What your customers aren’t telling you (yet): Survey strategies to unlock CRO opportunities

If you’re relying solely on traditional analytics to guide your CRO strategy, you’re only getting half the story. 

Don’t get us wrong, web traffic reports, heatmaps, and funnel analysis offer unparalleled insights into how your customers are behaving, and what’s happening on your site. But analytics data also has its limitations; if you want to understand why your customers are behaving the way they are, you need to go right to the source. 

That’s where customer surveys come in. They allow you to gather insights directly from your shoppers, uncovering key pain points, preferences, and barriers that might be stopping them from converting. When you understand the motivating and detracting factors in your customers’ experience, you unlock the game-changing CRO opportunities.

We consider change-making, high-impact, opportunity-unlocking surveys to be a careful craft. The key is intentionality—asking questions that will inspire feedback that is actionable, curating your survey to your audience, and leading with a strategic lens. 

Let’s talk about how to do this. And if you prefer to listen, feel free to watch the short webinar below: 

Setting up surveys that drive real change

When met face-to-face with a customer, for most of us, our knee-jerk reaction would be to ask something like: “Do you like our brand? Would you shop with us again?”

While in person, these could be great openers to a more meaningful conversation (and yes, it does feel good to hear that customers like your brand), these types of general interest questions are dead weight in the context of a survey. Regardless of the answer, they don’t provide insights that could lead to improvement or change and move the needle on your CRO goals. 

And high-quality insights aren’t won by chance. Impactful surveys are designed with a clear focus and objective. You’re casting a net for a specific type of feedback rather than throwing a line and seeing what catches. Before designing your survey, first consider the following: 

• Purpose: What are you hoping to improve? Navigation, checkout, personalization, or marketing?
• Audience: Are you targeting first-time visitors, returning customers, or cart abandoners? 
• Product: Are you gathering feedback on a specific item, bundle, or overall shopping experience?

To maximize impact, we recommend that every question in your survey be tied to a specific use case. There should always be a reason why you’re asking something and a game plan for how you would translate feedback generated by that question into strategic improvements.

Here are some examples of high-impact questions we’ve seen in our customers’ surveys and how they’ve used the insights to drive action:

But heed our warning: even the most carefully designed questions can fall on deaf ears. Tailoring your survey to a target audience, and delivering that survey at just the right opportunity are as crucial to survey success as the questions themselves.

There are two moments where customer feedback is especially valuable:

1. Immediately post-purchase, customers can help you understand what is driving your conversions. What keeps them coming back? What aspects of the customer experience are working well?
2. Cart abandonment surveys are another crucial opportunity for feedback, allowing you to identify what’s preventing customers from completing their purchases, as well as insights you can use to recover lost sales. 

Each of these surveys serves a distinct audience and purpose. So let’s dive into each a bit more.

Post-purchase surveys

When it comes to post-purchase feedback, you want to get it while it’s hot. Detailed, unfiltered feedback is easier to give when the experience is still fresh. 

Whether embedded on the confirmation page or delivered directly via email, the post-purchase survey is a goldmine for valuable data that can refine future marketing and CRO strategies. 

Immediately after making a purchase, your customers have the most clarity about their preferences and decision-making process. And the more recently they’ve shopped with your brand, the more they’re able to recall exactly what worked and didn’t work about your customer experience. 

For brands in scale-up mode

For newer or less-established brands especially, post-purchase surveys are an effective way to uncover customer hesitations that might be limiting your growth.  

Even though their experience may have led to a conversion today, it’s worth asking your customers: “Was there anything that almost stopped you from completing your purchase?” 

Whether it’s identifying a need for flexible payment options or for insights for refining your value proposition, we’ve seen this simple question pay off in major ways. 

For enterprise brands

Post-purchase surveys for established, larger brands are a chance to identify those little pain points that can sometimes get lost in the shuffle. 

Asking something like “Was there anything difficult about using our website?” followed by an open-ended answer prompt can inspire really specific answers into what’s causing that friction, and potentially costing you sales.

Segmenting by new vs returning shoppers

The motivations and experiences of a first-time buyer are also fundamentally different from those of a long-time fan. Consider segmenting your post-purchase survey by new and returning customers, and tailoring your questions accordingly. 

For example, new customers can provide more current attribution insights: are your most recent conversions coming from Tikok? Google Ads? 

The feedback you collect now not only helps fix immediate challenges but also plays a key role in shaping your future campaigns, product launches, and long-term messaging.  

Take the case of our partner SwimOutlet, a leading swimwear retailer, whose post-purchase survey results totally rocked the boat:

• New customers weren’t opting into their loyalty program because the value proposition wasn’t clear.
• Existing customers loved perks like early product access and reward credits.
• They assumed 80% of their customers were competitive swimmers, but surveys revealed only 51% were, leading them to refine their product offerings and marketing approach.

These insights allowed them to adjust their messaging, improve opt-ins, and better market to a previously untapped customer base. You can read more about this story here.

Cart abandonment surveys: Recovering sales and tackling barriers

While post-purchase surveys refine future experiences, cart abandonment surveys can tackle immediate barriers—and have an immediate impact on your CRO.

Sending a survey to a customer who has chosen not to abandon their cart might feel like taking a shot in the dark. But an abandoned cart doesn’t necessarily mean the opportunity is lost. We found that 61.3% of shoppers take longer than a week to decide on a purchase. 

