Feature Highlight: Question Targeting
The Question Stream is a powerful tool in your post-purchase surveys (PPS), a reinvention of traditional isolated surveys.
It functions similar to a multi-question survey with one key improvement—your stream feeds each question to the customer over time based on rules you program. One key factor behind the power of the Question Stream lies in its personalization capabilities, or namely Question Targeting.
By targeting at an individual question level, you're able to present each customer with a unique sequence of questions tailored to their specific attributes. For instance, a universal question such as "How did you hear about us?" could be followed by targeted inquiries related to the customer's specific purchase. This enables you to extract more precise and personalized insights from each customer interaction.
Inside question targeting there are currently 6 available personalization options: New vs. Returning, Surfaces, Geography, Product Purchased, Language Translation, and Frequency.
New vs. Returning
This targeting criteria gives you the flexibility to target questions to all, new, or returning customers.
How they’re identified
For Shopify merchants, the classification of 'new' or 'returning' is based on the 'order_count' value supplied by Shopify. A customer is deemed 'new' if the 'order_count' equals 1. If the 'order_count' exceeds 1, the customer is classified as 'returning'.
For merchants using platforms other than Shopify, we apply a similar logic in classifying your customers. Ultimately, this will depend on the values that you provide us. We take a more adaptable approach here to ensure that we perform precise targeting across all platforms.
Use-case
For different PPS questions, you may be targeting different consumer profiles. You may be asking attribution questions, such as “HDYHAU?”, to see what marketing channels have been working for you.
Such a question is most relevant to new customers rather than returning ones, and you would only want data from the former. This is because when asking HDYHAU, you’d want the consumer to be accurate in picking which channel led to their purchase. Accurate answers would mean accurate data for your business to analyze and utilize.
This option allows you to avoid getting responses from returning customers which may end up making your data muddy.
Surfaces
The surface option here is catered to brands who have a brick and mortar store on top of their online website. In our digital age, it might be difficult for customers to tell one store from another amidst the increased saturation of online shopping.
For that reason, physical stores are still a viable and popular option for many businesses. They provide a level of service and detail that online stores are tirelessly striving to achieve.
This option was created to provide these brands the ability to still conduct post-purchase surveys even if the purchase was done in-store. Brands will be able to maximize the capabilities of Fairing, bolstering their response rates and procuring as much data as they can.
How surface targeting is done
Checkout here refers to your regular PPS.
In 2024, Shopify has fully rolled out checkout extensibility which impacts the way Shopify applications can operate. However, Fairing has worked tirelessly since the beginning with the Shopify team to adapt to these changes. And so, our surveys integrate seamlessly with the extensions and are available as a Thank You and Order Status Page extension. Read more about how we integrate here.
On the flip side, Point of Sale (POS) means that we are integrated on the Shopify POS app as a tile. To facilitate the PPS, businesses can have their sales clerks to verbally ask and then key in their responses. Alternatively, customers can also key them in themselves.
Use-case
Let’s say that your business has physical retail stores on top of your eCommerce one. You recently started using Fairing as a means to figure out which of your marketing channels are driving you the most revenue.
Due to your physical and online presence, you have a lot of sales through both channels. Not only that, you’re running campaigns that would impact the both of them. However, as Fairing is a Shopify application, you were concerned that you could only gather data from eCommerce shoppers.
This is where surfaces come through. This option allows you to gather data about your entire customer base, simply by toggling and setting the questions for both checkout and POS.
Products Purchased
The ‘Products Purchased’ option allows you to target questions based on specific products purchased.
When performing a product search, you can search based on: Product Title, Product Type and Product ID. The products are viewable in the pop out modal. At launch, the targeting works as follows:
- No products selected: your question will be shown to all customers, regardless of what products they purchased.
- One product selected: your question will only be shown to customers who bought that specific product.
- More than one product selected: your question will be shown to customers who bought any of the products selected (customer does not need to buy ALL products selected).
Granting Fairing access to products
To access this targeting setting, Fairing must be granted access to read products. You will be prompted to do so under the section. Clicking 'Grant Permission' will route you to Shopify to update the permission access for Fairing.
