Keeping users engaged with you and your brand is crucial to increasing your site traffic and by proxy your revenues. You need people to visit the site and trust you to make a profit off of them, right? You can see examples of this in how so many sites today are littered with subscription popups, next-article links and a million other ways to try and keep you clicking. Comment sections on articles are a really popular way to keep users engaged with eachother and your site. Another way to get people's opinions is to add polls and surveys!
Why polls and surveys?
Polls and surveys can increase user retention
Comments are awesome at letting people engage with eachother but they don't give you a lot of quick insight into key metrics about your users that are difficult to measure. It's easy to use an analytics program and see when your site gets visits and from where but you can't learn things like users' favorite email app or preferred development environment. These are the things that are relevant to your business and your users will probably find interesting as well. At CSS Tricks Chris Coyier puts up polls regularly that draw thousands of responses. He publishes the results and I personally always go back just to see the discussion around the poll results. So, with very little effort, he's convinced me and thousands of others to give him valuable information and return to the site multiple times. That is building engagement. That is some really smart audience building.
Users want to engage with your brand
We, as humans, like to express ourselves and interact with others. Getting your users to interact with others is easy: just give them a forum/comment section. But what about with you/your brand? This is where we need to learn to not just create content but actively engage users in a conversation. By directly asking users questions and providing them a way to give you feedback directly, you've added a human element to your site/application that users can more easily engage with.
Tailored content
Using polls and surveys doesn't just increase engagement, satisfaction, and user retention. It also provides a way for you to gain a lot of insight into what your users want from you and how you can possibly pivot your content strategy to gain more traffic. Asking questions like "which article did you find most engaging?" or "which category would you like to hear more about?" provides a ton of already-valuable direction for your content strategy.
In addition to being able to tailor your content better to your users as a group, you can also tailor your content better to individual users. If you have unique user tracking or logged-in users on your website, you can associate these survey responses with their profile and recommend content to them that they'd actually enjoy instead of just whatever is most recently published. This gives you a much more fine-grained strategy for user retention which becomes more and more valuable when your traffic increases because you'll likely be serving more than one "persona".
Plug and Play Solutions
- Readygraph offers a one-stop-shop for all your viral marketing and engagement needs.
- Google Surveys is enterprisde-grade survey equipment that comes with super slick response breakdowns.
- SurveyMonkey is free, easy to use and has a great UI for creating user surveys.
- Rafflecopter makes it really easy to add raffles and giveaways to your website in a way that forces users to spread your good word socially.
- And many more. If you have a WordPress website, I know there are a litany of plugins for increasing user engagement in one way or another. Go searching for yourself or send me a message on twitter and I'll see what else I can come up with!