A well-timed, strategic survey can help you get the insights you need to nip your conversion barriers in the bud, recovering lost sales and preventing future shoppers from encountering the same roadblocks. This is our recommended cart abandonment email flow: 

Step 1: Integrate surveys into your email flow

The first email you send (sent within an hour) should be focused on recovering the sale, as the customer could still have a very real intent to purchase. 

By the second or third email, it’s time to investigate. This is where the focus shifts to asking your cart-abandoners to complete your survey.

Here’s an example from Aura Bora: 

Step 2: Make an incentivizing appeal

Your message should be positioned as a request to help you improve and to understand what might have stopped them from completing the order. 

Customers appreciate the effort to eliminate barriers and enhance their experience. You could even include a modest incentive, like a discount or free shipping for completing the survey.

Step 3: Follow-up on feedback

Once you’ve gathered insights, it’s time to apply them. 

For example, If high shipping costs are a common complaint, you could adjust your pricing strategies or offer threshold-based free shipping. 

But in addition to macro-level changes to improve CRO, there’s also an opportunity to apply these insights to follow up and re-capture your abandoned carts. Through KNO’s integration with Klaviyo, you can access tools to sync your survey responses into dynamic email campaigns. 

There’s a few common cart abandonment reasons you’ll probably run into once you start asking your shoppers the right questions. We’ve found that most of these can be overcome by managing customer expectations early and often. 

Here are some common barriers we often see mentioned in cart abandonment surveys, and the proactive approaches you can take to avoid them in your own checkout experience:

1. Extra costs: If your customers are jumping ship because of unexpected shipping fees, duties or taxes, provide that information up-front. To avoid surprises at checkout, you can include delivery fees in your listed product price. Be transparent about these fees on your website, on your product pages, even on the cart page; it can go a long way in dialing down shock-fuelled cart abandonments.
2. Required accounts: For some customers, the requirement to make an account before they can complete a purchase is just too big of an ask. The dread of searching their inbox for email confirmations and finding an acceptable password overshadows their desire to see their purchase through. It can especially be a deterrent for new shoppers who maybe aren’t ready to take that next step in their relationship with your brand. Consider whether an alternate account growth strategy, like an incentive-based CTA, would be more optimal for CRO. 
3. Delivery issues: If shoppers feel shipping is too slow or there’s a lack of clear delivery estimates, it doesn’t instill trust in your brand. If delivery times are too long, take a look at how you’re displaying estimated delivery times. Make sure you’re clearly setting these expectations on product pages or the cart page. You could also use those Klaviyo tools we mentioned to target survey respondents who found delivery to be their barrier, and offer expedited shipping options, potentially for an additional fee. 
4. Frustrating checkout process: Was it too complex, too time consuming? If you want to win these customers back, follow up to those specific customers by simplifying the forms and removing unnecessary fields and even adding quick payment options like shop pay, Google Pay, or Apple Pay. 

Carts are also frequently abandoned because the shopper was just browsing, or got distracted during the check-out process. In this case, you can add those customers to a nurture flow that continues to just highlight trending products, new arrivals or seasonal discounts, and just play the long-term game. 

Best practices for high-impact insights

For your surveys to have a meaningful impact on your conversion strategy, the feedback you receive needs to be honest, detailed, and actionable, not rushed, vague, or skewed by incentives. 

How your survey is designed and presented will also influence the quality of the feedback your customers will offer. As you’re designing your survey, keep in mind these tips for curating an inviting, frictionless and engaging feedback opportunity for your customers:

1. Ease-In: Avoid leading with open-ended questions; start with simple multiple-choice questions, then move to open-ended ones later. Starting with the more time-consuming heavy-hitters can discourage your customers too quickly.
2. Seize the opportunity: You might be tempted to make your survey as short as possible for a frictionless user experience, but don’t give in to the pressure. Customers have more to say than you might expect. We’ve seen brands do very well with long, detailed surveys (think 25+ questions) – though we’ve found that six to 10 is the sweet spot. Sometimes it’s better to put it all out there; even for a user who loses interest on Question 17 of 25, you still collect sixteen distinct points of feedback.
3. Tailor your surveys to different audiences: While new customers might get more attribution-based questions while returning customers might get deeper engagement questions. You’ve already established that relationship with them and they’re ready to share more. 
4. Refresh your surveys regularly: This could look like a refresh every few months to keep your insights relevant, or pivoting to an entirely different survey. As you grow your survey strategy, your use cases can become even more specific. Some of our partners exclusively run Black Friday Cyber Monday surveys to inform their ad strategy for that peak season.
5. Ask intentional questions: Avoid vague prompts like “How was your experience?” Instead, focus on specific decision drivers or barriers.
6. Go easy on Incentives: Special offers might get you more responses, but they also attract bargain hunters who will give you rushed and less honest answers. Incentives are by no means a requirement for a successful survey. Many customers are happy to share feedback without an incentive if they feel heard.

Start surveying

Your customers hold the answers to your biggest CRO challenges—you just need to ask the right questions. By strategically implementing post-purchase and cart abandonment surveys, you can identify and remove barriers to conversion, improve your user experience based on real feedback, and increase customer retention.

Wondering what questions to ask your customers? We’ve put together a list of over 200 post-purchase survey questions broken down by vertical. Get the full list here!