– The author does not believe that post purchase surveys should be relied upon for making business decisions.
– The author argues that post purchase surveys do not provide accurate or valuable information due to factors such as memory accuracy and the timing of the survey.
– The author suggests that pre-purchase surveys and data relevant to the customer journey are more useful for making marketing plans.Do not rely on post purchase surveys to make business decisions. Instead, focus on collecting data relevant to the customer journey before the purchase to inform marketing plans.I love post-purchase surveys, but I wouldn’t rely on any of the data to make business decisions. I keep seeing posts in my feed about brands using post-purchase surveys to figure out where to place ad spend. To me, the answer is don’t. For me, it comes down to statistics and psychology. The problem is, it really doesn’t play well into the narrative of the companies that sell the technology. (We do post-purchase surveys too, but we primarily only ask questions relevant to the customer journey.)
E-commerce post-purchase survey math: 1000 visitors to your website, 20 sales, 10 surveys, 5 with accurate memories. Of the 20 purchasers, 15 people won’t purchase a second time, 10 won’t answer, and 5 survey results likely won’t be accurate. You can put in your own numbers, but this is every reason why the information you’re collecting, which is post-intent and isn’t in consideration of any intent-based action, isn’t worth as much as you think.
You fill out a survey after you’ve made a decision, not in consideration of getting something to make a decision. There’s a huge difference in the quality of the answer. When you’re on social networks, based on your behavior, the platform will serve you ads based on products and ads that you spend time on. If you’re looking for a specific product, you will see multiple similar products. This clouds where you learned about a product even more so. Making spend decisions based on the post-purchase data doesn’t make sense to me. It’s an isolated collection time after someone has completed a purchase, which doesn’t really matter. It’s not part of the customer journey; it’s part of the customer post-purchase journey, which, if I’m honest, you can’t really impact as much as people think.
Yet, pay attention to how many marketing agencies are all of a sudden hyping up their usefulness without this basic understanding of statistics and psychology. There are better ways to use the data. Marketing spend decisions aren’t one of them, in my opinion. I’ve posted previously that there is no causation possible with post-purchase surveys, and the correlation is simply one of the people more willing to provide information after the action is complete. As much as they are being hyped, I don’t see them providing real tangible, reliable value. Ask the question in a pre-purchase survey then leverage that answer to help someone make a decision. I’m pretty convinced that the only thing that matters is subscription to conversion rate before making a purchase and collecting data relevant to the journey on the way to make your first purchase. That’s data I can build marketing plans on. #ecommerce #data #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco