Event Marketing — it’s about giving and receiving. Feedback is the lifeblood of improvement, growth, and genuine customer connection. Just as we can’t gauge our work without a yearly assessment, event marketing can’t succeed without event feedback questions.
That’s where the survey comes in. When you ask your visitors and customers about their experience with you, you open up a two-way dialogue that improves loyalty and points the way for where to grow next. Gathering feedback is vital to scaling your brand and event success.
In fact, according to People Pulse, with the right motivation, you can get 85% of your customers to respond to your post-event surveys. That’s essential information you can use to improve and earn your customers’ trust.
So let’s get into it. We’ll list out the 25 best post-event survey questions you can ask to help improve your brand experience.
What is a post-event survey?
Before we get into the post-event survey questions, what exactly is an event survey? An event survey is a questionnaire aimed at collecting feedback about participant experience and is often divided into multiple-choice and open-ended questions. This is also a common place to collect your net promoter score, or how likely your attendees are to recommend you to a friend.
Anyone participating in your event should get the survey since you want the most opinions possible. You’ll find trends you usually wouldn’t be able to if you focus on every person’s experience. Successful event planning and execution depend on customer satisfaction, and event surveys are an important way to measure your effectiveness.
Types of post-event survey questions
You can ask many different post-event survey questions, but each reliably falls into a few different categories. We’ve separated the questions based on their type to help you understand and choose which to incorporate. We recommend picking a few from each for variety.
We’ve listed the following categories:
- Interval scale questions
- Psychographic questions
- Multiple-choice questions
- Open-ended questions
Interval scale questions
You ask interval scale questions on a rating between 1 (extremely negative) to 10 (extremely positive). You'll see below how you define that rating language might change based on how you phrase the question.
Event marketers best use these questions when asking for an opinion they want to quantify into a number rating. That numerical rating can be used, along with your net promoter score, as a metric to point to for your team and a guiding light for how to improve your next event.
- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?
This question is the golden net promoter score rating and a massive opportunity for growth. This metric is one of the most vital pieces of information you can collect to gauge your performance. Loyal customers who respond highly to this question are more likely to make repeat purchases and spread positive word-of-mouth about your brand.
- How helpful was our staff?
Staffing is one of the most essential pieces of an experience. If your customers aren’t satisfied with your employees and how they interact during the event , you know to invest more in your training and close the gaps.
- How satisfied are you with…?
Attendee satisfaction is a great way to judge the more specific areas of your experience rather than a more general ‘Do you like us.’ You can narrow down your feedback parameters to places you’re working on improving, like the layout of your tours or how easy it was to find a specific product in your storefront. You can even judge if it’s worth trying the same premise again for the next event.
- How likely are you to visit us again in the future?
Great for your metrics if you’re trying to hone in on NPS. It might seem like the same thing as “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend,” but this is more nuanced. For example, if price or location are factors, this could be a very different score. It’ll help you determine if your pricing is fair or if there are any hesitations from your customer.
- How likely are you to purchase from our brand after your experience?
Number five is slightly different from returning to an experience and an excellent question to ask if you want to gauge purchase behavior or monitor average transaction value. You can directly correlate the numerical value of this question overall with the purchase trends you see.
Psychographic Questions
Psychographics is the study of consumer behavior and psychological characteristics, as opposed to demographic information like age and location. These questions mainly focus on determining your attendees’ traits, like their goals, preferences, and lifestyle choices.
These questions are great if you need to establish a customer profile but are hard to get answers to since it’s a little more invasive questioning than about your event. For more on how to create a good enough value exchange for customer answers, read our blog about it.
You’ll want to create a table similar to the interval questions for this kind of question. But instead of 1 to 10, list out:
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
Frame the section as “Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?” and treat questions as traits your attendees can respond to from there.
- I like to know trends before others.
This statement helps pinpoint how much awareness your event attendees need to have before they book tickets. It can also indicate a willingness to try new things or a preference for nostalgia or known products.
- I’ll go out of my way to find the best possible deal.