Use-case
This feature gives you the ability to have more granular access to your data. A need could arise when your brand releases a new product for example. In promotion of your latest product launch, you could be running various campaigns on different channels. Your brand hopes that this could be your next big product.
As many of your campaigns are directed towards that specific product, you want to gather data about it. So, you use this feature to ask a specific set of questions to customers who’ve purchased this item. This is to allow you to keep track of the successful conversions of customers, and what you should or can be doing to appeal to others.
Here, you can ask questions like “How does our pricing match up to your expectations” or “Where do you encounter our brand most often”. Using such questions will allow you to finetune the marketing surrounding the product.
Geography
This allows you to target questions based on the Billing Address of your customer. You have the ability to either include specific locations to target or exclude specific locations to target.
Geography targeting is currently available at either the Country, US state or Canadian province level. At launch, the targeting works as follows:
- All locations: your question will be shown to all customers, regardless of where the customer is located.
- Include specific locations: your question will only be shown to customers with a Billing Address in the specific location(s) selected.
- Exclude specific locations: your question will be shown to all customers EXCEPT the customers with a Billing Address in the specific location(s) selected.
Use-case
This is particularly useful for businesses currently in or looking to enter international markets.
Due to your business goals in the foreign markets, you may end up running marketing campaigns in those countries. These campaigns are likely to be localized and differ from country to country.
For example, you could be operating in Germany and the US. You end up running a TV ad campaign in Germany and a direct mail one in the US. Due to the different strategies taken and the vastly different markets, this will have a direct impact on what kind of data you wish to collect and what you ask in your PPS.
This is where the value of geography targeting is. It allows you to ask questions specific to the geographic location of the consumer. Hence, you’re able to ask TV campaign specific questions for your German customers, and direct mail ones to your American customers.
You have the freedom to toggle this to ask based on your own marketing mix.
Language Translations
The eCommerce landscape is international, and it is a goal for many brands to reach customers worldwide. As brands expand, the need to adapt and localize content becomes imperative.
At Fairing, we've listened closely to our merchants' needs, and one feature stands out as a game-changer: language translations. This simple addition addresses a crucial aspect of customer experience—seeing surveys in a familiar language.
The impact? A smoother journey from browsing to feedback, leading to higher response rates and more accurate attribution data for merchants.
Language Translations for your Question Stream can be set up via a CSV upload of your translations. Once uploaded, when customers go to answer your Question Stream, we will check their default browser language and we will display the Question Stream in that language if a translation exists—if a translation does not exist for that language, we will display your ‘default’ language. That is whatever language your Question Stream is originally written in.
Use-case
We understand that many of our merchants who use Fairing may not be english-speaking, or operate in countries where English is not their primary language. The translations feature comes as a way for your PPS to be carried out regardless of where you’re at or from.
With language translations, connect better to the local audience in their primary language. This will help lower bounce rates and improve response rates as they can easily understand what they’re being asked.
Previously, a quick fix could be to utilize Google Translate for this problem. This feature removes the need for all that, creating a solution for your business in-app.
Frequency
When getting your customers to answer your PPS, we want to put them on the path of least resistance. To put it simply, we try to cut down where we can to make the process as smooth as possible.
The "How often should we ask this question?" setting on your question edit page allows you to set the question persistence. We have the following options:
- Until answered - we’ll ask this question until we get a response. If you have New customers toggled above, the customer will only see this question once, as a customer is only "New" on their first order.
- Always - we’ll ask this question on every order, regardless of whether the customer is new or returning. This toggle is great for order-specific questions like: “Who is this order for?”
Use-case
Some PPS questions require constant updating, while others do not.
There are certain questions, like demographic or even HDYHAU questions, that need not be asked multiple times. Once answered the first time and your business has procured the data, that will be sufficient for analysis. In fact, additional answers may only muddy up the data and make it difficult to analyze.
As for order specific questions, such questions can and should be asked again. This is data that you want to keep collecting to make sure that you’re up to date on consumers. This includes personalization questions like “Who is this purchase for?” or conversion rate optimization (CRO) questions like “Did you encounter any issues in placing this order?”. Read our recommendations for the top PPS questions to ask to get a better understanding of which questions would be suited for which.
