– Collecting data before a purchase allows for more data to be gathered from potential customers compared to collecting data after a purchase.
– Attribution, which is the main focus of post-purchase surveys, is not as important as improving the customer journey and focusing on the basics of marketing.
– It is difficult to change someone’s mind after they have made a purchase, so collecting data after a purchase may not be effective in converting customers.Shift to collecting data before someone makes a purchase instead of relying on post-purchase surveys.Your post-purchase survey is dumb. Here’s why you should shift to collecting data before someone purchases instead.
1. More data
If you collect data during a discount signup, depending on your offer, you can collect data from around 8-10% of all new customers to your website. Data collected after a purchase, assuming a 2% conversion rate and a 50% answer rate, only gets 1% response data AFTER they have already decided to make a purchase.
2. Attribution doesn’t matter
The main draw of post-purchase surveys is attribution, yet all these companies that ask these questions already don’t spend enough time on improving their customer journey with basics for this to even make sense as a question. Attribution is the most overhyped bush-league idea propped up by tools that need to look smart for marketers that don’t understand business basics. Hint here, if you know what you’re doing, all the channels convert at high rates because you’re attracting the right quality traffic and telling the right story on your website after you grab that traffic’s attention. When you focus on the basics, you can scale all ad channels. (This is the bit that everyone doesn’t understand yet because everyone is too focused on hacking a specific platform)
3. You can’t change someone’s mind after they purchase
The whole goal of marketing is to be able to change a behavior and persuade someone to make a purchase outside of normal behavior. How on earth are you going to change an individual’s mind if you’re only collecting data after they’ve purchased? You can’t. Only 20-30% of people that sign up for a discount use the discount. If you can’t convert these folks, how are you going to convert everyone else? If you can’t convert the low-hanging fruit now, what makes you think some post-purchase answers from your low conversion rate are going to work?
4. Conversion rates
If you collect data only via post-purchase, you have ZERO context as to how the answers correlate to subscription to conversion rates. Yeah, Jon heard about us on Facebook! v. Jon prefers boxer briefs and cares about materials. People similar to Jon convert at 25% v. people that care about briefs and pouch size who convert at 60%. How can we send an email directly to Jon or look at the difference in portraying landing pages and product pages to better tell a story to improve the conversion rate for everyone like Jon? Post purchase surveys are great if you’re doing nothing, you should still switch to a popup though, in our split tests popups all averaged 50% completion rate whereas imbeds averaged around 20-30%. Look I get it, you’ve put in a post purchase survey and you’re feeling good about yourselves and you think you’re data driven, congrats!The truth is though, benchmarks are pointless unless you’re using your own data, and even then there isn’t context. Context is required, it’s why Formtoro exists. Because it was built by people that actually run successful ecommerce stores. #ecommercehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco