You’ve finished a new website, and you’re hyped, but you wonder if your users will love it as you do. You conduct 1-2 interview research, but time is limited, you just have to release it into the wild.
And again you wonder if there are other more efficient or creative ways to ask for feedback.
So that’s how you landed here. Many companies struggle with how to ask for website feedback just like you, and the solution varies. You can send more surveys, use new tools, or try to design feedback questions differently. All these are covered in this article.
See, you already found a new way to collect website feedback! Now, let’s continue and help you get that feedback with the right tool!
🔥 Quick sidetrack, feedback peeps: if you need an ultimate guide to customer feedback, check it out right away. 🔥
What is Website Feedback?
Before getting into creative ways to ask for feedback, it is imperative to understand what website feedback actually is. In simple terms, any opinions and impressions you receive directly from the users or visitors of the website through feedback widgets or surveys can be classified as website feedback. As it has become difficult to keep your visitors hooked, companies often look for creative ways to collect feedback.
This information can be highly valuable as organizations can leverage it to gain valuable insights to make informed decisions about new features, existing bugs, and preferences of their target audience.
Why Does Website Feedback Matter Anyway?
There are many companies that look for creative or funny ways to ask for feedback because they understand the importance of insightful information. Website feedback isn’t just about seeking validation for your ideas and execution but actually working towards delivering a better experience to your visitors.
By relying on best practices for website feedback collection, companies and brands can improve their business. Feedback can help them:
- Learn why visitors are abandoning certain pages or shopping cart
- Learn why they are not filling out forms and surveys
- Find out the bugs, weaknesses, and defects in the website’s UX
- Identify what they need to improve and prioritize their work
- Discover the elements or aspects that have been a turn-off for visitors
Apart from the above, there are various other business-oriented reasons for collecting website feedback.
- It makes your customers feel that you care about their experience
- It allows you to build brand loyalty in the long run
- It helps you improve your products and services across brands
- It enables you to learn about qualitative and quantitative customer satisfaction
- It helps you foster and nurture credibility and trust
Strategy First: Gain More Feedback by Asking the Right Questions
Before you start collecting feedback from your website visitors, make sure that you have clearly defined why you are seeking feedback.
Outlining the desired outcomes is essential for smartly gathering feedback from website visitors.
Consider the following aspects before you start:
- What has changed on your website from a website visitor’s perspective?
- What’s in it for your visitors?
- What will you do with the data you collect?
- Which channels have worked best for you in the past when asking website visitors for customer insights?
So… What is a Website Feedback Survey?
When you are looking for clever ways to ask for satisfied reviews, a website feedback survey can help you out. It is a simple form that asks simple questions to determine how your customers feel about the website. This can help you find out:
- Whether the visitors trust your website or not
- If they are acquiring the information they need
- If the website is aesthetically appealing and functionally user-friendly
- Whether the visitors are returning or not
- Whether the visitors feel on the website or not
Creative Feedback Channels
When it comes to gathering feedback from website visitors, I’m quite impressed with the many different ways companies and website owners deal with the matter. We have to constantly come up with new ideas and ways how to get in touch with our website visitors, especially since lengthy feedback forms do not drive conversions and qualitative feedback. This is why I’m going to show you some of the most creative ways to gather feedback from your website visitors.
1. Offer Various Touch Points & Have a Contact Page
OK, this might be an obvious one, but it’s a truly important one as well. Try to be as open as possible when it comes to feedback channels. There’s not one right channel, but there are probably a couple of them.
If your website visitors prefer email, make sure to provide contact info on your website that can easily be found.
If your website visitors prefer Twitter. Great, be on Twitter and make sure they can find you there.
2. Funny Forms
You probably consider yourself a serious businessman or businesswoman, and you have never considered making your feedback forms a bit funnier, right?
Well, why not? Funny feedback forms will definitely catch the eye of your website visitors. We’ve experimented quite a bit with different feedback forms and ways how to interact with our website visitors.
