The Beginner's Guide to In-App Surveys for User Feedback

In-app surveys are an essential tool for collecting user feedback for customer validation and customer-driven development. The more you interact with your app users and understand their needs, the better you know what to build and how.

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Surveys help product owners proactively get qualitative feedback from their users. One of the biggest challenges with collecting user feedback is low response rates, with some survey response rates cited at 10-20% and others as low as 1-3% for mobile web surveys.

In-app surveys aim to tackle this challenge by reducing friction. In-app surveys reduce the number of steps users need to take to complete the survey and eliminate the need for users to leave the app in order to submit their feedback. Keeping people in your app increases the chance that users will participate in the survey, and it also has the added benefit of increasing users' time on app.

Another factor that has an effect on survey response rates is audience targeting. With a customizable, in-app survey tool like Instabug, you can target specific segments of your app users based on various criteria, such as app version, event completion, or other custom attributes.

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In-app surveys are versatile and their insights can be valuable for a range of teams, including product, customer success, and marketing. Survey responses can help guide product development, measure customer satisfaction, and shed light on your user personas.

Here are some of the benefits of using Instabug's in-app surveys:

• Connect qualitative feedback to quantitative performance data
• Get customer validation for specific features.
• Help prioritize your product roadmap.
• Identify user pain points and come up with ideas for new features.
• Gather insights about the user experience of your app.
• Understand app usage and adoption of specific features.
• Identify unhappy users, prevent churn, and boost user retention.
• Identify loyal users and drive five-star reviews.
• Optimize your monetization and pricing strategy.
• Optimize your conversion rates.
• Conduct pre-release market research.
• Let your users know that their feedback matters.

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In order to make reliable conclusions about your app users from your surveys, you'll need a representative sample of responses. The more responses you receive, the stronger the insights will be. Here are some tips to help encourage participation.

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Timing

• Don’t prompt new users too soon.
• Don’t prompt users in the middle of completing a task in your app.
• Don’t prompt your users when they have just experienced an app event that could be considered negative.
• Don't be too pushy. Instabug's in-app surveys are displayed to users just a maximum of two times so that we don’t disrupt their experience. They don’t block the app’s UI and they are also easily dismissible with a downward swipe.

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Segments

Send your surveys to specific segments, or use your surveys to segment your users. For example:

• If you're asking about your app's shopping cart, make sure you only ask a segment of your users who have made a purchase.
• Send an NPS Survey to all users, then segment your users based on their responses. With Instabug's NPS Surveys, Promoters are asked to rate the app in the app store, while Detractors are asked for feedback about how to improve. This catches negative comments before they end up in app store reviews and gives you a chance to fix any issues.

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Length

• Shorter is better. The longer the survey, the more likely your respondents are to drop off.
• Multiple, focused surveys sent to relevant users and spread out over time are more likely to get higher response rates than one long survey that is sent to all of your users.

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Getting valuable feedback from in-app surveys takes more than just increasing response rates and targeting the right users. You also have to ask the right questions. Here are a few tips to help you get more useful answers, some example questions below, and more insights in this blog post about what to ask beta testers.

• Use multiple choice answers to make it easier for your users to complete the survey and increase response rates.
• Use numerical answer scales for more precise feedback.
• Ask specific questions to get specific answers.
• Aim for negative feedback to identify your app's weak spots.

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How likely are you to recommend this app to a friend or colleague? (1-10 NPS Score)

Follow-up questions:

• What is the most important reason for your score?
• What is the one thing we should focus on the most?
• How can we improve?

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How would you rate... (1-5 stars)

• ...this app?
• ...our customer support?
• ...this new feature?

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Value

• When is the app most useful to you?
• What triggers would prompt you to use this app/feature?
• Did the app help you solve your problem/achieve your goal?

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Mobile Games

• At which points did you feel bored with the game?
• Which parts of the game felt unnecessarily complicated?
• What was missing about your avatar/character?

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UI/UX

• What function didn't work as expected?
• How difficult was this button to find?

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Features

• Which of the following features do you use most?
• Which of the following features do you use least?
• Which of the following new features would you most like to have in the app?

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Monetization

• How much would you pay for this app?
• How many coins would you pay for this feature? (Multiple Choice)

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In addition to asking the right questions, there are certain do's and don'ts that you should keep in mind about the structure of your surveys. Here are some best practices below.

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Do's

• Have a clear objective to keep your surveys focused.
• Use mutually exclusive multiple-choice answers.
• Allow "other", "N/A", "neutral", and "not sure" answers.
• Start with an easy question to encourage users to continue with the survey.
• Ask the most important questions at the beginning in case users drop off before your survey ends.

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Don'ts

• Avoid leading questions.
• Avoid subjective questions (unless you want subjective answers).
• Avoid overly general questions (with the exception that sometimes you'll want to ask open-ended questions).

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User feedback lies at the core of what we do at Instabug and we’re constantly working on ways to help our customers build better apps by better understanding their end users. Our in-app survey features do just that.

Gather qualitative feedback about your users and how they experience your app without them ever having to leave it.

