The best decisions are informed by an abundance of data from a representative cross-section of your customer base, and mobile surveys are often the best way to get it. But here’s the catch: Effective mobile survey questions need to be shown at the right place and time within the app, to the right consumer segment. Through mobile apps specifically, short surveys with specific asks (like feedback on a new feature) are the most effective and efficient.
While we might all know this, actually writing and deploying mobile surveys is a different beast altogether. Many product and mobile marketing teams simply don’t have a technical or formal background in market research. Given this, people learn much of what they know through self-education. Just like through this blog post – hi, hello, and welcome!
So how does one deploy killer, effective surveys that garner high response rates and actually useful feedback? We’ve got you covered.
Why it’s important to write effective mobile survey questions
In case you need a refresher on the plethora of benefits mobile surveys offer to product and marketing teams, here are some of the highlights.
Higher app response rates and engagement
You can get higher response rates than traditional feedback channels like email. For example, the average email open rate is only roughly around 20 percent, with the amount of customers actually clicking through and completing a survey being much lower (the average email click rate is roughly three percent). Our customers achieve particularly high response rates for in-app surveys by triggering them at the most opportune times. This reduces friction in the customer journey because you’re removing steps that the customer has to take to give you feedback such as replying to a long, irrelevant email survey. Asking questions at the right time and place to the right people will help you gather far more feedback.
Persona-specific feedback
We know that the customer experience can vary drastically from location to location, demographic to demographic, etc. It is more important than ever to be able to identify gaps in the customer experience down to individual customer IDs. When you can quickly identify and analyze issues by passing through custom information like this, you will ultimately save valuable time and resources.
Real-time mobile app feedback
With in-app surveys, you can reach customers in real time when the experience is still fresh. It’s the perfect time to take advantage of that captive audience within the mobile app experience. When reviewing survey responses in real time, you can make faster decisions, fix problems more quickly, and resolve issues before they become larger.
Wider reach
On average, most brands hear from less than one percent of their customers surveyed. We call this one percent the “vocal minority” because they are usually the loudest customers on one end of the spectrum of customer happiness or the other. One percent is a tiny segment of your customer base, so it’s dangerous to make decisions – specifically about your product roadmap or mobile app experience – based on that small dataset. In-app survey tools like Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive) allow you to proactively hear from a much larger audience than any other channel, such as email.
So, how do we get better at creating effective mobile surveys? Let’s dive in.
Mobile survey use cases
There are many great ways to use surveys to better understand your customers. Here are some examples of how surveys can be used at every stage of the customer journey.
- *Ad feedback: Mobile surveys are a key method to measure the effectiveness of ads within your app by helping you gather feedback for advertising partners. Depending on how you segment your customer base to determine which group sees ads, conducting a quick survey can help you understand how customers received the ad. Even asking a question as simple as, “Do you remember seeing an ad from [advertiser name]?” can be enough to help you baseline its effectiveness.
- Customer research: Surveys can help you learn more about specific demographics and customer cohorts. Who are your happiest customers? How do different types of customers use your app differently? This ia a key way to learn about your most – and least – engaged customers.
- Investigating issues: If you notice abnormal customer behavior or a lot of bug reports, you can deploy a survey to understand exactly what’s going wrong in the customer journey.
- Customer education and adoption: You can fill gaps in customer education and product adoption. Why aren’t more people using your curbside pickup service? Are your marketing campaigns doing enough to educate your customer base about it – especially if it’s new? What messaging is working best? When you’re constantly getting feedback on these topics, you can quickly tweak and improve your outreach efforts.
*We have example effective mobile survey questions for these later down in this post!
Want to see what this looks like in real life? Learn how Dunkin’ was able to achieve 20% survey response rates when using Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive).
Steps to building useful mobile surveys (without a market research background)