How to Use Website Surveys and Polls to Boost Your Digital Marketing Activities

Website surveys and polls are the best way to communicate with large numbers of customers and prospects simultaneously, enabling you to collect the information you need to maximize the reach of all your digital marketing activities.

This also makes them great for building a community around your organization, to involve your internet users in decision-making in a way that makes them feel seen.

Today, these tools are very unobtrusive and can be customized to match the layout, design, and branding of your website - enabling you to integrate them seamlessly into your web pages. And, particularly with regard to micro surveys like Visitor Analytics’ poll feature - users can provide their answers with minimal effort.

Consequently, website feedback surveys and polls have a response rate of around 30% (SmartSurvey) - a real strength given that ever-tightening email laws and spam filters have made email far less reliable as an alternative conduit through which to survey customers.

This high completion rate makes them attractive, and all the more so given that they enable you to collect real-time feedback from customers and to target the right people with the right questions at the right time. 

How to Create a Website Survey - a Step-by-Step Guide

Website surveys and polls remain one of the more intuitive tools at your disposal, particularly since platforms make it easy for you to create surveys, deliver them to whichever audience segment you want feedback from, and analyze results.

However, getting the most out of them - and avoiding the various pitfalls outlined above - requires planning. and this section of the hub will now run through the steps required to get the best customer feedback possible.

Establish Your Objectives

It’s best to approach your web survey tool to help achieve any wider departmental or business objectives you have at any given time.

Practically, this means aligning customer surveying with the tasks that you’re assigned with - be it driving conversions, increasing website session times, reducing churn rates, and others.

Website surveys and polls are also particularly potent when used in conjunction with other analytics tools since they enable you to remove the guesswork from assumptions made from other data sources like heatmaps, conversion funnels, and so forth.

As such, it’s best to use them once you know exactly what feedback you need, and to keep this in mind when creating your questions, calibrating triggers, and analyzing results.

Choose Your Audience

Once you know your wider objectives and how a customer survey will feed into them, you’re in a good position to think about which customers, prospects, and other website visitors to target.

This is important, with accurate targeting essential if the web survey is to return insights relevant to the task at hand.

Ultimately, your choice of audience will affect question choice, as well as the best time, location, and survey type - be it on-page, off-page, or widget - for collecting feedback from them.

It’s also particularly useful to target internet users at specific points on your conversion funnels.

Of course, your choice of audience segment may be limited at first to characteristics identifiable as standard by your website survey software such as their device/browser specifications, whether they’re new or returning visitors, geographic location, and so on.

However, you will gradually learn more about your audience, through other web analytics features, online reviews, and market research. You can also directly ask for demographic information in the online surveys themselves and should do this whenever relevant to whatever feedback you’re seeking.

This means that you’ll get much better at segmenting and targeting your audience over time, which will then naturally enhance the quality of insights that you can pull from website surveys and polls.

Prepare Your Questions

Once you know your web survey goals and target audience, you’re in a good position to focus on the crux of the matter - writing the questions themselves.

Ultimately, the quality of actionable insights that you collect will be largely determined by the choice and wording of the questions that your surveys contain.

Practically, questions should complement each other by together collecting the qualitative and quantitative data that you need to get a rounded understanding of the specific issue that you want to investigate.

Put another way, you might want to ask them to rate their satisfaction with your organization. But by itself, this information isn’t particularly useful - you won’t know who they are, what their experiences were, or what you can do to increase their satisfaction in the future.

We’ve written elsewhere about how to write effective survey questions, but you’ll find below a list of tips for writing better website survey questions:

• Write unbiased survey questions that don’t manipulate how respondents will answer
• Don’t write loaded questions that force respondents to give replies unreflective of their opinion
• Don’t build any assumptions into your questions
• Avoid double negatives that can confuse or irritate respondents
• Avoid jargon or any words that people might not understand
• Avoid double-barreled questions that prevent respondents from providing a complete answer

Beyond the above points, it’s also important to remember to keep questions as clear and precise as possible.

You also don’t want to keep them all day.

As such, it’s best to keep your online surveys as short as possible. Short surveys are easier to complete and have higher completion rates. They also stop respondents from suffering survey burnout and make them more likely to complete another web survey in the future.

Ideally, they should take less than three minutes to complete, and include one main question and a few follow-up questions that will help you to add color to the single issue you’re investigating. Play with the wording until you’re confident that the questions are written clearly, while also complementing each other in a way that enables you to dig deepest into the issue at hand.

And when writing your questions, it’s important to remember that timing and relevance are vital characteristics of any successful website survey. Put another way, this means that the questions need to be as relevant as possible to whatever the respondents are doing when they trigger it.

