HDYHAU Answer Options: Why eCommerce Brands Use What They Use

Understanding the customer journey is paramount for businesses aiming to thrive in competitive markets, and this is more relevant than ever in the eCommerce landscape.

Survey questions like "How Did You Hear About Us?" (HDYHAU) serve as a crucial touchpoint in this journey. They offer invaluable and actionable insights into the effectiveness of marketing efforts, the reach of brand messaging, measure your customer satisfaction and more.

In order to maximize the value of your post-purchase surveys to capture the diverse channels through which consumers discover and engage with brands, it is necessary to provide the “right” options to your consumers to click through.

Recognizing the multifaceted nature of modern communication, it is important for businesses to offer a vast array of answer options in their surveys. This ensures a more accurate depiction of the customer acquisition landscape.

Done right, these insights can be the guiding light in your marketing efforts, or future events moving forward.

More than that, some platforms such as Fairing will offer features that give an added depth to your HDYHAU survey such as Response Clarification. This allows you to ask follow-up questions to your customers, which are available in different formats: Single Response, Multi Response, Open-Ended, Date or Auto Suggest.

Businesses can utilize each one of these options sparingly to create the ultimate post-purchase survey that will produce the best results for future analysis.

This blog explores the significance of each option in the HDYHAU question and explains why it is necessary to tailor these choices to the unique preferences and experiences of consumers, and where you can use follow-up questions to further bolster your data collection. We will go through HDYHAU examples as well as HDYHAU sample answers to give you a clear understanding.

Social Media

Social media is a powerful marketing tool for eCommerce businesses due to its extensive reach and low cost. It allows them to connect with a vast audience globally.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter enable targeted advertising, precise audience segmentation, and real-time engagement, fostering direct interaction with potential customers. Additionally, the ability to share visually engaging content and user-generated reviews enhances brand visibility and credibility. This will help drive sales and foster customer loyalty.

When presenting your customers with social media options, there are a number of ways you could do it.

General Option

First would be to offer the option ‘Social Media’ that covers all your social media marketing channels in totality. This would be done if your marketing campaigns span many different formats different from social media and you would like to compare between those.

Listing out each platform

Alternatively, you could list out the various social media platforms as multiple choice answers such as ‘Facebook’, ‘Instagram’, ‘TikTok’, so on and so forth. This enables you to get an in-depth understanding of your social media attribution, and which platforms have been the most effective in getting your brand name out. With this information, your business can decide where to invest more resources in to further drive your paid advertising or any other strategies.

A mixture of both

However, sometimes it isn’t necessary to choose.

As mentioned earlier about features like Fairing’s Response Clarification, using these features would give you the best of both worlds here. By first giving the ‘Social Media’ option to your customers, you can then follow it up by asking them “Which social media platform?”.

This will allow you to not overwhelm your customers on the main page with all the social media platforms, while still getting the much needed information.

Word-of-Mouth or Friends and Family

This is one of the options that showcase the irreplaceable value of HDYHAU surveys.

By presenting this option to your consumers, you will be able to tap onto offline referrals which is data you otherwise would not be able to procure with traditional data collection methods. With this, you can gather an understanding of whether your brand is liked by your customers and good enough that it is being referred to their friends and family.

With this information, it would mean that you should further invest in your business and brand, to continue with the current image and find ways to develop it.

Example

This was evident in the past with Weezie, a luxury towel brand, who were looking to make sure their investment in creating a quality brand experience was worthwhile.

By integrating Fairing’s post-purchase survey (PPS) into their store, they managed to attribute around 35% percent of their business to word-of-mouth referrals and hence they now had concrete knowledge that all their brand efforts have paid off to create a well-referred brand. This allowed them to optimize their 7-figure advertising expenditure.

Search Engine

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another crucial marketing technique that stands to be very valuable for your business. While this may not be a go-to option for many businesses, particularly those just starting out or of a smaller size, the payoffs of good SEO are monumental.

Businesses can consider investing in paid Google search advertising or simply to improve your placing on search engines so that your business can be more easily found. This can help to insert your business name into the awareness and consideration stage of the marketing funnel for your consumers. That would increase the likelihood of being top-of-mind when they make it to their decision stage and thus lead to higher purchases.

Similar to social media, a follow-up question here can be vital if you were to invest in various search engines. Hence, finding out which exact one or where they learnt about your business on search engines can be crucial information as the latter would indicate to you whether for example paid ads or SEO is more worthwhile to your business.

Podcast

Podcasts are an up and coming form of media that businesses are also starting to invest in. With podcasts becoming a norm and a primary source of audio content, it is also becoming a viable marketing platform for businesses. Here, it is also important to follow-up and asking “Which podcast?” to learn more.

Example

This was evident in the case of Füm, a product that helps people quit smoking and vaping naturally, Füm stumbled into success with podcasting as an advertising medium. However as they had initially done oher organic channels like YouTube and TikTok which had also helped to revive its business, murky attribution made it difficult to pin down exactly which creators, channels, and shows were driving the most revenue.

With valuable insights collected from their PPS, their HDYHAU survey question continues to power Füm’s investment in podcast advertising, where it grew from spending $5k to $120k on the back of Fairing insights into channel performance.

Others

While it is nice to offer your customers a long list of options, it isn’t advisable as we don’t want to overwhelm them and cause them to leave without answering. Hence, it is good to also leave an open-ended “Others” option to allow your customers to type in an answer that you didn’t include.

It is also possible that customers heard about your business organically or in ways you were not expecting, and such answers could potentially prove to be of value in the future when you reconsider your marketing strategy.

Example

This was exactly the case with Füm who experienced an unexpected sales spike and were left wondering what to attribute it to. From their HDYHAU findings, it was revealed that the brand was mentioned on The Joe Rogan Experience. These valuable insights gave Füm the idea to tactically invest in creators moving forward through paid partnerships and strong ad relationships.