Prefinery

How do you get your beta testers to give you feedback?  Over the past 3 months I’ve run a series of experiments on Prefiney, including feedback links, polls, surveys, and email.

Add a Feedback Link

My first experiment was to add a UserVoice feedback link.  The link is prominently displayed on every page.  You can’t miss it.  When you click the link, a little popup box appears where you can quickly leave your opinion, whether it be a suggestion, feature request or bug report.  Leaving feedback couldn’t be easier.

Over the past 3 months a total of 2 of Prefinery’s approximately 400 beta testers have given feedback using the feedback link.  Over this same period, 5 people emailed our support address to give feedback.  The Contact Us email link is tiny and concealed at the bottom of the page.  What gives?

The hypothesis here is simple - an email goes to a person and there’s an expectation that someone will receive your suggestion and follow up with you.  People like to talk to people, so place your contact link, email address, or phone number prominently on your site. Better yet, use Campfire or Olark to let your customers chat with you instantly.

I believe that you’ll convince little more than 1% of your traffic to click your feedback link and leave a comment. Now, if you have a very popular site, 1% is nothing to scoff at.  But, if you’re just launching your web app in private beta, 1% might as well be 0.  Sure, you should still place the link on your site.  But, you’ll want calibrate your expectations.  Better yet, actively reach out to your testers by asking them to take a poll or survey …

Publish Inline Polls

In the sidebar of one of Prefinery’s most popular pages we have begun placing a small poll.  We ask simple questions, with a yes or no response.  Such as, “Want to see tester growth over time on a chart?” or “Want to be able to create polls like this one with Prefinery?“   The polls are powered by PollDaddy. 

Every week we swap out the question via our PollDaddy account, with no changes to Prefinery itself.  Over the past month we have run three polls and had a good response to each.  About 3% of testers take the polls.  Polls are quick and easy for both the publisher and the respondant and have certainly been a success.

Email a Survey

Using Survs, we created a Beta Satisfaction and Pricing Survey (you can re-use our survey template here) which asks typical questions, such as “What did you like (dislike)?”

We very much wanted to hear the bad news alongside the good.  It was imperative that testers who tried Prefinery and decided not to use it answer the survey and tell us how we could improve.  So, we decided to offer an incentive for taking the survey - a $50 gift certificate to Amazon or Apple, winner’s choice, to be awarded to one lucky participant.  Also, we only asked those who chose not to use Prefinery one question - “Why not?”

The survey was distributed via multiple channels - we emailed it to 414 beta testers, tweeted about it from @prefinery, and linked to it from within our user’s admin account.  Survs creates a unique link for each channel, so we could measure the success of each.  The actual email was sent using Campaign Monitor, which also has very impressive analytics and is perfect for sending one-off mass emails.

Of the 414 beta testers who received our survey, 155 opened the email.  A typical open rate for technology-related email is 20%, so we are very pleased with 37%.  A grand total of 59 (14%) of all testers completed the survey.  37 (9%) took the survey after receiving the email.  Of our 94 Twitter followers, 9 (10%) took the survey.  A shocking few 13 (3% of all testers) followed the link from within their user account!  The conclusion?  Asking your customers to take your survey actually works!

Summary

14% of all testers took the survey, 3% took the inline polls, and 0.5% submitted feedback using the feedback link.

Overall, the experiments showed that passively placing your contact information, a feedback link, or even a survey on your site is not enough.  If you want to know what your users think of your product, ask them.