This content was originally published in our Product Director, Sandeep Shah's, monthly newsletter. If you would like to receive regular content written by Sandeep, you can email us to subscribe here.
The Missing Piece to Personalisation
User feedback is invaluable. It helps you to understand what it is your visitors want and what they feel is missing from their experience on your website.
Surveys can be an effective way to gather this feedback. But most people limit this tool to gaining information for graphs and wordclouds.
Not us. We believe that surveys can act as the missing piece to personalisation.
Webtrends Optimize launched surveys 3 months ago. The intention when building the feature was to give users some traditional ways to feedback on what they did and didn't like. A straightforward process that meant we could understand more about how our users felt. What we created was something a little more interesting...
When you're looking to personalise, there's a few datasets you have to hand:
- Traffic source: UTM parameters, referring URLs etc.
- Behaviour and Affinity: Categories browsed into, Price ranges viewed, etc.
- Long-term history: Imported profiles, long-term storage of purchase behaviour, etc.
- Wisdom of the crowd: If there's a wave of people looking for something, we can infer short-term relevancy.
Any one of these are great, and using all 4 are excellent. But now, we have another pool of data to utilise and learn from:
Surveys.
Surveys do two very important things:
- Tell people explicitly that you're interested in them and their opinions
- Give you very well categorised information
From what I've seen, asking questions don't hurt your conversion rates. Personally, I think that's because telling someone you're interested in what they want to say shows that you care. It's also an effective way to focus the mind of the user. Therefore, asking questions to visitors of your website is usually a safe bet.
Next is what Surveys give you.
"Why are you here?"
If you find the right question to ask, websites with a broad product range or many options suddenly get an injection of useful data to make the website more relevant.
For example:
- If you sell Printers and Ink, asking if the user is Home or Business allows you to quote pricing as Inc/Exc VAT.
- If you sell food, asking what their favourite cuisine is could help narrow down your list of restaurants.
- If you sell golfing equipment, knowing their skill level would help inform the brands and price ranges you promote.
A great decision we made with Surveys was to automatically feed responses into LocalStorage and use it for real-time personalisation. That's a profile made from a survey that was built in a fully WYSIWYG tool. Options to retarget being straightforward.
So, it's more than just measurement.
Surveys are the next data pool for personalisation. It's taking the "we inferred this passively", "we know this from actions" and also adding "we asked this proactively" to build a fuller and clearer picture of what users need.
