For some years now, websites – whether focusing on e-business or not – have entered a new era. After long claiming that the customer is king, it is now the “customer experience” that is at the core of all concerns: user-centric, customer satisfaction, customer-centric, UX, and so on. Effectively enough, according to a Forrester Research study, for 93% of decision-makers the quality of the customer experience is a strategic priority . Let’s have a look at how relying on user feedback can benefit your website.
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In spite of the importance you give to the technical aspect of your website, no web actor is safe from missing a bug. This can penalize smooth navigation. In addition, site visitors no longer lose time with sites that have problems. They tend to go directly to the competition. The retail sector is particularly affected by this phenomenon.
Nearly 70% of users who run into a problem leave the site immediately or go to a rival
User feedback is therefore a very effective way to detect problems encountered during navigation. For example, purchasing pain points and other obstacles can be eliminated to ensure smooth, pleasant navigation. You may observe that a large number of users leave the site on the same page or abandon their shopping cart. Why not ask them directly why they leave while they are still on your site? You’ll be able to shed light on a mystery that makes you lose customers, and therefore sales.
Continuing optimization of the purchase funnel must not take priority over the essential aspects of the user experience. This is what Chronodrive observed before the introduction of their new merchant site. Particularly in the online grocery shopping market, users want to be able to easily find brands and order in an efficient way.
Launching a new web platform means possibly upsetting loyal customers and potentially losing business. The new e-business site project needed to respect site user habits while proposing changes that would improve the navigation experience. Tests made with customers before putting the new version online allowed obtaining very precise qualitative and quantitative measurements. User feedback guided the redesign:
The entire Chronodrive team spent many months reworking our site, which is highly strategic for us. But we were no longer able to step back from the project. Therefore, the first results encouraged us to step back and identify concerns and ways to improve things in terms of ergonomics. And that’s exactly what we did!
In sum, by consulting with its own customers, Chronodrive was able to propose a new platform with even better performance.
A digital marketing manager may have a very precise idea of the information and products that should be found on his site, as well as the way they should be presented. But what happens if visitors are looking for other information? And what if the gap between the manager’s perception and that of users, however small, has an impact on the bounce rate? What if it even impacted shopping cart abandonment? It would be impossible to answer these questions unless you made a survey of visitors.
These few questions enable redirecting the user pathway in order to satisfy the primary expectations of visitors to your site. Let’s take the example of a retail chain that also sells products online. Here, visitors consult the site to obtain information on the network of brick-and-mortar stores, as well as to purchase directly online.
This issue was raised by Havas-Voyages.com. The idea was to measure the impact of online on offline. The teams explain:
We wanted an easy way to track our site visitors and ascertain their offline purchasing intentions through a questionnaire that would be triggered under certain conditions. This project led to the discovery that 53% of visitors intended to visit a travel agency and that 50% were not yet customers. We plan on making other measurements to improve our campaigns with this very flexible and powerful too!
In conclusion, the company was not aware of the intentions of more than half of site visitors and did not know whether online traffic was a significant driver of visits to an agency.
Traditional analytics tools allow studying the pathway of users by session. However, the sales cycle is, in reality, much longer and/or more complex. It is therefore very complicated to calculate ROI on marketing expenses by analyzing sessions only. In the previous point, we cited the example of Havas-Voyages, which discovered with LiveIntercept that over half of e-business site visitors planned to go to a travel agency. The analysis of these visitor sessions indicated that a large number of customers left the site without purchasing. Nonetheless, by simply asking prospects if they planned to purchase later (on- or offline), it was easy to identify the channels that provided a qualified audience and to optimize their use. The site served as a preliminary step in the process of cross-channel purchasing.
Furthermore, the average duration of the purchasing cycle could be identified through a complementary marketing study carried out in the agencies. In this way, it was established that a customer purchased within five days. Thus, it was useless to put a dent in gross margin by sending an email with a promotion before the end of this period.
It’s obvious: with user feedback, you can refine knowledge of the customer, and spending on customer acquisition becomes more effective.
Reworking an internet site is a major strategic challenge that can be very profitable if previous studies are properly done. But if you rush through an upstream study, you may end up launching a new site that disappoints visitors and puts a real brake on site growth. Not surprisingly, there are often major differences between a marketing vision and the perception of site visitors!
To avoid this pitfall, Ouest France asked its regular readers to test the beta version of a new site over a fifteen-day period. Through the collection and analysis of these impressions, the newspaper was able to make structural modification before launching the site. The assessment was a real success in terms of reader satisfaction, since readers realized that their opinion was valued, and also because of the audience statistics.
A recent study showed that less than 3% of site visits ended in a transformation . However, over a fourth of visitors who were re-targeted came back to the site to finalize their purchase.
Thus, user feedback coupled to a good CRM tool can improve the pertinence of remarketing campaigns. In this way, you can propose contents that are remarkably personalized to your customers in real time. Whether in their personal area or on your page, or even via email, it will be very easy for you to strike a chord. You’ll be able to propose services or products to your customers in accordance with their needs or current wishes, with everything just a click away.
User feedback can also be approached like a satisfaction survey that runs like a leitmotif on your internet site. Each behavioral change for a given profile (i.e., segment) can thus be clarified through questionnaires.
Using this feedback, it is easy to readjust your positioning.
For example, if you have a purchasing channel that converts less than others, it is possible to question this user segment in order to find out the reasons for their hesitations and/or encourage them to transform by offering promotions.
All brands orient their communications toward the consumer with slogans, promises and values. Since 1990, although the word “customer” appeared only 146 times in various international brand slogans and taglines, the word “you” appeared 5,600 times . Brand efforts to put the customer at the center of their strategies are undeniable. But more than words, users want proof of this commitment.
Regularly questioning site visitors to obtain their feedback, adapting according to these observations and informing the community of changes brought about by this process represents a highly tangible involvement. In addition to reinforcing your product through user feedback, your brand will take on a positive, friendly aura.
Offering site visitors the possibility of stating their opinion also enables avoiding that they leave comments on the social networks.
Abandoned shopping carts are the web marketer’s nightmare. Nevertheless, over two-thirds of purchasers adding an item to their cart do not finalize their purchase .
Fnacspectacles.com wanted to solve this problem through user feedback, with two major goals. The first was to understand why users who added an item to their cart did not concretize the purchase. The second was to obtain opinions of the platform from non-purchasing visitors. After the implementation of two different questionnaires and collecting their data, the teams were able to easily identify and then correct purchasing pain points. Visitors put their finger on a major functionality, which to them had been notably neglected:
Our tool for choosing a seat in a theater or concert hall was underused for a long time. Now, we are careful about the design of this key area and have optimized it to lead to an order as naturally as possible.
In large companies, the list of evolutions and changes to be made to a site is often like Prévert’s lengthy and absurd inventory: each person has a request according to his or her sector, service, objectives and, of course, personal interest.
Arming yourself with user feedback allows prioritizing these requests. For example, if 80% of users say that there is a lack of visibility on delivery fees, it is totally consistent to make this change before others. In other words, these results arising from user experience allow giving more weight to one project as compared to another, and sometimes to initiate new project.
User feedback lets you obtain precise information on the user’s pathway, as well as on user behavior, and allows questioning visitors on their motivations, expectations or pain points encountered. Using a tool like this is a gold mine for web marketers. With this knowledge, they can optimize their positioning and thereby increase ROI.
If you want to create an online survey and need more information about our solutions, contact us using this form or call us at +33 1 57 42 42 42.
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