Mobile App Surveys: Questions To Ask And Best Practices To Follow

If you’re a business owner or product manager, you already know this- A developer is never off duty!

Building a great app is not a walk in the park. Your development team can spend their entire life improving a product, but the day will never come when everything is perfect. There will always be room for improvement.

But the thing is, your development team is not alone in this process. Some people are ready to help you in the journey of developing the ‘perfect’ app. And these people are your customers! So yes, your customers are there to identify your apps or product’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas to improve.

They just need a well-crafted survey for that. And using a mobile app survey can do the job brilliantly. You can ask your customers to give honest feedback about new updates, features, and designs quickly. And to help you use mobile app surveys to their full potential, we’ll share the best survey questions and practices for these surveys. Trust us, everything we’ll share has worked for our customers and us too. So, rest assured, it’ll be the same for you and your brand as well.

Why keep you waiting anymore, then? Let’s jump right in.

What Is A Mobile App Survey?

These days startups and small businesses depend on mobile apps. The reason is apparent. When the entire world is coming to pace with the new standard, mobile apps are the most convenient way to get things done without leaving home. There are plenty of apps that help you get foods, medicines, clothes, and whatnot! As per a study, Google play witnessed 28.3 billion new apps installed in 2020, which had a growth rate of 31%. And we expect these trends will continue in the upcoming years as well.

Despite all the trends and demands, there’s still a lot of room open to innovate here to provide a better user experience. And with mobile surveys, you can get feedback through the app to monitor and improve the app performance.

Technically speaking, a mobile app survey is a set of questionnaires, which allows you to gather feedback from customers through an app on their phones. You can use these surveys to collect insights about what the customers think about your brand, product, service, or even the app?

For example, YouTube uses in-app mobile surveys to collect customer feedback. First, they ask users what they think of the video or post they’ve just watched to understand algorithms, user preference, and much more. Then, YouTube randomly asks questions like “How satisfied are you with this video?” and below, they display emojis or 5-star ratings. Ain’t that smart?

Reasons Why You Need Mobile App Surveys?

Mobile app surveys have proven themselves the most potent way for market analysis from restaurants to clothing brands. Surveys have become the most helpful tool for businesses to know their customers. Just like any other survey, mobile app surveys are created to serve customers and help companies grow. Other than that, here are some more reasons why your app needs surveys:

It’s Good For Your Budget

By 2023, mobile apps are expected to bring over $935 billion in revenue. Sounds exciting, isn’t it?

But apps have their flaws too! If the mobile app has bugs, inconsistent performance crashes, poor interface, the users won’t take much time to abandon it. When it comes to mobile apps, your customers have high expectations from your brand. Poor user experience can exploit your brand image big time! That’s why businesses must put the right effort into developing their apps.

However, app development is not child’s play, and it’s costly. Every time you add a new feature or function, it adds extra expenses to your budget. So, instead of wasting money and playing a guessing game about what works and what not, use a mobile app survey. The survey responses will tell precisely what features your customers need, and the development team can then go and include that for the app.

Connect With Your Customer

In 2020, 92% of the time was spent on apps. In addition, Americans spent 8% more time on mobile than watching TV. These stats clearly show mobile usage is rising every year, which means mobile apps are an easy way to connect with customers and gather real-time feedback. Using a mobile app survey, you can make your customer feel valued. And when you take action on their feedback and help them get an excellent user experience, they’ll become a loyal advocate of your brand.

Improve The Process Of Product Development

Let’s assume you spent millions to launch a new app. But after a few years, due to lack of customer interest, you had to take the app off the market. Unfortunately, it turned out you haven’t paid close attention to your customers’ needs and interests before launching the product.

You may ask, how can you gather customer feedback before launching a product or while developing it? Well, here’s the thing, customer feedback is crucial in every stage of product development. From planning, designing to testing- always start with learning your customer needs. Conducting market research surveys or soft-launching the product in a small user group would let you do that easily. And you conduct such surveys directly via phone.

In short, a mobile app survey is super beneficial to improve the app or any product in its early development phase. Any app needs to go through various development processes like prototyping, user testing, designing, testing performance, and much more. You can use targeted surveys to understand if these developments work as expected or users are having issues here.

Also, you can use in-app surveys to learn about the app design, flexibility, navigation, security, and speed. You can even run a mobile survey after a software update. But make sure to give users some time before you start asking them about the new version. When users use a feature or function for some time, their responses will be more specific, updated, and compelling.

