This blog post is sponsored by Formidable Forms which is owned by Strategy11. This blog post was written by me and the majority of the links were chosen by me. There may be more article’s like this in the future but I will continue to provide a disclosure similar to this every time. There will be multiple affiliate links in this article but they will be clearly labelled by mentioning in brackets after the product name that it is an affiliate link.

We all have been on multiple sites where we get ask if we can fill in a questionnaire or a survey (these are going to be used interchangeable in this post), sometimes offering something in return, and something not. Many of the big companies do this to get direct feedback from their website visitors, but this is something you should do on your website? It depends on how you set it up and what questions you ask, where you place the survey, and who will be asked to fill in the questionnaire.

First, choosing what to use for the questionnaire. You could use a site like SurveyMonkey, or Paperform, or JotForm (affiliate link) which all run the survey stuff on their website so you don’t have to worry about all of it. Or you could have the survey as a plugin on your website by using plugins like WPForms (affiliate link), or WPEverest, or Formidable Forms (affiliate link) which means only those who have a login to your website can see the results. There are positives and negatives to use each option and it may take a while to find the right survey option for you and your business.

Now that you know what you are going to use for the questionnaire it’s time to think about what questions to ask. These questions will mostly be related to what you what to know from that website visitor, you could ask them questions like how they found your website, is there anything they are looking for that they haven’t found yet (so you know to make that information easier to find), some specific questions related to your business and website, and a spot to give any additional feedback. You may also want to ask certain questions based on the answers to previous questions, and some survey options offer smart conditional logic which can do that for you. There may be local laws you have to abide by if you wish to collect contact information, so make sure you know your local laws before asking for that type of information. Don’t force any questions to be answered, sometimes people don’t answer certain questions because it is worded weirdly, or they feel the question would reveal too much about them. Nielson Norman Group also has 28 tips for creating great qualitative survey.

Once you have the questionnaire created it’s time to figure out where to place the survey. You don’t want the survey to be the first thing that the website visitor sees as they haven’t had a chance to use the website yet, you don’t want the survey to be a pop-up just as someone is exiting your website as that will discourage that person from coming back to your website. You also don’t want to disrupt your user flow. Consider having a little sidebar item that shows up after the visitor has been to a couple of pages, or asking for their thoughts somewhere during the business process (every business has a different process depending on their business and the process they have setup).

Now that you know what you want to use for the questionnaire, you know the questions, and you’ve placed the survey at a good spot on your website it’s time to think about what website visitors will be asked to do the questionnaire. If you have a high-traffic website you may not want to get every website visitor to complete it as you will have too many responses to sort through. If you have a low-traffic website you may get the same person filling in the survey multiple times. You should be able to configure how often a website visitor will get asked to complete a questionnaire. This also depends on your business process as you may want to have the questionnaire in the signature of emails, or with every couple of e-products sent.

After some responses you will need to see what the results are, and consider tweaking the questionnaire with different questions, or different options and see what the response to those tweaks are. While the results may be in one place it may not be the place your customer service agents always go to, many survey options offer integration with many other products and services.

Ultimately, yes you most likely should ask your website visitors to complete a questionnaire. What you use to make the survey, the questions you ask, and where you place it on your website are up to you and your business process. You can check out this posts sponsor Formidable Forms (affiliate link) to see if it offers you want you need.