also a great way to understand how well a new feature is performing in the market.

Step 2: Choosing the right medium to gather feedback

Choosing the right medium for collecting feedback can be a tricky task, but once you find the medium that suits your brand the best, there’s no turning back.

Let’s have look at some of the best-known feedback channels:

Live chat

Almost 79% of people prefer live chats to share relevant feedback. A lot of new-age companies are leveraging the live-chat feature and bringing in automation to collect customer feedback and offer instant support. It’s a quick and effective way of collecting feedback without being a pain for the customer.

This generally happens when you post a chat session with a customer executive or as soon as you use the service.

Email feedback

In a short and coherent way, you can ask a customer over email if they are liking your service and how likely they are to recommend it to someone else. You can do this via email clients that help manage email communication with customers and offer a user-friendly experience.

Use these tools to create a network of customers and be as clear and concise as you can be while asking for their feedback.

In-app feedback

In-app feedback is gaining momentum as the world is slowly transforming into a digital space. You can have a short pop-up that appears while the customer is browsing to ask them if they are enjoying the application. The message could also appear, once they quit the application or make a purchase.

This kind of feedback generally comes in handy while polishing the application and removing unnecessary bugs.

Website feedback

When someone visits your website, or online course and decides to stay there for some time, then that’s definitely something positive.

There are tools that allow you to create SEO-integrated landing pages and also help to track views and conversation rates. So, you stay in the loop of all that’s happening on that beautiful website of yours.

SMS blast

SMS blasts are a by-the-book, a conventional technique of gathering feedback that is still quite relevant.

A quick question like, ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, please tell us how would you rate our services?’

It’s simple, crisp, and effective which is in-win for both the customer and the business.

Step 3: Classifying the collected feedback into relevant buckets

Now that you have all your feedback, it’s time to collate and categorize that data through a scalable process.

So how do you do that? Let’s find out.

Product Feedback

This tops the list because you want your product to be the hero of your feedback approach. A minor bug can really pull your reputation down and prevent your customers from squeezing full usage from the product. They might even miss the main feature if the bug gets out of hand, so put your focus here first.

Customer service feedback

There are a few ways you can collect customer feedback data, via:

• Live chats

• E-mail

• SMS blasts

There are more ways, but these three top the list. They require less than a minute and are quick and handy ways of getting spot-on feedback.

Also, customer service feedback helps you spot a pattern in your questions and identify the weak or frustrating points. It gives you a larger room to work and build on your customer services, which is pivotal for your company’s growth.

Marketing and sales feedback

The last category deals with keeping your marketing and sales team in check. You want to make sure that whoever is in the marketing or sales positions is informed to provide and handle customer feedback.

Falling back on the car we recently bought, you were promised that within the next six weeks, you will receive beautiful and plush, brand new seat covers for your new car.

It’s been six months now, and you haven’t received anything apart from an annoying feedback phone call.

This is bound to cause major havoc and your customer service section will get flooded with complaints.

If you have set rules on customer feedback for your marketing and sales team, then situations like these can be monitored closely or can be entirely avoided.

Step 4: Working on the feedback

Now that you have the feedback sorted in relevant buckets, it’s time to share that and start working on bettering your product and service.

Sharing feedback with the team

Start by letting your teams know that the feedback is only to help them grow and become better at what they do. This will prompt them to keep an open mind and incorporate the feedback in a better way.

Brainstorming to create relevant strategies

Once you have teams in action and ready to make a change, gather them up in a huddle and create new strategies to make your product/service a huge success.

This could involve creating new social media strategies, or a killer digital marketing strategy, or anything that is necessary to put your brand on the block again.

Step 5: Follow up to make them believe that you are truly listening

This is where your loop closes.

Always remember that your customer should feel comfortable while giving you feedback.

There should be no effort involved because that’s generally looked down upon. Also, they should know that you’re listening to them “Oh, so they did listen and now I have my new car seat covers”. This should be their response.

You can follow up over an e-mail or via SMS or even a quick call. Say things like, “We received your feedback, and here’s an updated product just for you” or “Hey there! You said and we listened. Tell us how you feel about your brand new covers. We’re all ears!”.

Positive and affirmative statements go a long way in re-instilling your customer’s faith in your service.