Best Practices for Website Pop-Up Surveys

A website pop-up survey, also known as an on-page survey, is a survey to collect feedback in real-time on the customer’s online experience. It can appear as a pop-up window or as an on-page survey through a widget (usually appears in the corner of the page). They allow you to collect customer feedback directly through your website at various points of a potential customer’s interaction with you. There is a lot of freedom with pop-up surveys as they can appear to website visitors at a variety of stages of their time on your site, so you can evaluate the customer experience of your website anywhere. 

Best practices for pop-up surveys

1. Timing

A survey shouldn’t be the first thing to appear on a customer’s screen when they visit your website, but it might be useful for it to be the last. With pop-up survey tools, you can determine the logic for what prompts a survey based on what most makes sense for your business, customer base and website. In most cases, it makes little sense to have a survey generate at the moment a customer clicks onto your homepage, as your website visitors will not have formed any opinions yet that are worth measuring. The most important time to ask for feedback can often be directly following an interaction with a customer service representative through the chat functionality on your website. Exit surveys or post-purchase surveys can also be useful for NPS questions to see if a customer would recommend your business after their time spent on your website.

2. Keep it short!

We give this advice for almost every kind of survey, but it holds especially true for a pop-up survey. There is usually intent in the reasoning for someone to visit your website, and very rarely will that be to give feedback. Keep the survey length short so they can carry on browsing or shopping as they intended to do. Furthermore, a pop-up is almost never large, so considering the limited amount of space that is allowed for text, you will want to keep the questions concise and clear. If you’re including a survey that is more than three questions, it is good practice to also include an estimation of how long the survey will take to complete to reduce drop-off rates.

3. Optimise for mobile

It is becoming increasingly popular for people to search the internet and shop online via their smartphones, so your pop-up surveys must be equipped for mobile viewing as well as desktop. This means reformatting for the size of a mobile screen and easy to use navigation buttons. If website visitors are answering the survey from their device and gets frustrated with their inability to easily respond, you’ll have high drop-off rates. 

4. Target strategically

What’s really great about pop-up surveys is that you’re able to target key demographics based on their browsing history. By targeting your surveys you can get a lot of insights about different segmentations of customers. You can, for example, choose to survey based on purchase history segmenting customers based on if they are new visitors, returning visitors, established customers, etc. You can also survey based on the page your customer is viewing. Whether it’s a product page or at checkout, this can determine the type of question you ask to which type of customer.