Personalize The App

Let’s assume your organization launched a new app in the market. The app has some great features and advantages. Your entire development team was sure the app would be a hit. But guess what! The app couldn’t perform well in the market. So, despite having great features, why did your app fail to be a hit? Where did you go wrong?

Well, before launching the app, you never asked your customers’ preferences. So it doesn’t matter if your product has some special functions. If it doesn’t resonate with the expectations and challenges of the customers, it will never be successful.

That’s why it’s crucial to personalize the app or product as per your customers’ needs. Your customers are the only ones who can tell which features they want and what they don’t. According to Forbes, 80% of consumers said they are interested in purchasing from a company that gives tailored experience. Without collecting insights from your customers, you can’t identify customer behavior and preference, and no app could become successful without it.

Turn Customers Into Advocates

“Please rate below; how likely are you to recommend our app?”

You’ve probably come across this question almost everywhere. This is one of the most commonly used survey questions that brings actionable results. You can use this in your mobile app survey to identify how many users like your app or product—people who will highly are known as promoters. And promoters are loyal customers who will advocate for your brand no matter what! As per Semrush,

• Word of mouth drives $6 trillion in annual global spending.
• 64% of marketers said that word of mouth is an effective marketing method.
• Millennials were 38% more likely to discover brands through friends and family recommendations.

These stats prove that none can do marketing better than your loyal customers. And you can find them using in-app NPS surveys. Exciting, right?

Top Mobile App Survey Questions That Bring Results

A mobile app survey can be a blessing in many ways. First, it will help you in the early development stages of your app. Second, it will help you to prioritize the features accordingly. Third, and most importantly, mobile app surveys will help you voice the customers and connect with them. Based on different phases of your product life, we have compiled a list of engaging mobile survey questions that’ll always bring the intended result.

#1 “Do you like the new design of our app?”

Your application’s design matters! 52% of users agreed that they wouldn’t return to a website with poor aesthetics. Your users care about your app design, and it can make or break your brand image, to be precise. So, you can use this question in your mobile survey to ensure users genuinely like the design of your app.

Let’s take the example of Nike+Run Club here. It is one of the most popular health and fitness apps on the Apple store. But back in 2016, they got significant backlash from their users for redesigning their app. Most of their old customers weren’t happy with the new UI and features, which resulted in 2-star reviews from iPhone users. Well, today, it has more than 170 million users, and it’s expected the numbers will only grow in the future.

So, how did they manage to turn this backlash into profits? Well, they listened to their customers’ feedback!

#2. “How does the app run after the update?”

You may come up with a new app update in the market, and no matter how many times you’ve tested the update before launching, there’s always a chance someone might not find the update helpful. Also, your users can find a flaw the development team might’ve missed while updating. You can include this question in your mobile app survey to evaluate the new update in such scenarios.

#3. “How can we improve the app?”

Users can face a lot of issues while using your app. They can encounter bugs, app crashes, interface inconsistency, poor loading, and low performance. Even if you use the most skilled UI/UX team, there’s always room for improvement.

Include this question in your mobile survey to spot the issues sooner with the help of your customers and fix them accordingly. Use open-ended questions to allow users to share their problems. Ask them to add a screenshot if needed, so you can get to know the problem exactly. Here’s a heads up, send this survey question to users who have spent a considerable time in the app. New ones won’t be able to do justice here.

#4. Do you like our app?

Do you know why so many businesses fail? This is because they don’t listen to their customers’ voices. One such example is Zune. In 2006, Microsoft launched Zune to compete with Apple. The app was promising; still, it failed miserably in the market. Why? Because Microsoft created a product that had no reason for users to switch.

This shows the significance of feedback. If you don’t ask your users about the relevancy or likability of the product, you’ll never know how the market will react.

That’s why asking this question can help gather valuable feedback about the product. You can customize this as a yes or no question or keep it open-ended. If you get a more positive response, this will help bring more followers, downloads, and praise to the market. However, if you get more negative responses, don’t get bogged down. Instead, you can use them to analyze your business’s weaknesses and improve the app to come back stronger!

#5. “What goals are we helping you accomplish?”

If your app can help users solve their pain or achieve their goals, it’s definitely a great app to use. Identifying their pain points will help you build a strong relationship with them. So, you can ask them this open-ended question to find how the app is solving their issues. You may get surprised to see how the app benefits the customers in a way you and your team never thought of before.

