‘Tis the Season to Survey!

It is well known that the months of November, December, January and February are typically great online sales months. Online shoppers tend to begin increasing their activity immediately following the US Thanksgiving holiday.

Besides providing you with the obvious boost in revenue, these holiday shoppers can give you a reward that’s almost as good as money. Available often for free, and capable of increasing your earnings throughout the year, this reward is known as feedback.

The Benefits of Feedback

As previously mentioned, the major holiday months usually feature an increased amount of online shopping. This increase in shopping behavior typically leads to an increase in unique visitors on your website. Experiencing more unique visitors on your site naturally leads to your site becoming “top of mind” for more of your visitors as well. Basically, because these visitors were recently shopping for your product or service, they are now more engaged with your brand. Therefore, the influx of holiday traffic provides you with an opportunity to reach out to a larger pool of more passionate visitors than your site would probably normally experience throughout the year. With a larger and more passionate audience at your disposal, now is the time to solicit feedback that can improve your business operations immensely.

Feedback can often yield incredible results, including:

• Finding opportunities to increase your sales in 2013
• Gaining insights into the buying habits of your site visitors
• Discovering new ways to meet the needs of your site visitors
• Determining which site content is useful to your visitors
• Identifying flaws in your site design and sales funnel

How Can you Survey your Visitors to Generate Feedback?

Though you may not realize it, there are many ways that you can survey your visitors using your current marketing methods. Some of the many ways to open up a dialogue with your visitors include:

• Asking for feedback in your site newsletter
• Sending a holiday themed email to your visitors which includes a link to provide feedback
• Asking for feedback on your site’s social media channels
• Adding a “Call to Action” on your site that requests visitor feedback
• Providing visitors with an incentive (such as discounts, contests, rewards) to provide feedback

How Should you Construct your Survey?

No matter how valuable that you may feel that your survey is to your visitors, chances are, your site visitors don’t want to spend more than a few minutes of their day completing your survey. Therefore, you need to keep your survey short and direct. Five or six questions should be your maximum and make sure the questions relate to your most pressing concerns. Open-ended questions such as “What do you like best about our site?” or “How can we improve our site?” are always helpful. Your survey can be composed as a simple email with questions or can be created in a surveying program like Survey Monkey. Whichever format you choose, just remember to keep your questions to a minimum.

Have a great holiday season and while you are racking up sales, don’t forget to survey your visitors!

– The Adscend Media Team