Despite popular belief, the most successful ecommerce brands aren’t simply operating off vibes. They’re not just relying on the strength of their product/service to sell itself either. So what are they doing?
Customer research.
It’s easy to neglect just how powerful the right data can be. Asking strong customer research survey questions is one of the most cost-effective ways to learn about your audience, fine-tune your product, pricing, and digital strategy, and drive overall growth for your business.
This guide details eight types of customer research survey questions to inspire your next campaign, sale, or product launch.
8 best types of customer research survey questions to ask
Audience building questions
You can’t have effective marketing if you don’t know your audience. You need to know who you’re talking to, otherwise you’ll be spending time, effort, and money throwing darts with a blindfold on.
71% of customers expect personalization from ecommerce businesses, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t find it. Asking questions to understand your customers on a human level is incredibly important. It’ll help you effectively target, segment, and personalize your marketing to your audience so they feel like you’re talking directly to them. It’s not just a way to get important data – it’s also a way to make your audience feel appreciated.
To determine who your audience is, their preference,s and their buying behavior, you’ll need to ask demographic, psychographic, and purchase motivation questions:
- Demographic questions:
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- What gender do you identify as?
- What is your date of birth?
- What country do you live in?
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- Psychographic (values, interests, opinions, hobbies) questions:
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- What podcasts do you listen to?
- What TV shows do you watch?
- What do you do for fun?
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- Purchase motivation questions:
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- Who did you purchase this for today?
- What do you consider most important when choosing to shop with a brand? (quality of products, price point, brand values, sustainability, etc.)
Audience building questions in action: Loop earplugs
While it may seem ironic that Loop Earplugs uses audience-building questions to listen to their audience, it’s a sound strategy.
Using KNO, Loop segments customers into new and returning customer segments and asks them post-purchase survey questions to understand their intent and what drove them to purchase. These insights are then synced across the organization using tools like Klaviyo and Snowflake, giving all departments access to important customer insights that could inform their product development, marketing, customer experience, and more.
Brand perception questions
Branding can be tricky: How you define your brand is one thing, but the far more important aspect of branding is what your audience thinks. How do they really see you? What do they associate you with? And most importantly, have you earned their trust?
And you definitely want customers to trust you, especially when you consider 86% of customers say authenticity is a key reason they buy from a brand. So, how do you find out what your customers truly think of you? Brand perception questions will help you get to the root of this. Here’s some to get you started:
- What qualities or attributes do you associate with our brand?
- How would you describe our brand to a friend?
- Do you feel our brand values align with yours?
Discovery and attribution questions
It’s getting harder to get concrete information about who visits your site and who makes a purchase.
69% of adults worldwide find themselves more concerned about their privacy than ever. With growing concerns around privacy and data protection, third-party data restrictions are changing how ecommerce brands track key metrics as customers rightfully become more and more concerned about data privacy. This makes customer acquisition data harder to acquire.
Thankfully, KNO helps you gather zero-party data to circumvent this.
Zero-party data faces none of these restrictions because it’s data your audience willingly gives you. If you’re unable to track how your audience is finding you and it’s bringing you (and your revenue) down, try asking these attribution questions:
- How did you first hear about us?
- What encouraged you to come back and shop today?
- What would you Google to find a business like ours?
Discovery and attribution in action: BYLT Basics
Using KNO, BYLT Basics has BYLT a powerful customer data bank to help drive their decision-making. One essential cog in this machine is gathering acquisition data from customers post-purchase by offering them a discount off their next purchase in return.
By offering an incentive, customers are more inclined to answer simple questions. This provides you with valuable information on your acquisition channel efficacy and encourages another purchase. It’s a win/win!
Competitive alternative questions
In today’s world, customers have more options than ever before. It’s important to always know who (and what) you’re up against – competitive alternative questions, which ask your customers about what other options they considered (or previously used), help with exactly that.
The insights that competitive alternative questions provide can help refine your value proposition, strengthen your differentiation, and even inspire new product ideas to fill gaps in your market. Some examples:
- Was there another brand you were considering until you decided to buy with us?
- Why did you choose us over a competitor?
- Have you purchased from a similar brand before?
- What would make you switch to a different brand?
- What products do similar brands offer that you wish we did?
Product development questions
Did you know you secretly have access to a team of top product advisors? No, we’re not talking about watching Succession reruns – it’s your customers! Asking your customers the right questions can reveal opportunities for new SKUs, feature enhancements, bundling strategies, and more.
Including product development and feedback questions in your market research surveys ensures you’re building what your audience actually wants.
These questions can inform everything from color palettes to subscription options, and are especially useful post-launch or before a product expansion.
Personalization is becoming expected – customers now expect you to know what they want, and 59% expect brands to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions for them. Product development questions can be solved for this. Here are some useful starting points:
- What product would you like to see us make?
- If you could change just one thing about our product, what would it be?
- Do you prefer to mix and match your bundles or buy a pre-made collection?
- What colors or prints would you like us to use to create products with?
- Which features do you wish we had?
Product development questions in action: Marleylilly
At Marleylilly, personalization is everything. It only makes sense that they use KNO to gain a deeper understanding of their customers to inform product development and campaign strategy.
