5 ways to collect qualitative data from customers

Numbers are great. You can easily analyze them and some say they don’t lie. In fact, we love numbers so much and we produce so vast amounts of them that we came up with a special term ‘big data’. This buzzword is on mouths of all marketers and, of course, analysts.

The reason? Numbers really make work of marketers easier and much more effective. We can track the performance of marketing campaigns and how the website is performing. But we miss one important thing – opinions of users that can’t be shown in Google Analytics or KISSMetrics.

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Think about your marketing automation efforts. You might see people adding products to carts and then not converting. Probably you offer discounts or time-limited special offers to all such visitors or the most promising ones. Probably you’ll see good results. But what if the price is not the problem for the person? There are more reasons why people quit shopping (examples here: Why do customers abandon their online shopping carts? Time to research!). If you find out what why a certain person is not converting you can address their needs and see an even better performance of marketing automation.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? But how to collect feedback from visitors and customers? In this article, I will show you 5 ways you can do that.

5 ways to collect qualitative data

Website surveys

Run short surveys on your website with smart widgets and collect feedback. Precisely target who and when sees them so you can adjust your message. Thanks to that you can decide what to ask about. Example: you can ask a new visitor who just entered your website directly how they found you. However, asking the same question a person who clicked your AdWords ad doesn’t make sense – you know exactly how they came to your website. Ask questions vital to your marketing team to provide them with valuable insights on your visitors and problems they face. It will help you improve design, purchase paths and adjust communication strategy.

Available tools: Survicate, (SALESManago-integrated), Qualaroo.

Live chat

Perhaps there is no better way to collect feedback from visitors than simply talking to them. Live chat makes it easy. Chat operators can give visitors a hand to guide them towards conversion and solve problems. Interactions between people can help reveal problems impossible to notice in any other way. There is one disadvantage – if you want to be serious about incorporating feedback in your marketing then you need to create information flows. Otherwise, suggestions and opinions of visitors will end up in notes of staff handling chats without benefiting your company.

Available tools: SLAESmanago Live Chat (contact us and schedule an individual presentation) InteliWISE, (SALESManago-integrated), LiveChat.

Surveys

Surveys are still an incredibly popular way of collecting feedback from visitors. A completed survey gives you a lot of data and insight into your visitors’ behavior. The major problem is getting email addresses of people willing to fill out a survey. That’s why you usually send them to your customers or people on your mailing lists. It limits the scope. Plus, you shouldn’t expect high response rates – many people don’t like spending their time filling out surveys and some might be concerned about privacy. However, offering participants some kind of reward might help motivate them and get satisfying results.

Available tools: SurveyMonkey, Google Forms.

Social media monitoring

Without incorporating social monitoring, you’re blind. Often people don’t want to talk to you. Instead, they go to their social profiles and share information with their friends and followers. You can jump into conversations and help people solve problems or take praise. Keep in mind that if you don’t do that your competitors will be happy to talk to your customers, especially when they are dissatisfied. That’s the moment when customers are also more likely to switch a provider so keep you must be faster than your competitors.

Available tools: Brand24, notify.

Feedback tabs

Feedback tabs are similar to survey widgets but static. It’s a floating box on a side of a page that expands to a contact form when you click it. It’s available at all times, no need of targeting and any visitor can fill it out. Some visitors might be more willing to fill out a tab than talk to a person as such tabs seem more anonymous and some people just don’t want to talk to you. Less engaging than live chat or website surveys but still often easier to use for visitors than contact forms. Often used primarily for reporting problems or bugs.

Available tools: Survicate , (SALESmanago-integrated), BugMuncher.

Summary

As you can see, collecting qualitative data is not difficult. There are many available tools on the market. The key to success with it is having a clear goal what you are going to do with collected data and how you are going to use it. When you know that you can proceed to choose the right tool and putting it into action.

You can use user feedback solely for a given project, for example. when you want to assess a new design of your website (example here: Case Study). But you can also incorporate it into your marketing processes. Constantly listen to your visitors and customers to look for improvements and new ideas to test.

Plus, feedback from visitors can be a great addition to your marketing automation software. Answers sent to marketing automation software like (SALESmanago) can help you prepare tailored offers to convert a visitor into a buyer by addressing his exact needs and concerns. It will help you increase the effectiveness of marketing automation software and provide higher ROI.

(Survicate ) is the fastest way to collect feedback from website visitors and customers. Precisely targeted widgets allow you to survey specific group of visitors who will provide you with valuable insights. Use the (integration with SALESmanago)to personalize communication with customers better than ever.

Bio: Lucjan Kierczak is an inbound marketer at Survicate – a SALESmanago-integrated website survey tool that makes collecting feedback easy and quick. You can find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.