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Ecommerce businesses continually look for ways to improve customer experience and increase sales. One of the best ways to do this is by surveying your customers. By gathering customer feedback and insights, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance your business.

You can interact with your customers during their journey in multiple ways, and we will focus on all of them and some strategies to improve the response rate.

When you sign up for a Retently trial, a NPS transactional email campaign is created by default. To finish the set up of this campaign, you will need to create a Shopify webhook.

Go through this campaign's template settings and ensure the verbiage corresponds to the communication strategy, adjust the logo and feel free to add additional questions.

One of the best practices around the board is to have a Multiple Options question that, depending on the sentiment of the Main Rating question, will ask customers what they loved/think needs improvement/ disliked in their experience. By selecting “Apply as feedback topic,” these responses will be used to create your Analytics Page and will ease feedback filtering.

In this Multiple Options question, you can have various options depending on your niche, but to get you started, they could be:

Once you finish the template, get back to the campaign settings, and make sure the schedule corresponds to the following formula -> delivery duration+ two days. Don’t forget to set up your alerts and exports as a final touch.

One of the most important steps for ecommerce is the purchasing experience. Adding an in-app 5-STAR survey on the “Order Completed” page allows you to track the feedback related to this part of the customer experience.

This survey will allow you to understand how easy/hard it is to complete the purchase, as well as it can provide valuable feedback for what can be improved in the whole purchasing process. For example, you may need to add a different dropdown menu or remove a specific field within your UI/UX.

The third and final survey you need to have on is the CSAT survey for support tickets. Whatever helpdesk you are using, either Gorgias, Zendesk or Freshdesk, we got you covered. You can set up a transactional survey to run each time a ticket is resolved.

This survey is important to understand the areas of improvement of the support team as well as the needed adjustments in the purchasing experience or return policy.

Do not hesitate to user merge fields and make sure that in the export of data from your helpdesk, you include the name of the agent, as this can offer a better perspective on the performance of individual agents and can make the survey more personal.

When you import from an integration, you can pull additional fields on top of the default ones (Email, name, company name - if present). The merge fields add layer of personalization and significantly help raising the response rate in all your surveys.

When creating a custom property, you give it a name so you can reuse it later. Therefore, to use this property as a variable, you must include the property name in the double curly brackets. Here's an example:

The structure is simple:

When adding merge fields to a survey template, it will end up looking like this:

Here’s what respondents with existing first_name and customer_company properties will see:

And this is an example of a survey where all merge fields are displaying fallbacks:

IMPORTANT: Only custom properties of the text type will be accepted in the survey template as merge fields.

When you create a transactional survey, on the Trigger page, you will have 2 options, Delay survey and Throttle.

The way the transactional campaigns work is by having the survey sent each time an action is completed, so if you are using Retently for rating a purchase experience or a support ticket, you risk sending a survey each time these actions are completed, which more often than not can result in 3-4 surveys a month. This will undoubtedly create a survey fatigue and annoyance.

Delay, however has more to do with the most recently triggered survey. Especially when setting up a Shopify transactional survey meant to analyze the shopping experience after a physical product has been purchased, it is crucial to delay your survey for a duration that at least corresponds to your delivery schedule. This will help avoid situations when the survey arrives before the product itself, which might result in an artificially deflated score not representative of your products or services.

Sending surveys from your domain helps mostly with the surveys credibility, as your customers are already familiar with your own domain. This naturally helps with the response rates and lowers the unsubscribe rate.

In Retently, there are two possibilities for you to verify your domain. First, there is the Google Workspace Integration for our customers with a Google Business Account. If you, however, are using a different service, you can integrate your domain directly. You will have to follow these instructions.