Summary
Table of Contents
If your customers purchase from your online store, capturing their feedback is essential for many reasons. The feedback can help you improve your products, and services, which may lead to a better customer experience. Better customer experience also means better retention, growth, and revenue. What’s the best time to collect your customer feedback? After they have purchased from your store, of course. That is where the Post Purchase Survey comes into the picture. Post purchase survey, as the name suggests, refers to surveying the customers after their purchase from your store. In this in-depth guide, we will discuss why you should do it, what is the best time, and the questions you should ask. We will also explore how you can run the surveys to get the maximum response rate. Let’s dive deep.
TL;DR
- Post purchase survey refers to surveying your customers after they purchase from your online store. The survey can be shown immediately after the checkout (on the thank you page). It can also be sent to the customer via email or SMS after say 15 days from the order.
- Surveying customers immediately after the check-out has several benefits. This can provide insights into your website experience, ideas to optimize website conversions, check-out experience, etc. On the marketing side, this can give insights into how your customers found you and can help with marketing attribution.
- The survey can also be sent over email 10-15 days after the order. Using a well-designed survey, you can understand your product feedback, quality, pricing feedback, delivery experience, and more.
- The important questions can be divided into various categories.
– Understanding customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. E.g. How satisfied are you with your purchase experience?
– Open-ended question(s). E.g. what is the most important reason for choosing the score?
– Get feedback on Product quality and pricing. How satisfied are you with the quality of your product? E.g. Please rate your purchase in terms of value for money.
– Measure website experience, check-out experience, discover any technical issues or improvements to the website
– Delivery experience. E.g. How do you rate your delivery experience?
– Marketing attribution like – how did you hear about us? - You can use channels such as Web Popup, Email, SMS, etc. For emails, sending a gentle reminder can increase your response rate.
- You can use a survey tool like Affiniv to help you create the survey, embed it on your thank you page via a web popup, or automatically send the survey over email with gentle reminders. Create a free account to start collecting post purchase feedback in a matter of minutes.
Want to create and send a Post Purchase survey in minutes?
With Affiniv, you can create beautiful surveys and send them instantly via Email or Embed in your website/app.
What is Post Purchase Survey?
Purchasing from your online or offline store is the most important milestone in your customer lifecycle. Asking the customer for feedback after the purchase can be extremely insightful for your business. This is where post purchase survey comes into the picture. Post purchase survey, as the name suggests, refers to surveying the customer after the purchase. This can generate actionable feedback to improve products, services, website experience, and more. Post purchase survey form can be shown immediately after the customer has made the purchase, like say on the thank you page. It can also be sent to the customer via email a few days after the purchase. The feedback can help you learn about the website experience, check out experience, how they learned about your site, what should you do to deliver better products, services, etc.
What are the benefits of Post Purchase Survey?
Here are the key benefits of doing the Post purchase survey.
Understanding website/app feedback
Post purchase surveys can be a great way to understand what customers think about your website or app. When it comes to website experience, a few stages come to mind – finding the right product, information about the product, check-out experience, website bugs, and usability issues, etc. From this feedback, you can get ideas on what aspects need to improve to have a better conversion and user experience.
Insights for Product Improvement
Asking the customer for their feedback a few days after purchase can provide you with valuable information about your product. You can learn more about what customers think about your product quality, pricing, areas of improvement, and so on. You can also discover ideas around new products to launch in the future.
Improvement Ideas for Delivery and Customer Service
You can get ideas to improve your delivery process and fix the problematic areas in your customer service.
Marketing and customer insights
Post purchase surveys can also help you get an understanding of where your customers are coming from. You can get an idea of what percentage of your customers came from various channels – social, paid ads, referral, radio/TV ads, word of mouth, etc. You can also get an understanding of the demographic information like age, gender, profession, etc.
Increased reputation on social channels
As we see above, understanding your customer feedback can result in better products and services, ultimately resulting in better customer retention and brand loyalty.
when to do the Post Purchase Survey?
Generally speaking, you can do the post purchase survey twice after the customer purchase.
Immediately after the purchase
Days after purchase (Post-use feedback)
You can also survey your customer after a few days from their purchase, say 10/15 days. This survey can be done over an email. This survey intends to find out the delivery and product experience. The timing of this survey is important. If done too soon, the customer may not have time to experience the product. If done too late customers may not have the purchase experience fresh in their mind. This survey can give you an understanding of areas like delivery experience, product quality, pricing, support experience, etc.
What are the Post Purchase Survey Questions to Ask?
Now that we have discussed why and when to do the post purchase survey, let’s explore the questions you can ask.
The simplest Post Purchase Survey Template
Before diving deep into a detailed set of questions, let’s see a basic survey template that is also pretty popular as well. And for good reason. A basic post purchase survey template consists of just 2 questions. The first can be an NPS or 5-point scale question.
