How to Use Post-Purchase Polls to Improve the Buyer Journey

You can use post-purchase polls to create a better experience for your customers’ buying journey. You can also use the information you get from post-purchase surveys to improve your purchase processes, website, and products. There are many apps you can use — TruConversion or Hotjar, for example — but we use Lucky Orange for this purpose.

The Post-Purchase Poll

A customer goes through the purchasing process on your ecom store. When they complete their purchase, a form pops up and asks these questions: “Was there anything that nearly stopped you from purchasing any products on our site? If so, what?”

You can incentivize your post-purchase polls. We offer a 15% discount on their next purchase if they answer the poll. This should get you a higher response rate on the survey.

Note: If customers haven’t made a purchase yet and seem to be wavering about whether to do so, you can present this pop-up question: “Is there anything stopping you from adding this item to the cart?” You can include specific triggers. For example, if they say that price or discount are holding them up, you can offer a discount as an incentive to push them over the edge.

Analyzing Poll Data

Once you start gathering responses, you can review the reasons why customers might be hesitant:

• Perhaps they let you know that they haven’t received previous orders in a timely way. This is now an issue you can address with that customer as well as with your customer service team as well as your shipping department.
• On Lucky Orange, you can play a recording of customer sessions during the purchasing process to see where they’re having a hard time while buying.
• Customers may volunteer other concerns. For example, they may not like your prices or be able to find items on the website easily. Or your store may not provide a time frame for shipping.

Once you have responses, you can create a data tree. For example, I make a chart in Google Sheets in which I list all the answers I’m getting and how frequently some answers are repeated. I can then create a graph next to the chart to get a visual representation of the issues. This gives you immediate perspective on the breadth of the larger issues your customers are having. It also tells you exactly where you should start to improve your customers’ journeys.

Other Questions You Can Ask

There are other questions you can ask your customers in a post-purchase poll that include:

• Why did you buy this item?
• What made you buy this item?
• Who did you buy this for?
• How did you choose the product you purchased?
• What questions did you have that you couldn’t get answered?
• Were there any unique features you liked about our website?

You can use the answers to address these issues before new visitors to your site encounter them. This can improve the buyer journey for all, make the purchase decision much easier for your customers, and speed up the purchasing process.

And if some of the responses are about product features (e.g., poor battery life), you can improve your product directly so that this becomes a non-issue for your customers.

Setting Up Your Post-Purchase Poll

Here’s how you can set up your post-purchase poll on the Lucky Orange:

• Select “Polls” at the top of the screen.
• Click the “Create Poll” button to start the process.
• Under “Decision Tree,” you can opt for conditional questions (e.g., if a customer answers that price was a problem, that can trigger a second question on pricing). But we prefer to keep it very simple. We save the more complex questions for a poll we send to customers via email (with an incentive) after their purchase.
• Under “Poll Question,” key in the simple question you want to ask.
• Under “Choices” you can opt for one of two sorts of responses:

You can choose to ask a multiple-choice question: “What nearly stopped you from buying: Price, Shipping cost, Lack of information?”

Or you can choose to ask the same question but allow an open response. I prefer this to multiple choice: letting people answer in their own words can get you a lot more information. Note: You can mention an incentive here as part of the question.

• If you choose the open response, delete the sample choices provided under “Choices.”
• With the “Colors” tab, you can adjust the background and text colors to fit your brand. Note: I always make them slightly different from my brand colors so that when the poll pops up, it’s very noticeable.
• Under the “Triggers” tab, there are a variety of options. One of the most important is the “Behavior Tag Triggers” option. Here, you want to choose the “Purchased” tag so that the poll automatically pops up only when someone has completed their purchase. You can also block the poll if someone has purchased in the past. Note: I don’t block previous purchasers because each time someone purchases, they are having a new experience that might yield useful responses.
• Hit “Save” and activate the poll when you’re ready for it to go live.

Wrap-Up

Now that you’ve created a post-purchase poll, you’ll have the data to improve your ecom store buyers’ journey and your website, to answer customer questions before they’re asked, and to make your product better.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to learn how to build, grow, and scale your ecommerce business, check us out on social media or head over to workwithbgs.com to find out more!