Worried about the churn rate? Confused on why your visitors leave so frequently? Still figuring out on how to hold on the traffic at your site? Have you used Exit Surveys??
The good news is that your worries are coming to an end now!
Because the analytical tools have made it extremely easy to observe the activity of your visitors, nowadays!
Just relax and be sure that it is no longer a difficult task to track your visitors.
Along with the emergence of some amazing user activity tracking apps like heatmap and session recordings, other apps like Google Analytics now give you complete data of how many customers come and leave your website.
However, the fact of the matter is that your visitors will always keep fluctuating.
And it is a wise thing to accept the fact that your churn rate can never be 0%, because that’s simply a dream case!
Churn rate is the rate of your visitors leaving your site. It would definitely exist but make sure that it should never be too high.
The graph below shows a condition where you are having new sign ups and losing customers as well.
In the graph shown below, you can see that where customer graph is falling down, at that point, the danger zone develops. Make sure your website doesn’t exhibit a graph like this at the backend.
When you are experiencing a certain amount of churn rate, the best way out is to ask your customers about the reason which is making them exit without even signing up.
Now, how are you going to ask?
The answer is ‘Talking it out’!
Talk to your customers and ask them the real reason of leaving.
Here’s the Kicker:
Exit surveys have become popular nowadays. These surveys allow you to dig out the reason of your increasing churn rate.
Contents
What are Exit Surveys?
Exit Surveys are commonly used by companies when their staff members are leaving, they want to know the reason to rectify the problems if they are really at fault.
Now, people have started using these exit surveys among the customers who are leaving the website.
To know what turned their visitors off through asking some useful customer satisfaction survey questions.
Remember:
Never ask more than 10 carefully thought-out questions because they are enough to give you the greatest insights about your visitors.
The exit survey question would help you improve your churn rate, customer acquisition and would make your sales funnels effective and efficient.
There would be questions for three main sections in your Exit Survey:
- Subscription Business
- Marketing
- Churn Rate
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Subscription Business
This section will give you a clear-cut idea on what your visitor like and dislike about your service. You can ask them about the new features also, if they would like to add any.
These questions will help you a lot in making your model a much better version of itself.
With the help of a well-constructed exit survey, you’ll know what your visitors actually want out of your subscription. You’ll get to know what you’re missing and what you need to add to your model.
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Marketing
This section will guide you on what marketing techniques work for your product and which ones don’t.
This is surely going to formulate your marketing plan in a best way which suits your product/service. You’ll end up having great and effective ideas about the marketing platforms you should use.
The whole marketing strategy that you’re going to drive from your on-site survey will help in decreasing your marketing cost and increase your customer acquisition.
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Customer Churn
By coming to know what has really drifted your visitors away, you can tweak the process and make valuable changes.
This will cut down your customer churn rate with some unforgettable margins.
Now as we know the benefits of these exit survey questions, we would move on to the designing part. We will talk about what exactly do we need to offer in this survey.
Here’s an example of an exit survey question:
Now we would move on to the section where I’ll give you some insight on where these exit surveys should appear at your site.
When and Where to offer the Exit Surveys?
Here, I’ll be guiding you on when to put the survey forward. Time selection is again a very technical aspect.
Because asking someone to fill the survey at the wrong time is again a major mistake we all can make.
The two best ways to get this type of survey filled are as follow:
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Right beside the Cancel Button:
One way to place these surveys is putting these with the Subscription Cancel Button.
When the customer clicks on the ‘Cancel Button’ right after clicking on the Subscription Button for a particular service. That is where you should catch him up.
Placing this survey right beside the ‘Cancel’ button is a good option, we might get some insight on why he cancelled the subscription and what changes he wants us to make.
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Email:
A very popular method for taking these surveys is Email. This can be an excellent and a very cost effective method in fact.
A nicely written email with a friendly tone would really work and the customer might feel like giving you a good feedback.
There is an automation which will put the survey results into the database to analyse the results.
But if you have failed to construct your survey in the right manner then you are definitely failing to collect some essential information.
Also:
Don’t forget to use a compelling subject line which will be catchy enough to grab the reader’s attention and force him to open the email.
Below is an image of how companies usually send surveys in the emails.
Also keep in mind that a lot of people will leave your surveys in between and wouldn’t complete.
An Epsilon study conducted in 2009 exhibited that around 60% of the subscriptions got cancelled because customers thought that they were emailed quite frequently and it kind of irritated them.
Now we’ll move to the type of questions we should ask in the exit surveys. Again a very tricky part because you need to make the visitor stick to your survey for 2-3 minutes at least!
What kind of Survey Questions to Ask?
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Open-Ended Breakthrough:
Though very late, but people have now realized that qualitative data gives a lot more insights than quantitative.
The quantifiable data doesn’t always provide what we exactly want out of some surveys.
Sometimes we want a detailed answer to know the real reason. That is where these open-ended questions come in use.
It is proved that open-ended questions gave nearly eight times greater response rate than the multiple choice questions.
These questions give companies information about specific bugs, hang-ups and workflow inefficiencies that their customers aren’t able to tell them through other surveys with limited answer options.
So basically removing the pre-filled answers in the exit survey makes companies able to unlock loads of valuable and actionable data.
The picture below shows how the open-ended questions are sent to visitors who cancelled the subscriptions in the emails.
Some other reasonable open-ended questions which can be asked right after the visitor cancels or exits from subscribing can be as follows:
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Leaving so soon? Tell us why:
This type of question is quite attention-grabbing.
One initial catchy open-ended question like this one can grab the visitor to fill up the survey and then later you can offer a set of multiple-choice questions.
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How was your experience with us?
This will allow you to tweak your work, flow, sales funnels and various other activities.
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What was your favorite among the services we are providing?
This will give you idea of what is liked and disliked by the customers. They might also tell you some service which you should have in future.
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Is there something we can change?
This will allow you see what is bothering your customers, there would be a lot of weaknesses which you won’t be aware of and through this question, you would unveil those.
It can support team issues, updating issues or anything.
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Do you like the way we communicate?
This would be really beneficial for the support team. They will come to know about their strengths and weaknesses. Any technical or any actual communication flow would be caught through this.
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Find out what Grabs the Visitors:
The opposite of the “why are you leaving” question would be the “What grabbed your interest” question. Here are some basic questions you can ask here:
- What was the purpose of your visit?
- Did you find what you were looking for?
- Did you complete your task?
- If not, what stopped you?
- What would improve your experience?
All these questions will make you know about what your visitors feel about your site, service or product.
Asking the right type of question is very important in designing your survey. Download this Survey Swipe File and just copy paste the tired and test questions that you need to ask!
What Affect will Exit Survey have on your Subscription Business?
First of all, these exit surveys will reduce the churn rate and the bounce rate of your website.
This would definitely mean that the customer will stay longer on your site and you would have an increase in your customer retention.
Hence, your subscription business will also be positively affected through these surveys as the survey would guide you on the customer demands, do’s and don’t on your site and subscription offers.
After a thorough customer research you would be bound to redesign your subscription offer in accordance with the changes demanded.
Thus providing a good result through customer satisfaction.
Conclusion:
Using the exit survey will make you understand the demands of visitors, make changes and have increased subscriptions.
TruConversion also offer some extremely useful surveys which will dig out your visitors thoughts in just a couple of seconds. Their surveys are easy to interpret and understand.
I hope you will use the above guidelines and put this kind of questions in your surveys from now on.
Thus, building some high converting exit surveys which will raise your subscriptions to a great extent.