Practically, this means that you set effective targeting parameters for pop-up surveys, or insert the link to an off-page survey within an appropriate piece of web content. 

This will ensure that you don’t - for instance - send a website visitor a survey asking for feedback on their buying experience when they haven't reached that point of the journey.

Prepare Your Answers

When building your web survey, the question type that you choose will set the parameters fields for the answers that respondents will be able to give, and you’ll need to create replies that can be inputted properly into one of these options.

Practically, this means that you’ll need to choose the question type that enables respondents to answer precisely - select the right type and you’ll also find it much easier to analyze the replies you do receive.

Unfortunately, every digital survey tool will offer slightly different question type options, meaning that you’ll have to adapt your choice to the technical limitations of your tool - with Visitor Analytics, you can choose from ten different question types, and you can find out more further down this resource hub.

One great thing about these options is that they enable you to limit your usage of open-ended answers. These have their benefits, but they can be off-putting, drag the survey out, and it can be difficult to analyze what will inevitably be unstandardized replies.

And when writing your answers, it’s important to remember to use clear labeling, wording the answers clearly, and use the custom options to enhance this clarity further.

Build Your Web Survey

Once you’ve drafted your questions and answers around your business objectives and target audience segment, you’re in a good position to build your questionnaire within the web survey tool itself.

Modern iterations are intuitive, making this is one of the easiest steps in the process. 

You can find details about how this works with Visitor Analytics further down this resource hub - or on our visitor feedback support page.

It’s enough to say here that you’ll need to choose the right question type for each question, calibrate the trigger so that it reaches the right people at the right place, and at the right time, and complete a few design fields so that it integrates well with your website layout, design, and branding.

Launch Your Web Survey

Once you’ve built the survey in your chosen platform, launching it is simply a case of activating it.

Of course, you’ll want to test it to make sure that the survey is working properly, and you can usually do this yourself - fill the survey in, and then return to the survey software to check that your answers have been recorded.

After this, it’s simply a case of waiting until you’ve collected enough data before analyzing the survey results - something that we will cover in depth later. 

FAQs

What Is a Website Survey?

Website or online surveys are questionnaires that businesses can use to learn about their customers, target audience, and other internet users. They can vary considerably in terms of length and appearance, from long off-page surveys to micro pop-up feedback polls, and are a great way to fine-tune optimization work.

Why Are Website Surveys Necessary and Valuable?

Website feedback surveys enable you to engage with your target audience and to get precise real-time feedback from the right people, at the right place, and at the right time for whatever digital marketing responsibility you are focused on.

Simply put, website surveys and polls enable you to conduct market research at a fraction of what it normally costs, and to learn about your business from the perspective of your customers. They’re also useful for a wide range of marketing tasks, including product and competitor research, brand awareness, and content marketing.

What Are the Types of Online Surveys?

Modern website surveys have a wide range of different technical specifications. 

On-page surveys - otherwise known as pop-up or on-site surveys - appear directly on whatever web pages you’ve chosen, while off-page surveys appear on their own dedicated web pages. 

These different types are also offered in widgets with different triggering mechanisms, audience targeting capabilities, and appearance, with your choice dependent on the specificities of whatever task you need visitor feedback for.

What is the Difference Between Website Surveys and Polls?

Website surveys and polls are very similar, and together form what is known online as “website intercept surveys.” The main difference is one of length - website surveys are long questionnaires that often have their own dedicated web pages, while polls are micro surveys, and often appear in the form of a pop-up widget or feedback bubble.

How to Add a Survey to My Website

Surveying your website visitors is simply a case of opening an account with a survey software, web analytics solution like Visitor Analytics, or other marketing technology that provides surveying or polls tools. Once this is done, online surveys can be set up in minutes, with much of the results analysis done automatically by the platform. 

How Do You Create a Website Survey?

After choosing and activating your chosen tool, creating a website survey requires writing your questions, choosing the right answer fields, and calibrating the layout, appearance, and targeting options. And once live, websites with high traffic will start receiving results immediately, which can then be analyzed at your leisure.

Where on Your Website Should You Ask Survey Questions?

The various different website survey technical specifications available mean that you have real flexibility with regard to where online surveys appear, when they appear, and to whom they appear.

This enables you to optimize your survey to the specificities of the website issue at hand and to dig deep into the characteristics of the survey respondents.

Are Website Surveys Legal?

Website feedback surveys are legal because customers are under no obligation to complete them and, by doing so, they are providing the legal basis for consent. 

However, it’s still important that businesses comply with modern data privacy laws with regard to how they collect, store, and analyze this personal data - something that is done automatically with some website survey tools like Visitor Analytics.

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