Why Customer Surveys Are The Secret Weapon For Shopify Store Growth — Timothy Andersen | Why Zero-party Data Beats Third-party Cookies, How To Use Surveys In Customer Journey, What To Ask In Post-purchase Surveys, How To Boost Survey Response Rates (#379)

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In this episode, we explore how to collect zero-party data to drive Shopify store conversions.  

Joining the conversation is Timothy Andersen, Co-founder of Gojiberry, a leading Shopify survey tool. Timothy shares valuable insights on leveraging customer-provided data for better marketing decisions, inventory planning, and building trust.  

Learn the difference between data types and discover practical strategies for collecting and acting on zero-party data to improve your eCommerce business. 

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• What zero-party data is and why it's more reliable than third-party cookies. 
• How to implement surveys at different customer journey touchpoints. 
• Why marketing attribution surveys often contradict Google Analytics data. 
• What questions to ask in post-purchase surveys. 
• How to create engaging surveys with high response rates. 
• What the ideal survey incentive amount is ($1 per minute). 
• How one retailer reduced $80,000 in dead stock using product surveys. 
• Why sharing survey data improves team decision-making. 
• How to balance survey frequency without annoying customers. 
• Why human connection through surveys builds trust in the AI era. 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://www.gojiberry.app/
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/gojiberry
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-andersen/ 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/3r2j8p4f 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey there, welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break Podcast. I'm your host Claus Lauter, bringing you actionable tips and strategies to help you grow your online store and sell smarter. In today's episode we discuss how to collect zero party data to drive Shopify store conversions. Joining me in the show is Timothy Andersen, Co-founder [00:00:20] of Gojiberry.

So let's dive right into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we want to talk about how to collect zero party data and find out what that is. And we want to find out how it can drive Shopify store conversions in a better way. Joining me for that, I have a guest on the show as always.

It's Timothy Andersen. He's the co founder of [00:00:40] Goji Berry, a leading Shopify survey tool. With a background in startups and a passion for helping Shopify merchants grow, he specializes in leveraging zero party data to solve critical e commerce challenges. So let's. Welcome to the show. Hi, Timothy. How are you today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Claus. I'm very happy to be here. Let's dive right into it [00:01:00] for our listeners who aren't familiar with the term of zero party data, tell me what it is and why is it so important for online stores? Definitely. Definitely. Um, so zero party data, uh, to explain what it is, it's simply when your customers, uh, proactively offer their data to you.

For example, uh, [00:01:20] our Goji berry surveys, you can ask your customers for answers to your questions and then they offer you the data, uh, to compare other types of data, uh, third party data, for example, from third party cookies and such is when you're, uh, gathering data about customers from other websites.

First party data is [00:01:40] when you're tracking your customers, but they're not proactively giving it to you. For example, web analytics tools, you can track where they're clicking, what pages they're viewing. That's first party data. And again, zero party data is when they're offering you the data proactively.

And it's the most reliable, uh, most trust, uh, worthy type of data, uh, you can gather. Mm [00:02:00] hmm. I think it's a very good summary there, the difference between third party and third, uh, first party cookies. And there's a lot of uncertainty in the market for a very long time if third party cookies will go away.

So I think collecting the data directly on your platform, on your store, is a much better idea. Now tell me about different ways on how to do that. Um, you said you're doing [00:02:20] surveys. How does it work? How can I collect this data? So, um, you can collect, uh, data from your customers, uh, mainly using surveys in many different touch points along your, uh, customer journey.

So, you can collect it when they first enter your website and just show them a survey pop up, like, how did you hear about us? [00:02:40] Depending on what you're trying to learn about your customers, if you want to learn if there's a way to improve your, uh, website navigation, your store navigation, uh, ask them questions while they're navigating your store.

Or you can wait until after post purchase, after they make the purchase. Uh, did they have a good experience on your website? And then finally, like [00:03:00] post sales, like after they receive the actual product in hand, you can ask them about the product, of course. Like, do you enjoy the product? Are there any products you would like to see next?

