How do you deliver online surveys? How do you get them in front of the right audience? For different research projects and programmes, the answer will naturally change. But those are questions we've been giving a lot of thought to at FlexMR as we continue to develop InsightHub into an intelligent, integrated research platform.
Previously, we provided the option to run surveys within your platform to specific user segments, or generating an open link which could be added to online or printed materials, emails, adverts and more. But that still doesn't represent the full needs of researchers today. On a crowded internet where time and attention are precious, it's important to deliver surveys instantly and in a non-intrusive manner. That's why we're introducing pop-up and embedded web surveys to the platform.
Extending the Reach of Research
One of the biggest benefits is that you can use a single survey and publish it in multiple ways to different audiences - and still analyse all of the responses from one place in a seamless way. You could simply publish the same survey across different brand assets. For example, if you are managing research for a group of brands, you could analyse the differences in your audiences by publishing the same survey on each brand website.
Another way of extending reach is to survey people from different sources; you can create your survey, publish on your website but also send to your recruited community members, a wider CRM list, a non-customer sample (bought from an access panel). The analysis between these would elicit many interesting similarities and differences between your loyal customer base, those that are aware of you and those that are not.
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| For greatest effect, surveys should be delivered as close to relevant touchpoints as possible - meeting customers where they are. |
What is an Embedded Survey?
An embedded web survey is one that you can host from within your website. That means they can reach a far wider audience – for free – than your community panel or even from one that you might buy-in or promote through social media. There are two main routes open to you:
- Embedded within a frame on your website. This is good if you want every visitor to see it and have the chance of answering. They are also useful if you want to host alongside particular content and display questions that are relevant to that.
- Served via a pop-up overlay. A pop-up is an intercept on a user’s journey on your website and prompts them to answer some questions. This is best where you want to trigger the survey based on specific criteria or only want to survey a sub-section of your visitors.
Both of these styles of delivery open up a wide variety of options for researchers. Let's take a look at some of the opportunities in more detail.
Embedded Frames
- Audience profiling. If you want to know more about your target audience, the easiest way to find out is to embed a survey directly on your website. This will capture people who you know are aware of your brand and it will get the widest reach possible; everyone who visits. You’ll want to ask questions to find out who they are, what they want/like and why they are visiting.
- CSAT and feedback. Businesses often have specific member areas on their websites, where they can manage their account, report problems or request upgrades. These are people that you will want to get regular feedback from and embedding surveys in these areas, perhaps alongside the places where they report problems or request help, are a great way to invite open feedback. Check out our embedded CSAT survey template here.
- Product research. To grow your business, you need to be able to quickly innovate and develop new products and services. A good source of help can be found from people that are already aware of you – some may be regular customers, some less and some might be first-time visitors, so an embedded survey on your website will get a good cross-section. Ask them about their wants, needs and desires; what else do they want from you that you’re not delivering?
- Research recruitment. Another great way to use an embedded survey is to recruit them into something else; into a customer panel, where you can invite them to get involved with a wider range of research projects and have the opportunity to receive rewards. Create a web-page that advertises the opportunity and embed a few questions to qualify or profile them, which will then automatically sign-them up at the end.
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| Surveys embedded into your website, e-commerce store or digital products can be used for audience profiling, CSAT or CX research, plus recruitment into long-term insight platforms. |
Pop-Up Delivery
- Website user experience. In today’s digital world we need to make sure our websites are enticing and easy to use and one of the best sources of understanding is to ask people what they think to their site ‘in the moment’, as they are using it. What do they like? What frustrates them? For this type of survey it is best to ask a random sample of people so that it doesn’t get biased to those happy or unhappy. You could also programme one to only pop-up on a specific page or site-wide.
- Customer journey analysis. A variation of user experience is to analyse specific web journeys through your site. In this case you are probably trying to analyse how a specific form, page or checkout process is working; can it be improved? What do people leave the cart with things in it? In these cases a pop-up survey will get higher responses and better quality responses than following up with them later. Trigger it from specific actions from within that journey.
- Product feedback. How are consumers responding to your product range and offer? Rather than ask everyone visiting your site for their un-met needs, in this case you will want to ask a specific or random sample of people visiting specific product pages; you might want to ask people who exit from a certain place or dwell longer than average on a page.
- Net Promotor Score. One of the most frequent reasons people use surveys is to track satisfaction over time. The Customer Satisfaction Survey is now almost ubiquitous. One variation of this is to use the Net Promotor Score (NPS), which boils down experience into one simple question; How likely a person is to recommend you to their friends and family. The two attractions of this are: the simplicity of answering one question, and the powerful feedback internally. You want this to be continuously available on your website, from a random sample and using a live dashboard to share internally.
Integrating Qualitative Research
Whilst numbers are great and are the mainstay of survey research, increasingly people need to ‘see and hear’ their customers, so remember embedded and pop-up surveys can easily be enhanced with both open-comment boxes and simple video recording, Video Booth questions. These still work perfectly within embedded and pop-up surveys.
Want to find out more about how you can use InsightHub embedded and pop-up surveys? Browse our library of template surveys for inspiration.
