Exit survey recommendations?

[edthomas]

We're considering adding some sort of exit survey onto our company's ecommerce site at http://www.harkenhome.com. Since the vast majority of our visitors come and go without leaving any indication of what they thought of the site, why they did (or didn't) buy, if they found what they're looking for, etc, we thought this might be a valuable way to gather feedback on our site and company in general.

Does anyone know how to go about doing an exit survey online? I'm thinking of just having some popup that comes up when a person leaves our site that points them to a seperate survey, and then paying some amount (probably a coupon on any future purchase) for taking the survey. Has anyone done such a program in the past? I need to know how to go about implementing this (for free, if at all possible), as well as thoughts on types of questions that should definitely be addressed.

Thanks for your help!

Ed Thomas
General Mgr,
Harken Home, LLC (http://www.harkenhome.com)

[zojnk001]

Dear Ed:

What you could do is open a litle survey window when the visitor of your site close the browser or leaves your site. This can be detected by different events within your web page. In this survey window you need to have a form in which can ask all the questions you need. The form information can be send to your e-mail address, or you could have a complete infrastructure to track the surveys.

Cheers,

Zojnk

[jestep]

I think it could be a good idea, but it is often abused. I would make the survey as simple as possible, and make it appear all on a single page. Also make it easy for a user to opt out of the survey, so they are not overly annoyed. You also might try just offering it to a random number of visitors instead of every one, also make it so that if a user has taken the survey and they come back, dont offer it to them again. This is very annoying, and a really easy way to lose customers. Offering an incentive would be good to, but like I said, make it as simple as possible.

[edthomas]

The ability (or inability) to opt out is one major concern we're having. We really want as much feedback as we can get about the site and our operations, but not if it risks offending any current or potential customers.
One suggestion that we got elsewhere was using one of the simple 3rd party survey sites to host the survey, then bringing up a (ideally fairly inoffensive) popup when someone closes or leaves the site asking the user to take our survey, if they would like to help us improve our business.
Has anyone tried something similar?