So depending on the point of, uh, where in the customer journey, uh, you'd like to learn more about, uh, there's different questions you can ask. and different features you can use in Goji [00:03:20] Berry. But we support all the different touch points in the customer journey. I want to dive a little bit deeper into this because I think a lot of listeners are being interested in how to do a good survey.

Um, doing a survey is not an easy part in marketing. Um, I see a lot of very bad surveys out floating out of there. And um, so maybe we [00:03:40] just go through the different versions that you have and give some tips and ideas and tricks on how to create an engaging survey. Absolutely Claus. So, uh, us ourselves, we're user research experts.

So as product developers, IT product developers, we rely very heavily on user feedback. So, uh, one, just [00:04:00] gathering feedback in the first place, getting lots of responses, lots of data points is very important. And then also, obviously, you want unbiased data, right? You don't want to be getting the wrong data, getting bad data that would steer you in the wrong direction.

So as user research experts, we understood that it [00:04:20] was our job to help Shopify store owners. guide them into asking the right questions in the right way. So the right questions in the right way. That includes getting high response rates on your survey, making the sure the questions are short. The number of clicks on your survey is few.

[00:04:40] So you get a high response rate. You get answers quickly. And then it's also our job to make sure you're asking questions in an unbiased way. The way you word the question, uh, how you give incentives, uh, like, for example, randomizing the options, uh, the order of the options. Uh, so they're not just clicking the top [00:05:00] option every time biasing your results.

So getting lots of, uh, responses, getting high response rate, getting unbiased, uh, responses with the way you're asking the question and even like after you get the responses, what do you do with it? Like, connecting to the next action. Yeah, that's also, that's not easy, right? So, our team, Gojiberry [00:05:20] team, we're constantly thinking about, like, how can we connect it to the next step, to the next action point.

Okay, I think that's a very, very important point. That's why I was smiling. It's like, a lot of people just collect data, and that's the right thing to do, but then the next step, connecting, that's sometimes very, very difficult. So, tell me about it. What are ways to [00:05:40] really get most of the data that you just have collected?

Right. One simple one. Um, it's just to share it with your team, right? Like you don't want to be using Gojiberry by yourself looking at this big data set by yourself. And you want to, um, you know, uh, copy the charts, copy the CSV data, share it with the [00:06:00] rest of your team. So when you're having your team discussions, um, everybody's on the same page and you have.

Team discussions, folks around evidence around real data, rather than intuition. And then the second thing, more practical, more thinking about like marketing automation and such. Uh, you can definitely use, uh, survey data [00:06:20] to, uh, connect to your marketing automation tools to your email tools. For example, a lot of our customers, they ask like, what, what products would you like to see next when they're trying to figure out what next products to develop?

A very easy, easy thing to do is to, uh, take that data, connect it to your [00:06:40] Klaviyo, connect it to your email marketing app. and segment your customers. If a customer said they like product day, uh, and when you actually make product day, you can just email them and say, okay, product day is ready. Uh, here's a coupon if you like, or, um, uh, uh, navigate them to the store and have them take a look at product day.

Uh, you can segment your [00:07:00] customers based on their responses to the survey, and you can give very personalized experience, uh, using that method. Earlier you mentioned that you do post purchase surveys, so you already have some data from the client, obviously, order address and so on and so forth. What other questions would you ask in a post purchase survey?[00:07:20] 

Um, there's a whole lot of different questions. We definitely get a whole range of them. Um, the most common question we get is marketing attribution surveys. This is where he asked, like, how did you first hear about us? So going back to the whole third party data discussion with the shift [00:07:40] away from third party data, understanding where your customers are coming from is becoming harder and harder, less and less reliable.

Uh, these, uh, ad platforms, they're not able to track where your customers are coming from and converting to purchasers. So if you ask them, uh, simply like, uh, directly, how did you first hear about [00:08:00] us? You get a data set that's completely different from the data you'll be seeing on these ad platforms. We have customers, one example.

