Website Visitor Feedback –Your Mission Is To Listen!

Listening to what your website visitors have to say and the type of feedback they give is as much dependent on when you ask, how you ask and being trusted with a reply. Approaching at the right time in the right way is a crucial part of your online brand design.

Collecting visitor feedback is a delicate operation! Knowing how your visitors feel and respond to one or more aspects of the website experience offered is crucial. How they might view and possibly share their thoughts and feelings to their social media network communities can make or break perceptions of your brand identity – and consequent visitor traffic and ranking.

The number one action is to tell visitors immediately on arrival to your site that they are invited, if they wish to spend a few moments, to provide feedback after their visit. By inviting on arrival, you avoid interrupting visitors during their experience.

Under no circumstances interrupt potential customers in the middle of their visit with a request for feedback that was clearly triggered by some action they took.

Research shows that survey interruptions yield four to five times fewer replies than on-arrival invitations, and will significantly increase the annoyance among all of the visitors involved, whether they participate or not. On average, 2 to 6 percent of visitors will opt in to a well-branded, on-arrival invitation, with more than 90 percent of those who agree to take the survey, actually providing feedback at the end of their visit.

Inviting feedback during or at the end of a website visit has been proven to produce a more negative feedback. On-arrival invitations tend to provide a representative sample of both positive and negative feedback.

Remember - timing affects visitors’ motives to take the survey, and people are quicker to complain than they are to compliment!

To gain visitor confidence, it is vitally important that visitors understand immediately that a feedback request comes from your organisation only, i.e. as part of your online marketing,  and not by an outside source. The invitation should be branded to make it clear that you are the one conducting the survey and must have a clear and easy to use opt-out button.

The facts are that most visitors will not want to participate, and it is equally important to respect their decision, and avoid asking them again for at least three months.

It’s also important not to overdo the feedback requests. For most sites, 750-1,200 responses per month is enough to address most information needs, e.g. for 100,000 unique visitors per month, an invitation rate of three in 10 should be more than adequate to gather new and relevant information on an ongoing basis.