The biggest benefit your blog or business can have from existing clients and first-time visitors is their well-thought out feedback. It can improve your products and services and ultimately result in more product sales.

So in this post I am going to guide you on how to add a client feedback form to your website easily.

What’s the difference between client feedback form and contact form?

Essentially customers can and do use contact forms to provide feedback about a product or service but feedback forms are dedicated places that people can use to add their feedback.

By doing so they’re providing their opinion on a particular service or product and this helps you understand how they like your product or service. And sometimes their overall opinion regarding your brand. Taking this into stride you can work in improvements helping you get many more customers.

However prior to you going strutting about with a feedback form it’s important to understand why you want feedback and who you’re going to target.

The process is straightforward and simple if you spend a little time thinking about your goals. Based on reviewing goals you will be able to create an effective feedback gathering form.

The key is to ask the right questions:

Start by defining your Goal

It’s the simple process of defining the reasons behind collecting feedback from clients and visitors. Without a clear goal you’d be like Alice asking the rabbit about going somewhere. Alice didn’t know where she wanted to go and the rabbit replied that anywhere she went the result would be same. Without knowing why you’re collecting feedback there would be no point in collecting it.

And you wouldn’t be any better off understanding your customers than from the point when you started.

A few questions can help you arrive at the right questions.

What you feel is presently lacking in the conversion flow that you want to improve?

How will you use the data collected to this end?

Plan where to put the feedback form

You can either aggressively ask for feedback or wait for until the user wants to submit feedback. Asking for feedback ensures you reach your goals faster and get more data to work on.

Auto-triggered forms are active forms of feedback for example a footer widget activated at the bottom of the blog post.

Depending on your goals and how quickly you want to achieve them you can use active or passive forms.

To ensure success in your feedback collection efforts ensure that questions are asked at the right point of customer journey. By doing it at the right time, when people are primed to answer questions you ensure that the success rate of them answering your questions is high.

Make it as easy for people as possible

A good feedback form isn’t one rife with questions, or even different formats of question. In this particular case minimalism is king. Remove the non-essentials. Focus on what’s important. And you’ve made an excellent form.

Simplicity sells and it’s what motivates people to submit feedback and be done with it. It’s certainly not in anyone’s bucket list of items and definitely not something one looks forward to.

So have few fields to improve conversions. People tend to avoid things that require a lot of work especially ones that don’t directly benefit them. If you think of it in the customers’ shoes there’s no direct immediate benefit for them.

Also from the scanty few questions you have don’t mandate customers answer each question. Even some feedback is plenty.

Offer goodies

When you expect value be prepared to give value in return too. Niceties and thanks yous are all good but when asking for a favor the proposition is taken much more kindly when you’re prepared to give something in return. A popular item is coupon or in-store credit to help people ease into the decision. You can offer an eBook, a guide or a checklist anything the target audience would find useful.

Use email to send this gift so that they can come back to it later or have access to it in case they close the browser unexpectedly. Also email lets you grill some of these customers for additional feedback if you so wish.

There are several plugins available for WordPress based sites to add client feedback form. For all kinds of sites, there’s Google forms that you could mould and tweak to forge any kind of form.

 

How to use WPForms to collect feedback?

 

WPForms is a drag and drop builder created by WpBeginners. It’s pretty easy to use and user-friendly.

Start by installing and activating the form.

Name your form and select Suggestion form template which is the default for feedback forms.

You will see that  basic form fields are readily added and with the editor you may edit any or all fields and move them around. Adding new field is easy with you having to just dragging and dropping from the left side to the main area.

Next, confirm form notifications and confirmation settings. Whenever clients submit feedback form on the site you will get an email. And when the user submits the form he will see a customized confirmation message. All of this can be accessed via settings tab.

Adding form to your site via shortcode

Once you’re satisfied with the feedback form, you can proceed to adding it to your website. You can create a new post to add or use an existing article to add the form. The plugin integrates with the post editor with a new Add form button now visible atop text editor. Clicking on it will let you choose the form created earlier and add it.

The form will get added as a shortcode to the post body. You can copy the shortcode elsewhere say the blog sidebar.

Go to Appearance followed by Widgets on WordPress dashboard. You will find a new widget called the WpForms widget on the sidebar. Drag and drop to the right or left sidebar. With widgets you will have to enter a title for the same and click on Save so that it gets saved.

Use Google forms to collect feedback

I posted in some detail about adding Google forms to Blogspot sites. The procedure for any site is same. You don’t get shortcodes though. You get html which you can embed to any blog post or page or blog sidebar as you wish.

Compared to the feature set I don’t find WpForms any better than Google forms. You can’t trigger it based on user behavior or make it pop-up at the footer. Google forms has the edge since it’s free.