Uh, on Google analytics, they're seeing like 30 percent of customers were coming from Google search and then two to 5 percent were coming from Instagram or YouTube. For [00:08:20] example, uh, when they did the survey, uh, asking how do you first hear about us, the numbers were completely the opposite where like 30 percent were coming from Instagram, these guys had a strong YouTube channel, so they're getting like 10 to 20 percent from.

Uh, YouTube. So they find out about the store on YouTube [00:08:40] video or Instagram influencer post. And then the next day they open up the mobile and then they search the store name. So that's why they're getting high Google search numbers, where in reality, they're finding out about the store in these other channels.

That's the most used ones. For other, if you want to improve your marketing, you can ask demographic data, like, uh, [00:09:00] what age group are you, uh, what, uh, gender are you, uh, are you purchasing for yourself or are you purchasing for your partner, uh, for a friend, for a co worker, uh, you, you might be, uh, a male person buying a dress and that could confuse, uh, the data you're getting for the store, but if you get a survey response saying you're buying [00:09:20] it for your wife, And it, uh, suddenly makes sense, like, uh, why, why the data you're seeing isn't matching up.

I think it's not matching data is a very important point because it's directly influenced where you put your marketing budget and unfortunately, all the big platforms, I think they have the tendency to try to claim the conversion for themselves. [00:09:40] Might it be Meta or Google? And as I said, having the data directly from the customer gives you different pictures there.

I want to touch a little bit on privacy, on privacy, friendliness, and data protection. Where in a survey would you start asking for more privacy related data? Um, so that's a [00:10:00] very good point. Like privacy these days, uh, the regulations out there are getting stricter, one. And then two, of course, end users, their preferences are getting much, much, uh, stricter as well.

So, uh, to answer your question directly, you, you want to get that approval, their approval from them very early, as early as possible when they enter the [00:10:20] website. But we, we've been experiencing with our surveys, people are very happy to answer a survey, uh, when they understand where their data is going, uh, when it's very obvious.

If you show them a survey, obviously the sur the response is gonna go to the store owner. They, they trust that, uh, they are very comfortable with it. [00:10:40] We saw numbers in like the high 90 percent of people are happy to answer a survey, whereas, um, if you're presenting them with like, um, web analytics tools like trackers.

60 percent of people distrust third party cookies, uh, web trackers. They just don't [00:11:00] trust it. They don't know where the data is going. Is it going to some other website that they've never even visited? They don't trust that. They hate that. But if they know it's just going to go to the store owner, I wish they're, they're very happy to support.

Uh, they love the store owner. They want to be supportive. They trust that they're happy to do it, and you're giving them a great experience. [00:11:20] Before you mentioned that you can incentivize people for taking a survey. What kind of strategy would you prefer there or would you recommend there? Uh, so incentives is one of those, uh, knobs that you can turn if you want to increase your, uh, response rate.

Uh, but there is, uh, too much incentive. So if you give too much incentive, [00:11:40] you might bias your, uh, survey results in the positive. Because they're getting a high, uh, incentive, they might give you a positive, uh, answer. So you want to give them just enough. Uh, the rule of thumb that we always tell our customers is for every one minute it takes to answer a survey, you want to give one U.

S. dollar amount of [00:12:00] incentive. So if it's like just a couple questions, you can, it takes less than a minute, just give them one dollar. Uh, if you want to ask a lot of questions, like maybe take 2 3 minutes, then you want to give like 2 3 dollars. Uh, but you don't want to give too much, uh, to bias their responses, but you want to get your response rate up, uh, get those responses quickly.[00:12:20] 

Let's dive into your Shopify app. Obviously, that helps with creating surveys. What's your take on how many surveys should you do in a customer journey? When does it start to become annoying? So where's the fine line to keep it balanced? There's definitely too many surveys. I would just [00:12:40] say one at a time.

