Why collect website feedback?

You can’t always know what’s wrong with your website. Whether you have a one-page website or 50+ pages, errors are bound to pop up. And as more potential customers begin to interact with your business’s website, little mistakes or bugs can make an impact on brand perception and conversion rates. And website traffic data alone can hardly give you insight into how your customers are doing.

This is why website feedback during the design and development phase is crucial. It lets you test out new pages with a small group of people to get their thoughts. Once you have this feedback, you can begin to update your website and make changes as needed to improve the user experience (UX) of your website.

So how do you collect feedback? In this post, we’ll discuss why businesses need to collect feedback and easy ways to collect feedback.

How to Collect Website Feedback

You know you need to collect feedback but not sure how to collect it? Here are some of the best ways to collect website feedback

1. Use a Pop-up Customer Survey

Pop-ups can be annoying if you overdo them. Not only is the placement of customer surveys important, but the timing of a survey pop-up is a vital thing to get right.

In general, it's a good idea to give users the room and option to opt-out of a survey. Mandatory surveys are a sure-fire way to annoy website visitors. Users should be able to willingly consent to a customer survey.

Remember, annoyed users might not give you the most honest feedback. Effective popups have short and concise questions or even one single question. The questions should be so simple that the user feels it’s easier to answer the question than to try and find the exit button for the popup.

One place for popup customer surveys is on the landing page of your website; this ensures that most website visitors will have easy access to feedback forms. Another good placement for popup customer surveys is at the exit page of your website - this might translate into the checkout page for online shopping websites.

2. Put a Feedback Button on Your Website

A feedback button is a very useful method of collecting user feedback and is popular with many websites and businesses on the internet. While its placement can be customized to anywhere on the website, it’s usually placed towards the bottom right of the page.

To make things easier, these can be integrated into an existing website through plugins that are simple to source and install. Once you’ve installed a website feedback button, you can quickly check up on its effectiveness by conducting a short survey of the customers who choose to give the feedback. 

Feedback buttons are generally less invasive than popup surveys, providing more flexibility and giving users the option to choose when to give feedback. This way you can ensure that you are not forcing a response from your users but are instead engaging with the users who want to interact with you. 

What makes feedback buttons a great solution is that customers can decide whether they want to give feedback, and once they do, the option is only one click away!

3. Offer an Incentive

More often than not, customers might not be willing to provide you with feedback because it usually takes time. Concerned users might reach out to you, sure, but you might be missing out on feedback from general users. In this situation, the offer of an incentive might be able to increase how much feedback you get. 

This usually involves offering coupons, a free e-book, a template, or a free guide in response to a feedback survey. However, your incentives should depend on your customer base, their interests, and the nature of your website. For example, if you are a clothing brand, then your customers might be interested in a discount or a coupon. You might even offer free shipping to customers if it’s suitable for your business model. Discounts and coupons can also drive up your sales because people are more likely to buy something when they know that they are getting a discount.

By giving your customers an incentive to fill in the feedback form, you can also strengthen your relationship with them by increasing their engagement with your business.

4. Use Live Chat

Live chat can give the feedback process a more human touch, and with the current COVID-19 pandemic limiting in-person interactions, this might be welcomed by a large chunk of the population.

For websites that sell products and services, having product details and a page about Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) might not cut it for some customers. They still might have more questions, but just the thought of going through the hassle of writing an elaborate email through a different app might make them reconsider. This can translate into lost customers and revenue. Just like in brick and mortar stores, giving customers the option to speak directly with a representative means that any questions they might have are more likely to be answered.

A consensus by online customers is that having the option of live chat during online purchases amps up the shopping experience that much more. The integration of live chat into your website is a generally inexpensive process and can be installed through plugins and packages that are easy to manage. Having direct access to you through live chat can greatly add to customer satisfaction and increase your clients’ trust in your business.

5. Ask for Feedback at the Right Place and Time

While asking the right questions might seem like the only integral puzzle piece to the feedback process, there are other important elements that businesses should keep in mind while asking for feedback. When and where you ask for feedback can have a big impact on your users’ reaction to the feedback request, as well as influencing how they answer your questions. So it’s definitely worth it to dedicate some time and effort towards researching the optimal way to ask for feedback.

A good place to ask for feedback is during a crash, along with sending an automated bug report. This can help you understand the problems your website users face during their online detours and can allow you to identify and fix possible bugs on your website to ensure an optimal user experience. If your website is for an e-commerce store that allows customers to purchase products and services online, a possible place to ask for feedback is whenever a customer abandons their cart. A pop-up survey here could get you some valuable information. 

This can allow you to ask the right questions at the right time and find any patterns for why customers might be abandoning their carts. The data might help you devise future policies for your business that can help improve purchase completion rates. Another good time to ask for feedback is whenever a customer confirms an order.

A general rule of thumb when asking for feedback is to keep questions simple and concise, so that they are easy to answer and don’t irritate users. Even a simple comment box on your website can provide you with valuable user feedback that can help you improve your product or service.

6. Find Out Why Visitors Are Abandoning Your Site

Customer feedback can be a very powerful tool for your business if employed correctly. With the right placement, a feedback form can give you answers that you might not get otherwise. If you see your website traffic plummeting, it might be time to ask your users what’s causing this. Feedback forms can also give insights into the reasons for cart abandonment on e-commerce sites. In these forms, it’s often best to give the option for open-ended answers, with plenty of blank space in a textbox, so users can write about their concerns in detail and you can identify any problem easily.

Placing a feedback form at your website’s exit page can also tell you why your customers are leaving your website. Once you have gathered the data and used it to identify the areas that need improvement, you can start working on shoring up your shortcoming and iterating on parts of your website as needed.

Pastel - the Best Website Feedback Tool

Want a better way to collect website feedback? Try Pastel. 

Pastel is a website feedback tool that makes it easy to collect website feedback in real-time. Instead of waiting for feedback on an image of a website, Pastel allows people to comment on the live version of your site.

One benefit of Pastel is that reviewers don't need to create an account to give feedback, they can just use the unique link you share with them to leave their comments. There's no limit to the number of people you can get feedback from and reviewers can attach screenshots and other files to help get their point across.

Another thing that makes Pastel great for all platforms and businesses is that you can get feedback on responsive websites on any screen. Metadata like browser type and screen size is automatically recorded, along with a screenshot of the website. Pastel is compatible with all websites, regardless of how they’re built. So whether your website is built with React, WordPress, or anything else, Pastel is the right tool for you.

With such great features and easy accessibility, Pastel is the perfect way to gather and handle feedback.‍

Get started with Pastel today!