Enhance your conversion with 3 microsurveys

“Not quite my tempo” the infamous line of the music instructor from the movie Whiplash when the protagonist, a drumming prodigy, is out of sync.

Not quite my tempo is also how we all feel about conversion rate on our websites & digital platforms. We are never content with it, it should always be higher.

As we seek the right tempo for conversion rate, we first look at analytics to pinpoint where prospects abandon the buying process.

However, to improve conversion, we need to understand the thinking of prospects who do not complete the purchase process. It’s essential to uncover how prospects decide to buy your product. Understanding it empowers you to optimize your conversion flow.

This is where microsurveys enter the arena

Before you head off to run some user interviews, you can easily uncover key reasons for dropping out of the conversion funnel.

You could set listening posts along the user flow at critical steps to shed light on their thinking and feeling. A listening post is a euphemism for microsurveys, which are widgets offering you to show questions in a pop-up at targeted events.

Here are 3 microsurveys we use at Airtime that will help you understand why prospects don’t convert:

Information availability survey

When a prospect visits your website with a degree of purchase intent, there are specific kinds of information they are searching for. It’s critical for conversion that (1) decision influencing information is easily findable and (2) it’s easy to understand.

Type of microsurvey: Customer Effort Score — on a scale of 1–7 the prospect can indicate how difficult it was to find all relevant information

Exemplary question:

1. Question (scale): To what extent do you agree with the following statement? “It was easy to find the information I was looking for.
2. Follow up question (free-text): Why did you give this score?

Targeting: Product / pricing page with at least +30 seconds delay.

Exit-intent survey

If your website visitors need to go through a form to purchase or create an account, a majority exits the process on any of the pages.

Type of microsurvey: Free-text

Exemplary questions:

1. What hinders you from continuing?
2. Why did you decide to leave before finishing?

Targeting: Exit-intent event in your conversion flow. On a desktop, the mouse leaving the browser window is a good proxy. On mobile, it can be longer idle time or changing the downward scrolling to a brief upward scroll (prompting the browser URL & navigation bar).

Purchase experience survey

Even visitors who convert experience some hurdles in the process. Understanding where they struggled is a decent proxy for uncovering the reasons for drop offs for less dedicated visitors.

Type of microsurvey: Customer Satisfaction Score — on a scale of 1–5 new customers can indicate how satisfied they were with the purchase process

Exemplary questions:

1. Question (scale): How satisfied are you with the account opening process?
2. Follow-up question (free-text): What did you like and not like about it?

Targeting: On the thank you page after account opening (or use an equivalent major conversion event in your flow)

What to expect

Data supported evidence of the key pain points within a couple of days.

With a 10% engagement rate of the microsurveys, you can plot key pain points with a traffic of 1000 sessions.

Depending on your traffic, this could be as fast as a few hours.

Of course, the more data you have the more solid your findings are. However, the first 100 responses are good enough to see the outlines of the main problem fields and why people stumble in the conversion process.

Lastly, I shared examples here that will require your fine tuning for your conversion funnel.

Think about the events in the user journey on your platform, which indicate the right moment to prompt a microsurvey. Otherwise you end up annoying people resulting in low response rate and oftentimes low scores punishing you for the disturbance.

Start with a reasonable setup, observe feedback and fine tune the questions & targeting.

Final thoughts

A key advantage of microsurveys is that once you set them up, they deliver you a constant inflow of feedback.

As you use this feedback to change the copy, design or user flow in the conversion process, you can track how your users’ feedback changes. Do new pain points emerge? Are you still hearing the same thing?

Either way, now you have an additional layer of input that will help you to interpret analytics and measure how successful you are improving the conversion funnel.

Check out Airtime for microsurvey templates and start improving your conversion for free.

‍