Learn the benefits of interrupting with a survey, but also what you shouldn't do.
Surveys are a great method for learning more about your visitors and how they experience your website, but will interrupting your visitors with a survey annoy them?
To start with, the interruption is a useful tool to increase the participation. Your visitors are not going to seek out a survey, and by interrupting them with e.g. a pop-up, they are much more likely to participate. The key is when to interrupt them. If you interrupt them too quickly, you are asking about an experience the visitors have not yet had. If you interrupt them too late, they may not remember the details of the experience, or remember incorrectly. Both cases can cause annoyance among the respondents, but they will probably be more annoyed if you interrupt them while they are doing something important, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
However, this can easily be solved by excluding pages where the survey shouldn’t appear, and by adjusting the trigger time to find the window between when the visitors should have found what they were looking for and when they leave. You can’t find the perfect time for everybody, but you can find one that suits most. With good triggers, you are also able to catch the visitors in the moment where your questions are the most relevant, and where you will get the most constructive feedback.
The next important step is explaining why you are interrupting them. The survey introduction should have a clear purpose and explain how you are going to use this information later. By giving the survey a purpose, the visitors will be more likely to see the value of participating, and therefore have a more positive attitude towards the survey. Sure, you interrupted them, but they are now able to give you feedback on something that’s been bothering them so that you can fix it.
The last step is to make sure the survey actually matches the purpose. If you ask irrelevant question or personal questions for seemingly no reason, your respondents are likely to leave the survey halfway through. A web survey should be short and to the point, without excluding important questions, and the better your survey is, the less likely it is to annoy your respondents.
Interrupting isn’t the same as annoying, and by interrupting your website visitors with a survey you are able to get information you cannot get from web analytics. If you want to learn more about your visitors – who they are, what they need, what they expect, and how they experience your website – then you should use a survey.