Online Business - Understand Your Visitors and Customers

Understand your customers for website builders Conducting an online business is easier than ever before.

It is also starting to be a preferred method of starting a business venture because it is less capital intensive, more flexible in terms of your schedule, and who doesn’t like the idea of working in front of a computer in pajamas?

Getting an e-commerce website running is not as big as a hurdle as a number of years ago.

Website builders such as Weebly, BigCommerce, Jimdo, Wix, etc all have very good platforms for online entrepreneurs to get their online businesses up and running.

Getting Consumer Feedback – Not Easy

Even though it may be easier to start an online store, a major disadvantage for running an online business is that it is more difficult to solicit consumer feedback.

A major factor in continuous improvements for all aspects of a business is to obtain constructive feedback on areas such as product, service, and price points.

When you are conducting an online business, it is not exactly the same as a brick and mortar store when someone could verbally solicit feedback, or have customer feedback forms at the check out counters.

A universal challenge of all online businesses is to fully understand their target audience, what do they want, what are their preferences.

As a business, no matter if it is a physical business or a virtual, if it does not deeply understand its target consumers, its chances for success or even survival, would not be very high.

So how could an online business get into the minds of its consumers?

There are several tools at your disposal and they are all free and effective – Jotform, iPerceptions – 4Q Survey, and Qualaroo.

There are many more in the market but I have had experiences using the 3 mentioned above.

All are very easy to implement – just sign up for free, insert your questions and the survey platforms will provide you with HTML codes for you to insert into your e-commerce website.

These surveys are designed to be non-intrusive. For Poll Daddy and KISSinsights, their survey participation tab is off to the side or bottom of the screen so it doesn’t get in the way of your website visitor.

For iPerceptions, there is a little pop up window that comes out when a visitor first visits your website which kindly asks them if they would like to participate in a 4 question survey upon their exit.

If they choose not to, iPerception will remember the request and will not try to re-engage the same visitor again in the near future.

Conclusion

Personally, I have gathered a lot of information about my potential customers and existing customers which led to improved services, products and client care.

It is always very interesting to get a glimpse of what they are thinking, which is particularly difficult if your consumer base is spread all around the world.

However, don’t expect to be receiving hundreds of feedback immediately. Similar to the physical world, useful constructive feedbacks may be rare, but they are gems.

The free tools I mentioned above are there to assist you along your journey in building a successful online business. But as it is a long term building process, so is the process of receiving constructive feedback.

Interested in kick-starting your online business?

Check out these free website builders to launch your first website!