How to Create a Survey for Your Customers

Surveys are a great way to find out more about your customers, but they also help you find out what needs to be improved to make your customers even happier. In this article, we’ll give you tips on how to set up customer surveys for your online business.

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions...

✏️ Why should you create a survey for your customers?

🎯 How to start a survey

📫 Who to send a survey to

🔏 What kind of questions should I ask?

❓ How to pose questions in your survey

🌎 How to make sure your survey is representative

💲 Should you be offering some kind of incentives or rewards in return?

👍 How can Trusted Shops help you create a survey?

✏️ Why should you create a survey for your customers?

The purpose of a survey is to gather more information on a specific topic.

Therefore, it can turn out particularly useful for online shop owners like you if you want to find out things like…

Do my customers prefer to buy one product over the other?
What elements in my online shop need to be improved?
How do my customers like the services my online shop has to offer?

Recommended reading:
What is Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

🎯 How to start a customer survey

Start by setting a goal and coming up with a plan.

If you’ve decided you want to create a survey, it is wise to first think about the purpose of it. Why do you want to make a survey? Try to set up a very specific goal. In order to do this, we recommend you do a little research beforehand.

What kind of problems or issues would you like to address in the survey? Is your return rate rather high, for example? You might want to do a little research on all the possible reasons that customers decide to return items before setting up a questionnaire about this issue for your customers.

📫 Who do you send the survey to?

It is important to think about who you send the survey to. Suppose you have a list of people who have subscribed to your newsletter. These are a perfect set of customers to send a survey to. However, non-customers (people who have not ordered anything or have never been to your site) are people you might want feedback from as well.

If you want to know about something like improvements in the ordering process, you can ask both groups this question because having both an “insider” and “outsider” perspective could be useful here. However, if you want to know how satisfied people are with the shipment of the order, it is better to only send the survey to existing customers.

🔏 What kind of questions should I ask?

What kind of questions are the best when it comes to setting up customer surveys? This really depends on what you actually want to achieve with your survey.

Closed questions, for example, can help you to get a very clear picture of what your customers think. This can be a 'Yes/No' question or even multiple choice questions.

The idea here is that these kinds of questions are easier to process as they provide you with clear answers and you won't have to spend much time thinking about what your customer really wants to communicate with their answer.

Shutterstock/Black Salmon

Open questions, on the other hand, will likely lead to answers that you might not have even expected in the first place.

For example, let’s just assume you want to find out which part of your site's customer journey is the weakest one. Accordingly, a question you could ask could be: What were you least satisfied with? The answers here could go in a hundred different directions.

In order to process the answers as efficiently as possible, you need to set up a system after you receive the filled in surveys. For example, try to think of categories or themes for possible answers so you can break down the answers into sub-groups or concepts.

Of course, a survey containing only open questions will ultimately be more time consuming for you. Still, you’ll be able to yield more information as your respondents aren’t limited to predetermined answers.

❓ How to pose questions in your survey

Think carefully about how you ask your question(s), and consider if the question(s) you pose are clear to all your customers and can be understood the same way.

For example, a question like: "Were you satisfied with Microsoft?” can be interpreted in different ways. For example, someone might be completely happy with Microsoft's computers, but not with their customer service. It’s also possible that the customer preferred one product over the other. Therefore, you need to be very specific in what you ask.

Also, think about whether you can really find out what you wish to find out with the question posed. This particularly applies when you think of your target group and the customers that you want to send a survey out to.

Let’s say, for example, you ask the following question: What did you think about the ordering process in our online shop? Most probably, you won’t receive any specific answers from your customers or they drift away from your intended insights.

Some customers may let you know that they’ve found it difficult to place an order, while others may think you're actually referring to the whole shopping process from product search to receiving the package. In order to be clear about what you're referring to, you’ll want to specify that you're asking about the checkout process.

Also, be careful with the words and phrases you use. If you want to learn if someone agrees with a statement, we wouldn’t recommend you to present a statement with a negative connotation such as "I wouldn’t recommend this product".

Instead, it might be better to come up with a statement like “'I would recommend this product”, since it has a positive connotation.

🌎 How to make sure your survey is representative

Maybe you’re wondering what "representative" means in this context. In other words: make sure you send the survey to enough people so the results can be considered significant.

Let's say you were to conduct a survey among 10 customers about how they feel about the new website design. Only sending the questionnaire to such a limited number of people won’t make it representative. The chance is rather high they all answer the same thing, and the answers likely won’t reflect all of your customers’ points of view.

Just think about it: in a 10-person survey, each answer represents about 10% of your audience! Therefore, a survey will only benefit you if you get closer to 100 answers. But of course, the more, the better!

💲 Should you be offering some kinds of incentives or rewards in return?

In order to collect as many answers as possible, you can offer your customers incentives such as promotion codes or gifts: “Complete this survey and enter the chance to win a free soap package”.

Of course, this is a nice way to encourage people to fill in everything. However, this can also backfire: it’s possible people will only fill out the survey to win something.

If the survey is actually a review or some kind of testimonial that you plan on publishing or using in your marketing, you have to be careful about the legality of doing that. Be sure to check up your local laws regarding incentivised reviews.

👍 How can Trusted Shops help you create a survey?

Good to know: As a Trusted Shops customer using our eTrusted platform, you can easily set up your own customer surveys.

We even offer specific templates and presets, allowing you to quickly create a questionnaire that will help you optimise your online shop and the services you provide.

🔄 Conclusion

Conducting a survey is a great way to find out more about what your customers want and what kind of things you need to improve. Make sure, you don’t send out surveys too often. Also, try keeping them as short as possible (but still as relevant as possible to gather enough information). Find your own way and don’t forget to evaluate what went well and what you could do better next time. After all, surveys are beneficial in more than one way!