#6. “Which features in the app do you use the most?”

Again, this question will give you an idea of what users think of your app. Learning about the best features can help you understand the vital aspects of the app. Also, you can prioritize the features based on the survey responses to understand which of them is necessary.

For example, companies like Apple use surveys for product innovation and improvements. The company welcomes surveys from users to know their satisfaction level with a specific feature and their app. In fact, in 2018, Apple sent surveys to iMac Pro users, asking why they purchased the product and the features they liked or disliked.

#7. “How satisfied are you with the purchasing experience?”

With mobile app surveys, you can ask users a post-purchasing question to increase the lifetime value. Right after you deliver them a product, food, or even clothes, gather feedback on how satisfied they are with the purchase. Companies like Amazon send in-app post purchasing surveys to gauge their customer satisfaction level.

There you have it! These are a few examples of mobile app surveys that you can use to understand customer behavior. However, if you’re still confused about how to craft questions engagingly, you can count on us! Head to SruveySparrow’s free mobile survey app templates and craft conversational mobile surveys. You can also use SurveySparrow’s Mobile SDK to embed surveys in your native Android app. The only prerequisite is a little coding knowledge to embed this survey on your app.

Best Practices For Creating An Effective Mobile App Survey!

When you use it the right way, mobile app surveys can work wonders on your users’ engagement. In 2019, apps sent over 44,849,700 consumer surveys, which is a 28% increase from 2018. In fact, in 2021, there was a 50% increase in the number of surveys sent. The good news is, the numbers are increasing year over year.

But, when it comes to conducting a mobile app survey, the most common challenge businesses face is low response rates. Gathering feedback while keeping users engaged and in the app needs some time, patience, and some best practices! Here are a few such practices that’ll work wonders;

Find The Right Time

Finding “The Right Moment” is crucial for mobile surveys. After all, you don’t want to frustrate your app users with unnecessary survey pop-ups. Never send surveys too soon or too late. For example, let’s say you want to know the performance of a new feature. And, you send the survey asking feedback to a new user who just logged in to your app. What do you think the result will be? Well, the user won’t help you because they don’t have the app’s experience yet.

So, refrain from asking questions at the wrong time. The right time to evaluate the app for your customers is right after using the features. So, you can send a mobile app survey right after product delivery or right after someone finished streaming a movie.

A great example of using in-app surveys at the right time is Netflix. Netflix asks its users to rate their experience with a thumbs up/down rater after watching a movie or series.

Keep The Surveys Short

How many times have you answered a lengthy survey on mobile? Not many times, right? Mobile app surveys don’t have to belong and boring. People have an attention span of approximately 30 seconds. You have to catch their attention and persuade them into rating within this period. That’s why never ask more than 3-5 questions on mobile. If a question doesn’t add value to the survey, remove it from the list. Also, invest in a tool that offers contact form surveys. You can embed the survey in the app to make the conversation engaging and chat-like. Straightforward questions can help you get better responses across all channels.

Don’t Trust NPS Blindly.

NPS surveys are still valuable for identifying your promoters and detractors. But in mobile apps, depending on NPS alone won’t give you an expected result. So, mix and match your survey with ratings, yes/no, open-ended questions to ask targeted questions that get better responses.

Before wrapping up, it’s vital to know collecting feedback isn’t enough to get the balls rolling. If you want to improve your product and earn customer loyalty, you need to take action on the survey responses. After completing the survey:

• Analyze the answers to get rich customer data.
• Compare the data with market trends, competitors to see how you can optimize the app for a better user experience.
• Use online survey software like us to gain rich insights in real-time.

With SurveySparrow, you compare the responses and spot patterns with features like cross-tabulation. In addition, an advanced report filters the answers based on time, respondents’ details, degree of competition, and much more.

Why don’t you take it for a free spin today?

That’s It From Us

While creating a mobile app survey, the last thing you want is to irritate the users with irrelevant questions. These users are valuable assets who can guide you and your teams throughout the app development journey. So, ensure their voice is getting heard by your organization.

Finally, if you want more information on mobile app surveys, head to SurveySparrow’s Help Center. We’ve made a guide for developers to create in-app surveys with ease. They would love it there, for sure.

Till then, keep surveying!

Kate Williams

Content Marketer at SurveySparrow