We’re not talking surface-level stuff either – they actively involve their customers in the product development process by simply answering a question on which design they like better. If there’s a clear preference for a certain pattern, it gets developed further. This ensures Marleylilly is creating products their customers will actually buy because they’ve already shown interest.
Pricing questions
Drew Carey is onto something – no matter how innovative or desirable your product/service is, it won’t sell if the price isn’t right. Price perception still plays a major role in purchase decisions.
It’s not easy to nail down a price – too high and you’ll lose sales, too low and you’ll lose money. To figure out what price makes sense for you, you can perform pricing A/B tests, offer steep discounts, or create various bundles to see the impact on your sales. Alternatively, you can ask your customers pricing survey questions and get the answer straight from them!
Pricing questions show how customers view your value, what they’re willing to pay, and whether they see your product as premium, affordable, or overpriced. We recommend asking questions like these:
- Do you feel the product was worth the price?
- Would a payment plan or “Buy Now, Pay Later” option make you more likely to purchase?
- At what price would you consider this product to be too expensive?
- If we increased the price by 10%, would you still purchase?
- Do you look for discounts before buying?
Purchase hesitation questions
Abandoned carts don’t have to mean abandoned revenue.
While the average cart abandonment rate may sound high at 70%, abandoned carts can actually be a fantastic opportunity for gathering crucial data to improve your purchase funnel. If you play your cards right, you can even win back the sale, too.
Abandoned carts are essentially untapped revenue – understanding hesitation points helps you identify where customers are getting stuck or second-guessin,g so you can fix it. Think of it as a leak test – once you find the hole, you can patch it. These questions aren’t just for abandoners either – even if the customer completes a sale without bouncing, they may still have valuable information to improve your purchase process.
With that in mind, purchase hesitation questions like the ones below are great tools to get insight into your purchase experience:
- What almost kept you from purchasing with us today?
- Did you have any unanswered questions before buying?
- Was anything confusing or unclear during checkout?
- Did you experience any technical issues or bugs?
- Were shipping costs or delivery times an issue?
If you want a more in-depth look at abandoned cart survey questions alongside many more examples, take a look at our abandoned cart survey blog.
Purchase hesitation questions in action: Marleylilly
Once again, our friends at Marleylilly proved that not only can they make beautiful monogrammed products, but they can also use KNO to create beautiful marketing strategies. They took the purchase hesitation/cart abandonment approach to the next level by focusing on brand abandonment with a win-back SMS campaign.
Marleylilly reached out to lapsed customers, asking why they hadn’t made a purchase in a while. The next step varied based on their response:
- If the reason was financial, the customer received an immediate discount.
- If their website was the problem, they were asked for more details.
- If they weren’t excited by the product offerings, they’re asked what they’d like to see.
This targeted approach is a great example of using purchase hesitation questions to overcome obstacles in your purchase funnel.
Loyalty, retention, and Net Promoter Score questions
Investing in customer loyalty literally pays off.
Returning customers spend 67% more than new customers, so it’s definitely worth figuring out what drives their loyalty and keeps them coming back.
The most common way to measure loyalty is through Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions focused on loyalty and retention. NPS, a quantitative measurement of the likelihood a customer will recommend you to others, can be determined through responses to these questions. Once you have your score, you can compare it against industry benchmarks to see what you’re doing well and where you can improve.
Some questions you can ask include:
- How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?
- How do you benefit from using our product?
- What problem are you trying to solve with our product?
To learn more about NPS and find even more examples of NPS questions, check out our blog on all things NPS!
Loyalty and retention questions in action: BrüMate
The fine folks at BrüMate integrate loyalty and retention questions to evaluate product satisfaction post-purchase.
By asking customers who purchased a product from their ERA line of tumblers, BrüMate was able to gather quantitative NPS data on how satisfied customers were with that particular line of products.
Note the incentive of a gift card draw being used to increase responses as well — you can tell they had their coffee the day they thought of that strategy!
How to put customer feedback into action
So you’ve determined the best questions to ask your customers post-purchase – now what? You don’t need a full research team to get actionable insights and make meaningful changes – you just need KNO!
Here’s how to put your valuable feedback into action:
- Use a post-purchase survey tool like KNO to automatically collect feedback after checkout
- Analyze trends and identify common themes across responses.
- Share insights with your product, marketing, and CX teams to implement the feedback in tangible ways. For example, if you survey customers about their pattern preferences for a new clothing item, pass this feedback along to your design team to help bring their wishes to life.
- Iterate quickly: ask, analyze, act. Strike while the iron is hot to avoid letting important customer feedback go unactioned for too long.
If you want to dive deeper into proper customer feedback management, you’re in luck! We have a blog for that!
KNO what you’re doing: gather and implement customer feedback the right way
“The customer is always right” has stood the test of time for a reason.
Your customers are your single most valuable source of feedback about everything from your product to user experience to pricing to new product development. It’s never been easier to get actionable data straight from customers’ mouths.
To help, we compiled 200+ post-purchase questions. Our goal with KNO is to make gathering and actioning this crucial feedback as seamless as possible.