Users aren't very bothered by seeing multiple surveys throughout the entire customer journey. You can give one when they enter the website, uh, just one when they, after they purchase and then another one post sales, like after they receive the product, like three surveys over a long span of time is not too [00:13:00] much.

But, uh, obviously you can overdo it if you're showing like two, three surveys, like post purchase. You'll, you'll start to overwhelm the user a little bit, but I would say, uh, one survey at each touch point, they, they are separated. I, I don't think that would bother the user experience too much and, and they would be happy to respond.

[00:13:20] Can you give an example of one of your clients, uh, what happened once they installed the survey feature to their store and what kind of results they saw? One of our, uh, great, uh, case studies happened with this, uh, fashion store from Canada. They were, uh, trying to think of what product, uh, they wanted to order next and add to their [00:13:40] store.

So they, they, like any store out there, they have a inventory problem where if you order too much, you have all this dead stock. If you don't order enough, you're, you're, you're losing opportunity. So in the past, they would have like 80, 000 worth of dead stock, right? Like that's, that's somewhat, uh, common for the bigger stores out there.[00:14:00] 

Um, so predicting how many products to order. Uh, they use our survey, uh, product discovery survey. What product would you like to see next? Showed four pictures and had their, uh, customer, uh, pick which one they liked. So once they had that data, the next team discussion they had, uh, it wasn't based on intuition, [00:14:20] whose opinion was strongest.

They all had a shared, uh, data set they were looking at, and it was clear, like, which one, which product would be the most popular. So, uh, they ordered, uh, based on that data set, on the relative ratio of products of each, uh, product design, and they significantly lowered the inventory, the dead stock they [00:14:40] had in the, in that batch.

So you, you can save a lot of money, uh, if you have the right data set. Uh, especially in, uh, around that stock. It's an interesting, um, insight into how surveys really help. Nothing I would have thought of. I would say more on the front end on marketing, but I'm a [00:15:00] marketing guy. But I think there's such a strong feedback loop coming from survey.

Now let's talk about your Shopify app. Um, how does it work? What kind of features does it have? How does the onboarding work? Absolutely. So, um, again, we're user research ourselves. We're user research experts ourselves. Um, so when we started [00:15:20] Goji Berry, our goal was to bring the power of user research to Shopify store owners, and we learned very quickly that Shopify stores are very busy, right?

Like they're doing, like we're talking about dealing with inventory, dealing with marketing, they're boxing the products, like they're doing 100 different things. So [00:15:40] getting the power of feedback from your customers in an easy way was our goal. Uh, so we, we broke it down into like three main components, um, where, uh, getting, uh, high responses efficiently, uh, was the one component, uh, the next one in an unbiased way.

So you're getting correct data, not, [00:16:00] uh, incorrect data, uh, guiding you in the wrong direction and then actioning, taking action on, uh, the survey results. So when you install GojiBerry, we're guiding you. We are the user research experts. Uh, some of, uh, Shopify store owners out there might be experts or have experience around it.

But a whole bunch of Shopify store owners just don't have that user [00:16:20] research experience. They don't have a user research expert on their team. Uh, so we help you with templates, helping you understand, uh, the right way to ask a question. We help you with how much incentive to give. We help you on where to place it on your, uh, website, what part of the customer journey.[00:16:40] 

And then we make sure the results are easy to understand, easy to share with your team. Um, so you're getting high response rates. Uh, you're getting unbiased data. You're sharing it with your team and you're connecting it to your marketing, uh, tools, other apps that you have installed. So all those different parts of the customer journey, we have all of it inside [00:17:00] our app.

We're guiding you throughout the entire journey. That was our intention, and we, we consistently hear about how easy it is to use Goji Berry, and how easy it is to set up these surveys, and how helpful they are once they start seeing this data, uh, come in. Uh huh. That makes perfect sense. Is there any kind of homework that the merchants need [00:17:20] to do before they can get started?

