How In-App Surveys Can Help You Reduce Funnel Drop-Off Rate

Funnels are part of every digital products out there: sign up, onboarding, key tasks, and even subscription cancellation are most of the time funnels.

So, increasing conversion rate between each funnel step is a typical mission for product teams. Reducing drop-off rate means that your users reach their goals and they are one step closer to perceiving the value of your product. This is key, and often on top of priorities for SaaS companies.

Obviously, product analytics solutions can be of a great help. All of them enable you to visualise your funnels and conversion rate. (If yours doesn't... well you should start looking for a new one.)

But analytics have a limit: they never explain WHY people drop-off. You can visualize the problem, but you can't understand WHY it's happening.

This is where in-app surveys can be helpful: by helping you understanding why people leave your funnel and giving you keys to improve your experience and your performance over time.

Be sure that you collect your key funnel events

Before starting to optimize your funnel, you must be sure that you track everything right. The bare minimum is to track when people are entering the funnel, and the event that you consider as a success - the end of your funnel.

Obviously, you should also track every step and every action in your funnel but, if you can't, entering the funnel and leaving it by doing the key action of the funnel (validating a subscription, creating the account, etc) are the two events you must track.

🆕 Discover how to track events in Screeb with Google Tag Manager!

Start by looking at two (and only two) metrics

When your events are tracked, the first thing you need to do is going in your analytics solution. We'll need two metrics to know where and when to deploy our in-app surveys.

The first metric we need to have is obviously the conversion rate from one step to another. If it's really good from Step A to Step B but bad from Step B to Step C, we don't need to ask questions on Step A and we'll concentrate on Step B.

So start by understanding where are your biggest drop-off in your funnel. This will be our priority.

The second metric you need to look for is the average time spent on a step before going to the next one. If you see that people are spending 50 seconds on Step B and that only 40% of them are converting to Step C, you may want to display a survey right before they leave to understand what could have make them stay.

At the end, you should have a table like this:

This simple table will be your most powerful tool to reduce your drop-off!

🥇 Display surveys in the funnel right before drop-off

Now that we know where most drop-off happen and how long people stay on the page before leaving, we'll use these information to display a survey in the funnel to understand what you could improve on this screen to reduce the drop-off rate.

Ask a simple question like "How could we make this screen easier to understand?" or "Do you need more information to perform this action?" and let people answer in an open field.

Display this survey on the page of the Step with the lowest conversion rate. In our table, that would be /funnel/step-b/.

But don't display it too soon, you would disturb people and worsen your conversion rate. Use the Average Time Spent data to display your survey once we reached this delay, or even a bit after it. In our example, you would wait for at least 50 seconds before displaying your survey.

Be careful: don't wait too long, you would also miss a lot of people! Conduct tests and find the right balance between too soon and too late to optimize your response rate.

This is REALLY easy to do and you'll get tons of insights about how to improve your funnel.

🥈 Ask those who succeeded what was hard to do

The fact that some people succeed in going through your funnel doesn't mean that your funnel is working and that nothing has to change. Some of them maybe really wanted to go through. Maybe others didn't have a choice because their boss wanted them to complete the task.

Asking to those people what could have been improved is a great way to collect feedback and spot areas of improvement. But you have to do it as soon after the completion of the funnel as possible, for them to still have all their feelings in mind and share them with you. So we'll use the success event that we were speaking about above to display a specific survey to this group of users.

In Screeb, select the Customer Effort Score template. It's a survey designed to identify the level of effort needed to complete a task in your product.

To start, keep the survey as general as possible. It will help you see if every respondent giving a bad CES talk about the same issue. Over time, you'll refine your questions and be more and more precise about a part of your funnel.

Display this survey on the page that is reached after completing the funnel, and only if the success event has been triggered. This way, you'll ask questions right after the completion - so people didn't forget the experience they had - without risking to disturb them during the funnel, and while being sure you'll collect answers only from people who went through every step of the funnel.

🥉 Target those who dropped

Even if with 🥇 and 🥈 you already identified key opportunities to improve your funnel, you still may not have a 100% conversion rate for every step. It means that some people will continue to drop. That's ok, if you tap on this group to continue to understand what you could do better.

To do that, you'll use the two key events we were talking about above: entering into the funnel, and your success event. You'll target people who triggered the first one but not the second one. In other words, it means that you'll display a survey to people who entered in the funnel, but left it before the end.

In Screeb, you'll do that by setting your User Segmentation with your first event count greater that 0 and your success event count smaller than 1. Read more about it here.

In your survey, ask simple questions and use variables to engage with your users. For example, you could ask something like "Hey {firstname}! We've noticed that you didn't go to the end of our funnel. Could you tell us why and help us improve your experience?".

A simple question like that, asked at the right moment to the right group of people will be a tremendous help for you when you'll want to reduce your drop-off rate.

3 surveys? I don't want to spam my users!

With this 3 surveys, you'll get all the information you need to improve your funnel. But you may think that 3 in-app surveys is too much and that you risk to "spam" your users.

First of all, keep in mind that thanks to an event-based segmentation, your users will only see the second OR the third survey, not both. These are not 3 consecutive surveys, but more like a conditional workflow.

Also, in Screeb, we have a capping feature that let you decide how many surveys you want to display to your users per session. This way, you're sure they'll never be bothered by your questions.

With 3 simple surveys, displayed at the right moment thanks to the data you have in your analytics solution and thanks to some key event tracking, you'll build a strong list of improvement for your funnel. You'll be able to reduce your drop-off rate by a lot and increase your conversion performance!