3. Asking the Right Questions
I know you have probably heard this before. And it’s certainly true. Although I mean something different here. It’s not about asking the same standard questions we all have seen before on other websites.
No.
It’s about asking your personal questions to your own website visitors.
So what do I mean? Do not copy/paste other people’s questions, but think about creative ways to gather feedback.
Need some examples?
Instead of asking what his or her profession is, why not reframe the question to:
“What are you doing for a living?”
After re-phrasing this particular question in this way, we saw a great increase in the amount of feedback. I can really imagine how it brings smiles to our website visitors when they see the available options.
Here’s a screenshot I took from the answers of our website visitors to that question.
4. Social Media Feedback
Ok. I know Twitter, Facebook, and Co. might not be the perfect place for every business when it comes to asking for feedback. But it can be the place where you can hear honest feedback from website visitors and potential customers in an informal way.
Here are a couple of examples:
5. Exit Intent Feedback
Opinions on exit intents differ. No matter how annoying or inappropriate, you’ll find them. Exit intents are a good way in order to convince your website visitors to do one last thing before they leave your site.
So, why not ask them for feedback? For example, you can place an exit intent on your newly relaunched website or on certain new features on your site to get some fresh insights!
We’ve experimented quite a bit with different exit intents, such as site overlays and sidebars.
I think there’s no silver bullet and no perfect exit intent that fits every need.
6. Be Nice with Hello Bars
Hello bars, or skinny banners, are not only great for welcoming your website visitors, but they are also useful for addressing certain topics, like gathering feedback.
When asking for feedback, I recommend making it as personal as possible such as a personalized Hello Bar including a special mention like…
“Hello Trello Lovers! Are you enjoying our integration? Let us know & get a free goodie bag”
7. Raise an Easy-to-Answer Question via Email
So you might have gathered the email addresses of your website visitors by giving away something for free (an ebook, a case study, etc.). That’s great!
Now, it’s completely up to you not to mess things up.
Emailing those people is a great way not only to collect feedback from active website visitors but also to build relationships with them.
But if you end your email with “Can you give me some feedback?”, you won’t be getting a ton of email responses.
Instead of such generic questions, you need to come up with some specific question that reflects the person’s skills and strengths.
So if you know, for example that the person you’re emailing has experience in web design (see above-mentioned point 3) on how to get that information) you can ask her/him about her feelings about the re-designed product tour.
Pro tip: Include a funny gif or image. In the end, it’s all about making people smile.
8. Retarget Your Website Visitors
Have you ever thought about asking for feedback with paid ads or with targeted URL paths?
Well, I guess a lot of people aren’t aware of the benefits of retargeting your website visitors.
Besides getting the chance to get in touch with already pre-branded people, it also enables you to communicate the added value of your brand or product to people who already visited your website.
What to bear in mind when it comes to retargeting:
- Use google tag manager for setting up retargeting ads on Google Adwords, Facebook, and Twitter.
- Be as specific as possible. For example: Only ask people who visited your product tour about something product-related.
PS: If you want to learn more about remarketing, make sure to check out Moz’s Whiteboard Friday on Remarketing.
9. Get the Timing Right.
Have ever been asked to leave a review for a new app immediately after installing it?
Well, this is definitely not how to do it. Aside from these creative ways to ask your website visitors for feedback, it’s also about getting the timing right.
Sending the right email at the right time is as important as asking the right question at the right place and time.
If you have some website tracking (like Google Analytics or Heap) installed, you can filter out users who have visited a certain amount of web pages or have done certain activities.
Knowing when to ask for feedback is a crucial part of getting more and better feedback.
It’s All About Being Nice to Humans
After showing you these nine creative ways of asking for feedback, I’d like to conclude with one last key lesson:
“In the end, we need to stop treating customers like metrics and more like people. Treat them right and never ask for anything in return and then reap the benefits.”
If you’re interested in feedback workflows and website feedback tools that can help you get started collecting feedback, you should also check out the following post on a “new way to stress-free customer feedback”.
And don’t forget to avoid these mistakes when collecting feedback from your website visitors.
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