Uh, you just need to know what you want to ask, right? So, um, you need to know what it is about your business. Uh, you want to improve. Um, we, we find that people who already know what questions they want to ask when they enter Goji Berry, uh, have the best experiences. Uh, we, we do give you categories of [00:17:40] topics, uh, to ask if you're really coming in with, uh, not really sure what to ask, uh, which is perfectly fine.

But think about like, uh, where, where are the bottlenecks in your business? What would you like to learn about your customer? Um, and you'll find that when you're asking your customer questions [00:18:00] about these problems, about these bottlenecks, the answer is so much more clear. We experienced this ourselves on the Gojiberry team.

When we're not getting feedback about what our customers needs are, where, what problems they're facing, the discussions are much more stressful. Like we're in the dark. We don't know what to work on next. [00:18:20] But when you're asking your customers questions, like, where are you having problems and they're telling you, like, we're running into a problem here.

Like, could you improve this? We would love to see that when 10 people tell you the same thing, but the team discussions are so much easier. Everyone agrees. Like, yeah, the thing that everybody is saying, let's work on that first. And suddenly, uh, you're, [00:18:40] you're growing your business much more efficiently, uh, data driven based on evidence.

So think about what your bottlenecks are. Think about what you want to learn about your customer and just, uh, install Gojiberry and start asking them and you'll, you'll find your discussions go much smoother. What you should be working on next is much more clear. [00:19:00] You'll be having a much better time growing your Shopify business.

I like that you mentioned that the Goji Berry team takes you by the hand during the onboarding process. And as user experience experts, you know, basically if somebody, because the problem is you don't know what you don't know. So if you don't really know what to ask, then I'm sure that your team [00:19:20] will help there and point them into the right direction.

Let's talk about the pricing structure. How do you charge? Our pricing is very simple. We have a free plan to help you test out the survey, set up the survey, make sure it's working the way you wish. And we have a plus plan, a paid plan, currently 15 a [00:19:40] month, um, where one of the cheaper options out there against the other surveys, unlimited responses, uh, so we'll help you get set up.

And once you're set up, you have unlimited responses. And you can start running your survey. Okay, that sounds absolutely like a no brainer. And I think every store out there should use this feature in their business, in their [00:20:00] customer experience, um, because the data is just so valuable. Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, Timothy, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

Just, uh, the way the industry is changing these days, like e commerce and, uh, the internet, uh, industry at large, like trust. is, uh, we're losing it [00:20:20] every day. The loss of trust is becoming more and more powerful, especially with A. I. These days. As powerful a tool as it is, um, think about when you scroll through Instagram, like half the, half the content out there, you, you can't trust if it was generated by AI or if it was, uh, built [00:20:40] with some intents of manipulating you or like, uh, lying to you.

Uh, you don't trust it anymore. So if you want to build a great Shopify e commerce business, where you have a great, uh, relationship with your customers, where you trust each other. You want to build that human aspect. We're all about the human connection at Goji Berry. [00:21:00] So connecting with your customers, asking them human questions, getting responses from the real human being on the other side of the screen.

You'll find it to be very motivating. When you hear feedback directly from your customers, it's super motivating. Um, if you're a new entrepreneur out there and you're struggling, uh, [00:21:20] it's very motivating to hear from real people using your products. So make sure you reach out to them, build that human connection, build that personalized experience.

They'll love you for it. You'll love you for it. Uh, and you'll find that growing your business will be much easier. Uh, so we love to be part of that journey and, uh, we're working every day, uh, to help, [00:21:40] uh, help that experience for you. Okay, cool. I know it's, um, I think it's very valid reasoning that you have there.

Um, trust becomes more and more important. Um, absolutely with you on that one. Uh, where can people go and find out more about you guys? So you can find us at gojiberry. app, uh, G O J I B E R [00:22:00] R Y. app, or just find, search Gojiberry on the Shopify app store and, uh, we'll be towards the top. Okay. I will put the links in the show notes.

Then you're just one click away. Timothy, thanks so much for giving us an overview today on how you can use data to, with surveys to get a good customer feedback and to optimize your business and your [00:22:20] marketing. Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you, Claus.