What Your Customers Are Hiding: Discover It Through Surveys

Even if a customer interacts with your product or service, you’re probably not aware of all their preferences, pain points, and hidden needs.

A well-timed marketing survey can uncover this information and give you valuable insights into what truly matters to your audience. With surveys, you can understand what prevents customers from making a purchase, what challenges they face while interacting with you, and what improvements they would like to see.

In this article, we’ll explain how marketing surveys reveal customer needs and how to get the most value from them.

Why Conduct Surveys

• Understanding your audience. Surveys let you find out what your customers need, what they like, and what could be improved. You’ll see which product features are important, which ones need refinement, and which aren’t worth your time. This makes it easier to make the right decisions when improving your product or service.
• Personalizing offers. Surveys segment your audience by interests, satisfaction level, and other criteria. Based on this, you can set up marketing scenarios for each group—for example, sending different email campaigns depending on the responses in the questionnaire. This approach increases the chances that your messages will be opened and clicked.
• Boosting conversions. A feedback form on your website simplifies the process: visitors can quickly submit a request or ask a question. This speeds up lead collection, improves communication with customers, and makes the path to purchase or registration smoother. As a result, more people take the desired action.

• Trust and loyalty. When a customer sees that their opinion matters to the company and that requests are answered quickly, they become more attached to the brand. Regularly collecting feedback—for example, through NPS surveys—helps identify dissatisfied users in time and improve the service before they leave.
• Measuring effectiveness. Surveys show how a marketing campaign performed. After it ends, you can gather feedback and understand how customers perceived the promotion or new product. This allows you to make informed decisions about budgets and future strategy.

How to Use Forms and Surveys

It’s best to send surveys right after the customer has interacted with the brand

A re-engagement email in the form of a short survey. Source: reallygoodemails

Avoid ambiguous or overly long questions. One question — one idea. Short, simple wording significantly increases response rates.

You can also include open-ended questions so customers can share ideas or point out a specific problem.

An open-ended question shouldn’t be mandatory — many people will just close the survey

Why Do People Often Abandon Surveys Halfway?

People often close long or inconvenient questionnaires. The main reasons are too many questions, a complicated interface, repetitive items, and lack of motivation. If a respondent doesn’t see the point of the survey or gets tired of answering, they won’t waste their time.

To avoid this, keep forms short and to the point. If the questionnaire is long, break it into several parts so respondents don’t feel overloaded. Remove unnecessary questions and only ask those truly important for your goal. If your tone of voice allows, you can also get creative:

Add visual cues and a progress bar — this makes it easier for people to see how much is left. It’s also a good idea to offer a small incentive for participation, such as a discount, points, or useful content, and always thank respondents at the end.

It’s important to check whether the answer options are logical and cover all possible scenarios. For example, in the survey below, the respondent is asked which city they are from, but the option “San Antonio, Texas” is missing. If the participant tries to enter this answer manually, the system shows an error. As a result, the survey will most likely be closed, and you’ll lose a potential respondent.

Where Can You Create Surveys

Customer survey template

Where to Create Surveys to Know Everything About Your Customers

Altcraft is not just a set of tools but a full-fledged marketing and sales platform that unites all channels of communication with users. It collects and stores all customer information — for example, purchases, website behavior, and survey responses — in one place. This way, all data from forms immediately go into the shared database and become available for work.

• Simple drag-and-drop builder. You can create a survey without developers: just drag and drop fields (short text, answer options, rating scale, etc.) with your mouse. The interface is intuitive, and the design can be easily adjusted to match your website’s style. Any element can be made mandatory so that the customer doesn’t skip an important question. Add different types of questions to the form: with short or long answers, with one or multiple choice options, or with a rating scale.

Creating a form in Altcraft

• Conditional logic and automation. Data is automatically imported into the database, and the platform updates the customer profile. You can also set conditions within the survey — each answer corresponds to its own block of questions. For example, if a respondent gives the service a high rating, the company thanks them for their feedback, asks which features they liked the most, and invites them to share ideas for improvement. If a respondent gives a low rating, the company tries to understand what they didn’t like and asks for suggestions. This makes surveys more targeted and informative.
• Publishing and analytics. After creating a form, Altcraft generates either a link to a form page (which you can send to customers, for example, via email campaign) or an iframe code to embed the form on a website. Built-in statistics show how many times the survey was opened and how often it was completed. All results are immediately saved in the Altcraft CDP platform, where you can see the full customer profile. At any time, you can view response charts or export results to Excel.
• Triggered campaigns. Survey responses can automatically trigger new messages. In Altcraft, as an omnichannel platform, you can instantly send a series of emails, SMS, or push notifications based on customer actions, such as filling out a form. For example, you can thank them for completing the survey and send an email with a promo code.

Visual template editor in Altcraft Platform

• NPS Testing. In Altcraft, you can easily conduct NPS testing using forms, where a scale from one to ten is set up along with additional customer questions. Results can be calculated in different ways — for example, by average or total NPS — and are displayed in the statistics. This makes it possible to see customer loyalty, track changes, and categorize respondents into promoters, passives, and detractors. Such data provides a clear understanding of where improvements in customer relations are needed.

Conclusion

Marketing surveys and feedback forms provide insights into the real needs and problems of customers. They help identify weak points, improve the product, and make marketing more precise and effective. Creating and setting up such surveys in Altcraft takes just a few minutes thanks to its simple builder and flexible settings. Add a feedback form to your website and regularly ask your audience questions. This way, you’ll always know what your customers really think.