Give Your Visitors A Voice

There's a lot of talk about conversations these days. Some have even described web sites as conversations, where users speak with their clicks. Too often, what they're saying is "you don't have anything interesting here, or at least we can't find it. Goodbye."

But there is another way to talk to web site visitors. It's easy, it's cheap, and it gets results. Post a survey.

We have no affiliation or benefit for saying so, but we use SurveyMonkey.

We recently helped one of our clients add a simple survey to their home page - not contest, no bribes - just 'please take 3 minutes and answer some questions'. And out of a few hundred unique daily visitors, a dozen or two are taking the time and providing great insight and information.

It isn't scientific, and the sample is still relatively small, but with those caveats we now know how many of our visitors aren't looking to make a short term purchase. We know how many of the are having their first exposure to the brand, and how they'd force rank the seven top selling points we thought people consider when making a purchase.

It may not be gospel, but it sure is interesting and as the numbers pile up it's clear the minor effort (and the $20) is going to really help improve the site and enable us to define success metrics that make sense for the site and its visitors. It may even help us to attract a different type of visitor to the site.

But most importantly it's giving us a sense of who these people are, what they want, and how the offerings on our pages relates to what they're thinking about. We're intense believers in analytics, and there are some new numbers we're going to be watching very closely!

Posted by Craig Danuloff at May 25, 2005 9:14 PM