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Survey Display Priority Logic
Survey Display Priority Logic

Learn how running multiple surveys with overlapping audiences will display to your customers

Landon Anspach avatar
Written by Landon Anspach
Updated over a year ago

Learning how to leverage the survey display logic of KnoCommerce can be a powerful tool within your survey arsenal. This doc will explain the behavior behind survey targeting, the logic that is used whenever multiple surveys are live, and how to use that technology to best suit your brand's purposes.

Survey Targeting

KnoCommerce uses Audiences to determine who should see a survey. A survey defaults to an All Customers audience if none exist or if none are chosen. When an audience is selected, it will appear slightly lighter than other audiences and will have a green checkmark to indicate its selection.

Note: Free version customers do not have access to audiences, which makes the default Audience All Customers. Free version surveys will have an audience field that looks like this.

To add an Audience, do so either directly from the Audience field of the survey builder or go to the Audiences page to create them.

Common Audiences for Survey Targeting

  • New Customers -> Lifetime Order Count = 1

  • Returning Customers -> Lifetime Order Count > 1

  • MVP Customers -> Lifetime Order Count > 5

  • Product XYZ Purchasers -> Line Items - Name Contains XYZ

  • Product XYZ Purchasers -> Line ITems - SKU Contains XYZ SKU

  • Customer Browsing Language -> Customer Locale Contains Language Code

  • Survey Completed -> Survey Completed - Survey#1 Is Complete

Survey Targeting Behavior

After a customer makes a purchase, our script loads on their order confirmation page. Part of that script checks all live surveys for their audiences and creates a list of surveys for which the customer meets the audience criteria. Then the system chooses from that list at random. There are three main ways you can leverage this targeting behavior.

Mutually Exclusive Surveys

You segment all customers into two or more groups but each customer only qualifies for one survey. An example would be lifetime order count and showing surveys to New Customers, Customers with 2 to 4 lifetime orders, and customers with 5+ lifetime orders. A customer can ONLY fit into any one bucket at a time. The benefit of this method is that the boundaries are clear cut and your customers see the specific survey with the important questions given their current lifetime order count.

Previous Survey Completion Surveys

This method allows you to ask multiple questions on multiple surveys without adding too many questions to any one customer survey experience. You can also prioritize which questions a customer has to answer before moving on to the next set of questions.

A really common setup for this is having a Returning Customer survey for all customers > 1 lifetime order. For every subsequent order as a returning customer, the individual will see that survey until they complete it fully. No response or partial survey completion will result in the customer seeing the uncompleted survey again.

Then Followup Survey 1 can have an audience of Completed Returning Customer survey. Then you can have Followup Survey 2 with an audience of Completed Followup Survey 1. This gives you more control over which questions to prioritize and specifying the customer survey experience.

Round Robin Surveys

This method allows you to survey a wide variety of audiences using multiple surveys targeting different segments of your customers. The benefit of this method is that you get a wide variety of surveys and survey results and customers who come back several times to make purchases will be asked regularly for detailed information.

An example of this would be running a New Customer survey, a Returning Customer survey, a survey for customers who purchase product XYZ, a survey for customers who purchase product ABC, and a survey for female customers (determined by their answer to a question displayed on the Returning Customer survey)

Final Suggestions

Audiences used for targeting surveys are very useful but also very flexible. If you're wanting to accomplish a particular use case but aren't quite sure how to accomplish it, please reach out to hello@knocommerce.com as we'd love to strategize with you to get you the info you need.

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