By collecting more (and more focused) feedback from your users, you’ll be able to make well-informed, data-driven decisions about your app. For example, you can identify the features of your app that are loved most or used least. You can identify users who are most likely to give you a five-star review in the app stores, or those who are most likely to churn. You can discover your app’s most common pain points, fix them, and boost user happiness.

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In-App

• No more e-mails.
• Reduces friction, increases engagement.

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Seamless

• Doesn't block your app's UI.
• Minimal interruption of user flow.
• Smart Dismiss: Users can swipe down to dismiss and they will be reminded later. If they dismiss the survey a second time, they won't be prompted again.

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Customizable

• Choose between a dark or light theme to match your brand's colors.
• Have complete control over which surveys are shown to which users and when.

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Actionable

• Connect user feedback to stability and performance data
• Understand the exact user experience behind every response

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Let's take a deep dive into how to maximize Instabug's in-app surveys.

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Custom surveys

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With Instabug's Custom Surveys, you can ask one or multiple questions and mix and match answer types.

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Text field answer

Use this for open-ended questions, usually general or catch-all questions like, "What would improve your experience with this app?"

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Multiple choice answer

Use this when you want users to select only one answer from a list of possible choices, such as a numerical ranking.

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Star rating

Ask your users to rate your app or an aspect of it from 1 to 5. For example, "How would you rate your last purchasing experience?"

Use this to get feedback from your users with the least friction possible. This works best when you’re not really concerned with details, but you want as much participation as you can get.

Take it one step further and identify those users who replied with five stars, then ask them to rate your app in the app stores. Or have your customer success team contact those users who replied with one star to see how you can prevent them from churning.

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Multiple questions

Use this when you want comprehensive and detailed feedback from your users.

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NPS Surveys

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Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys help you measure your users' level of satisfaction and loyalty on a scale of 1-10.

By default, Instabug's NPS Surveys consists of two questions, and you can also adjust the wording:

1. "How likely are you to recommend [App Name] to a friend or colleague?" (1-10 indicating least to most likely)
2. "How can we improve?"

Those who respond with 9 or 10 are your "Promoters", loyal customers who like your app enough to recommend it to other people. To help you drive five-star reviews, we prompt these users to review your app in the app store.

"Detractors", those who respond with 1-6, are typically not satisfied with your app. We ask these users the second question about how to improve in order to catch negative comments before they reach the app stores.

"Passives" are those who respond with 7-8. We also ask them the second question. We recommend that you target these users and aim to turn them into promoters as quickly as possible in order to retain them and prevent them from becoming detractors.

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Survey responses

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See how many and which of your app users responded to your Custom Surveys, your NPS Survey scores, and each individual answer to all of your surveys. You can also export your survey results.

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Filter survey responses

In the Instabug dashboard, you can filter survey responses by timeframe, keyword, specific user, or NPS score. This is useful when you want to identify users who commented about a specific issue or when you want to segment your survey responses, for instance.

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Response analytics

To help you get an overview of your survey results, we show you the distribution of responses for multiple-choice answers and star ratings, as well as the most common keywords used in text field answers.

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View user sessions

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Truly understanding your users requires you to combine their direct feedback with their experience and their actions. Instabug enables you to combine quantitative and qualitative data by giving you the power to replay their app sessions along with all the data you need to understand their experience.

Selecting view sessions will take you to the Session Replay page with the respondent’s user ID applied as a filter. This enables you to view a list of the user’s app sessions to help you understand the user experience behind their feedback.

Alternatively, selecting view response session will take you directly to the replay of the user session the response was sent from, shedding light on the state of the user and their experience when they answered the survey.

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Reply to users

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A critical step when you send out surveys to your users is to close the user feedback loop. Whether you are sending NPS Surveys or Custom Surveys, it's important to get in touch with your respondents to let them know that their feedback was received, to thank them for their participation, or to ask for more details. This strengthens your relationship with your app users and motivates them to engage even more.

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Audience targeting

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At Instabug, we prioritize customizability to give app developers the most control over the SDK. With opt-in surveys, you have the option to define when your surveys are shown to whom.

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Targeting surveys

Define one or many rules in the Instabug dashboard with default and custom conditions. With targeted surveys, you have two options:

1. Auto targeting: Any user satisfying any or all of the default conditions you set will be prompted with the survey after 10 seconds.
2. Email targeting: Any user matching any of the emails you provide will be prompted with the survey after 10 seconds.
3. Manual targeting: Call the survey token programmatically for granular custom targeting

These conditions include:

• Application Versions: Target users running a specific version of your app. For example, use this when your survey is related to a new feature added to the latest version of your app.
• Session count: You can target users who have logged a specified number of app sessions.
• User Attributes: Instabug allows you to add custom attributes to help categorize users. For example, you can add custom attributes specifying different interests. With targeted surveys, you can send them only to users who are interested in certain topics.
• Events: Instabug allows you to add custom events. With targeted surveys, you can trigger them to appear after specific custom events. For example, when a user adds items to their cart and then cancels, you can send them a survey asking why they canceled.