For example – how likely are you to recommend <Your_Brand> to a friend?
Or – how satisfied are you with your recent purchase experience from <Your_Brand>?
For these questions, you can use a simple numeric scale or a visual scale like the Star survey or Smiley face survey.
This question is followed by a long answer question (also known as an open-ended question).
For example: What was the most important reason for choosing that score?
You can also have 2 different questions, for promoters/happy customers and non-promoters. Promoters are the ones who have chosen a scale of 9 and 10 in an NPS question. Happy customers are the ones who have chosen 4 or 5 in a CSAT or 5-Star survey question.
Open-ended Question for Promoters: What did you like the most about your experience?
Open-ended question for Non-Promoters: What can we do to improve your experience?
Often having a simpler survey can help you get more insightful feedback. In fact, you can start with a simper survey and then gradually add more questions.
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Question
- Question: How satisfied are you with your recent purchase?
- Question: How likely are you to recommend <Your_brand> to a friend?
- Question: How would you rate your overall experience with <your_brand>
Open-ended Question
- Please tell us the most important reason for choosing that score.
- For Promoters: What did you like the most about your experience?
- Non-Promoters (Detractors and passives): What can we do to improve your experience?
Ideally, you should have at least 1 open-ended question to get qualitative feedback.
Website/App Experience Questions
- Please rate your experience with our Website/App.
- [Follow-up for not satisfied customers] What issue did you face on our website?
- Please rate our check-out experience
Product Experience
- Please rate the quality of the product. Or How satisfied are you with the quality of the product? The first question is a numeric scale. The second one can have 5 options, 1 being Not satisfied at all and 5 being highly satisfied.
- Please rate the product in terms of value for money.
- What other products or categories would you like to see on our site? [Open-ended question]
Delivery and Customer Service Experience
- Please rate your delivery experience
- If you have contacted customer support, please rate your support experience.
Conversion and Marketing attribution
- How did you hear about us?
- What motivated you to buy from us?
In-store Questions
- Please rate the helpfulness of our staff at the store.
- How easy was it to find the product you were looking for at our store?
How to distribute the Post Purchase Survey
As we have already seen before, how to distribute the post purchase survey, depends upon the time of the survey. For example: when you survey the customers immediately after their purchase, the best way to do the same is on the Thank you or the Order confirmation page. Similarly, when you want to capture the product feedback after product use, the best mode could the email. Let’s explore the modes of survey in detail below.
Web Popup or Web Embed
Email Survey
When you send the survey a few days after purchase, say 10-15 days, you can send the survey over email. Some of the best practices for sending a Post purchase survey via email are –
- Embed the first question rating in the email body. This helps improve the response rate as customers find it easy to respond.
- To build trust, Use your brand theme and send the email using to own domain.
- Send a reminder email to the customers who don’t respond to the first email.
- Personalize the survey email with variables like First Name, Order Number, etc. Personalization builds trust and increases email deliverability.
Here is a detailed list on the best practices to send a survey via email.
When you use an all-in-tool Customer Experience tool like Affiniv, you can easily create a post purchase survey using our templates. Then you can distribute the survey either as a web popup or send the survey over email to your customers after say 15 days from purchase. And finally, you can analyze the feedback on the AI dashboard. Create a free account now to get started.
Best Practices for Post Purchase Survey
Now that we have covered almost every aspect of creating and sending post purchase surveys, let’s explore some best practices. Please note that some of these best practices can apply to all kinds of surveys.
- Keep the survey short and survey questions simple.
- Ask a mix of quantitative and open-ended questions.
- Timing is pretty important for a survey. If asked too early, the customer may not have used the product to provide actionable feedback. Surveyed too late, the customer may not remember their experience too well. It can reduce the response rate as well.
- Provide incentives for a better response rate, especially if the survey is longer. The incentive works well if you are looking for detailed research into your customers and their journey.
Here is a detailed guide on how to increase the response rate.
Conclusion
In this detailed post, we have outlined the details of the Post Purchase Survey, why to use it, when to send it, the questions, and the best practices. If you are an online retailer or sell in-store, surveying your customers after their purchase can provide you with the right insights to improve your customer experience and delight them.
If you are looking for an all-in-one tool to create and distribute the survey, you can try out Affiniv. Used by hundreds of retailers across 10 countries, Affiniv can help you create the survey, show it using a web popup, send it over email, and analyze the responses on the dashboard. You can create a free account to get started.
Also Explore:
Affiniv Post Purchase Feedback app for Shopify
Affiniv Post Purchase Feedback app for Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Want to create and send a Post Purchase survey in minutes?
With Affiniv, you can create beautiful surveys and send them instantly via Email or Embed in your website/app.
