What is an exit survey?
An exit survey is a method to take qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers when they are about to exit the brand touchpoint. The touchpoint could be a retail or a digital store. In a brick-and-mortar store, it’s quite common to see a staff cordially requesting to fill out a survey at the exit door.
Exit surveys are widely used to get feedback from visitors. On a digital touchpoint like a website, an exit survey is triggered when a user moves the cursor toward the close button. One example is asking questions about the user experience when a customer is about to exit from the cart page or checkout page of an eCommerce store.
What is the importance of an exit survey?
Customer drop-off is not uncommon, but analyzing the reason behind it allows for creating a better user experience. The purpose to deploy the exit survey is to understand the motivation of a departing user and identify the weak links present in the user journey.
The importance of an exit survey is that the information about the product or service experience comes straight from the horse’s mouth. Thus, an exit survey reduces guesstimates and helps in creating a strong hypothesis for the next CRO campaign.
Also, the importance of an exit survey can be understood from the following benefits:
- Helps in gathering accurate information on the product, user experience, and pricing.
- Becomes a foundation for product improvements and new feature rollout.
- Creates a caring image of the brand in the mind of a customer.
- Allows changing the user’s mind and reduces the churn rate.
- An exit survey has a better completion rate than email feedback because its triggering is contextually relevant.
Now that you know the importance along with benefits of exit surveys, the next natural step is to understand the best practices for creating exit surveys.
Best practices for creating exit surveys
The exit survey is a powerful tool to involve customers in improving the experience with the brand. However, the questions and the wording must send a clear message of seeking genuine feedback to improve. So, let’s understand the best practices for exit survey creation.
Set a goal
Before creating an exit survey, it’s necessary to have a SMART goal (S – specific, M – measurable, A – achievable, R – realistic, T – Timely). Goals decide the questions as you can’t use the same survey to know the reason behind bounce rate and cart abandonment. Once the goal has been set, the questions for the survey can be framed. Also, the sales funnel stage of the visitor group must be considered to set a goal.
Make it easy
Filling out an exit survey takes extra effort from the visitor without any returns, so a digital space owner must make surveys easy to fill. The questions must be balanced between the click-based and type-based questions in the survey. A user must know in advance about the number of questions via a progress bar.
Frame right questions
As said earlier, the questions must seek answers that fulfill the goal. Apart from that, the questions should be mutually exclusive. Frame questions such that they don’t have any ambiguity. Also, consider the domain and technical knowledge of the visitors while creating questions.
Create segment-specific exit surveys
The experience of a new and returning user on the website is always different. So to make an improvement that caters to every segment, it’s better to create segment-specific exit surveys. Thus, creating surveys based on segmentation helps in a more personalized user experience.
With best practices that need to be implemented, a digital store manager must also know common mistakes associated with an exit survey.
Common mistakes while creating an exit survey
A bad exit survey not only gives inaccurate or useless feedback but will further frustrate the visitor, who is intending to leave the website. An exit survey should be seamless and contextual to the end users. Here are common mistakes to avoid while creating the exit survey:
Creating leading questions.
It’s important to frame the questions such that the user doesn’t feel being led toward a set of responses. Questions should promote candid responses, as this will guide to better insight collection.
Running the same survey every time.
An exit survey must be changed and replaced with a new one with contemporary conditions to keep them relevant and effective.
Making lengthy exit surveys.
The abandonment rate increases with the survey length. We can’t expect a leaving customer to spend a couple of more minutes filling out the survey. A survey should be crisp and to the point.
Not optimizing for mobile.
Many times an exit survey is published such that it works well for the desktop version but overlays elements in the mobile version. Being mobile-friendly is mandatory in today’s age of tight competition.
Create exit survey with VWO
A business always desires to create a survey based on triggers like exit intent and complex conditions with ease. With VWO Insights, a digital store owner can deploy and track surveys from a single dashboard. One such use case is Casa Mineira, a Brazilian real-estate company that deployed an exit intent survey with VWO to understand visitor expectations. The ease of response collection and friendly report view helped in building a strong hypothesis for the optimization campaign. The subsequent experimentation and optimization generated 57% more leads through forms.
With a seamless adaptation into the CRO process, any business can leverage the power of VWO Insights to make a data-driven decision. Get a 30-day free trial of all the features and capabilities of VWO, including VWO Insights.
