Joomla Surveys - a great tool for your online business
by Tiara Rea
If you are doing business online, you probably already realize the importance of customer feedback. Unlike when you visit your local Wells Fargo Bank and they ask you to take a customer survey after your experience with their sales representatives, it’s hard in the online realm to know what your visitors are thinking or why they bought from you. There are several things you can do to remedy this, and I’m going to talk in-depth about one of those today – surveys.
Working with Joomla, there are options for implementing either a simple user-experience survey, general site feedback, or even full-fledged solutions to assist with future releases and troubleshooting. Using a survey on your website cannot only boost your sales and increase your future customer base but can also act as a development tool to help you figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Using the Joomla Core Polls Components
Working with the Joomla core, you can add a survey to your Joomla website as a “poll”, a feature included with every Joomla install. I have to say, this is fairly limited, although you are in no way limited by how many polls you can include on your site or really where you want them. Plus, it’s already installed, which is a plus.
A poll is automatically featured on your newly-installed Joomla website, but you can add a new one or delete the current ones by visiting Components > Polls.
Once there, you’ll see your Poll Manager, where you can create, edit, or delete your polls and the order in which they show up on your site. So let’s create a New Poll.
Click on the “New” icon, and you’ll see various fields where you can create a question (title) and options for answers (options 1 through whatever you choose):
On the right of that page, you can choose where you want the survey to be displayed. For example, if you have a page called “Thank You” that shows up once a user has completed an order, you could choose that from the right menu and have this little survey show up there. It’s an easy method that only requires these simple steps. Plus, you can create multiple polls for multiple pages.
The drawback? It’s not very pretty, nor is it very complex, nor can you make it do cool things like popup or under or really anything. And it’s not worthwhile for an actual post-sales survey, as it doesn’t give you many options for customization. So even though it’s easy to work with, it’s not very informative, and though you can view statistics on how and what people have answered, it doesn’t necessarily work as a survey but is best suited for quick polls or user quizzes to get fast feedback.
FREE POLL DOWNLOADS
A decent downloadable poll addition for Joomla and an extension of the normal poll modules is PollXT from JoomlaXT. There are many alternatives for extending the features of the Joomla core Poll feature, but PollXT comes with a slue of awesome features, like unlimited questions and answers, intro and exit texts, different types of answers (like checkboxes, pull down menus, freetext entries, etc), IP and cookie logging, and more. The stable version can easily be installed to your Joomla website.
The biggest problem I found with using PollXT is that even though it’s quite popular amongst the Joomla crowd, the support on the company’s website isn’t so popular and actually nonexistent. But the biggest upside is it’s completely free and very easy to work with, and this one can definitely be used as more of a survey feature than the regular old Joomla Poll.
ADVANCED JOOMLA SURVEYS
As an easy but advanced way to add surveys to your Joomla website, try the Survey Module from iJoomla , which allows for further and more in-depth survey solutions. There are tons of reasons it’s more than worth the price you pay, but the first is the simplicity. As a new Joomla user, you’ll really benefit from ease of navigation and setup:
In working with iJoomla Surveys , once installed you need only click on Surveys > New to begin and you will be immediately prompted to name your survey, input welcome text, pictures, charts, etc, and even preview your work.
Once you’ve written an intro text, you can insert images, choose options for publishing the survey to your website, and even end with a Thank You text or redirect to a landing page.
This kind of page is especially helpful if you have an affiliate relationship with a partner or can offer your customers something that will assure they come back to purchase again, such as a coupon discount for future purchases.
After creating your survey, you can create pages to host the questions on. For example, page one might be just the intro text, while page two handles simple questions like Name, Age, Email Address, and Sex. Page three might be more detailed demographics or might be set for actual questions for facts you need to know about your customers, like their experience with your products, experience with your competitors, and information on how they found your website.
The best thing about iJoomla Surveys is that it’s really comprehensive without being overwhelming, and the results are phenomenal. Here are some of the other awesome features to gander:
- Skip Logic – This allows you to set specific sets of questions, based directly on your customers’ answers. So if you ask them, “Was our signup process smooth?” and they answer “No”, you can ask them for more information and suggestions for a better process; whereas if they answer “yes”, you can move onto the next relevant question.
- Multiple Viewing Options – You’re not limited to just showing a survey on screen. You can initiate a pop-up, send an email invitation to take a survey, or even simply display a link.
You can try the demo here to see for yourself, but it’s a great step up from the Joomla Core and you get to keep it forever!
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