Pricing matters to those who answer Strongly Agree. If most of your base is in this part of the value matrix (more on that here), you’ll want to start thinking about discounts, coupons, and more to entice returners and even new attendees of a similar mindset.
- I will travel far for the right event.
Asking this question helps determine how far afield your attendees are willing to go. It helps when deciding where to take your event next, whether to host events in your space, which areas to focus your marketing on, and what radius is ideal.
- I love diving into new experiences head first.
Number nine is an impulse question. Are your attendees more cautious and need time to make their decision? Or does FOMO work on your visitors? This statement will help you narrow down what kind of language or imagery will drive ticket sales or attendance. It will also tell you which customer persona requires lower spending and which is more high-touch effort.
Multiple-choice questions
A multiple-choice question is great for getting demographic information that you can use to narrow down marketing spend and better understand the trends in your customers or visitors. These answers are a great starting point for building personas, learning where your survey responders are from, and more.
- Do you want to join our newsletter? / Do you want to sign up for deals and discounts from us?
Number ten is a great opt-in moment for those who respond to your post-event survey. This way, you can continue to market to them and drive up their average transaction value while remaining compliant with spam marketing laws.
- Have you attended our other events before?
This yes or no question is fantastic to see if you have returning visitors to your experiential marketing. It’s the cherry on top if you’re tracking the customer journey. You can see who’s more likely to return for more and go after the same customer in your marketing efforts.
- How did you hear about this event?
When working on an event, knowing the most effective way to reach event attendees is critical. When you see what works, you can double down on wins and improve (or de-prioritize) losses. List all your marketing channels so they can check off the corresponding one!
For example, Burnt Church Distillery used AnyRoad to gather feedback from their visitors on where they heard about Burnt Church’s distillery tour. When they learned most of their visitors were from billboard marketing, Burnt Church was able to lean in and dedicate more budget!
- In the past six months, how often have you purchased [your product/kind of product]
This is an excellent question for understanding consumer purchasing behavior. With other specific demographic questions, this will help you build a fuller picture of who’s worth more marketing spend based on their average buying behavior. The answers to this you can list include Never, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly.
If you ask this question before the event or during the booking checkout process, as well as after the event, you can see an actual change your event had on buying behavior.
- Did this event meet your expectations?
Keeping your survey frictionless and short is the key to good feedback responses. If you already have too many questions or lean heavily on the interval scale category, you can replace the 1 to 10 rating with a yes or no question. That way, you can still get this information without frustrating visitors and customers with how long your feedback survey is.
- Did you have trouble finding the event information?
If your event attendee had issues finding the location, times, or booking details, that’s a problem. Other potential attendees probably gave up halfway through your booking process if they couldn’t find the needed information! Knowing ease of use is a huge advantage and one you should consider, especially if your event requires booking or has instructions for visitors.
- Who was your tour guide? / Who facilitated your experience?
If you’re offering tours, like a brewery or distillery, or events that require a staff member as the main face of your event, this question can help you figure out any training changes. This also helps with raises, promotions, or deciding what areas your staff can improve on, more specifically when partnered with an open-ended feedback question.
- Have you heard about this event before?
Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful tool. If you want to measure brand awareness, how many people are talking about you, and in what locations, this basic yes-or-no question can help determine where the buzz is coming from and its effectiveness.
- What country are you from?
If you get plenty of international event attendees and have already narrowed down your most common options, this is a great way to continue tracking those trends. You can then decide the location for your next event, distribution areas if you’re selling a product, and build a reliable customer profile. Don’t forget ‘Other’ just in case you start having new customer types visit!
- What is your sex/gender?
Looking to be inclusive? You’re in luck; Deloitte surveyed Gen Z, and their results revealed deep preference trends. Overwhelmingly, 94% of Gen Z surveyed expect companies to take a stand on important social issues as part of their brand identity.
So asking what your gender is and only listing ‘male’ or ‘female’ isn’t going to cut it in 2023. If you want to know sex, that’s one thing. But gender is a more complicated designation that your consumer base might appreciate some sensitivity towards.
So if you want to know the gender of your attendees, asking “M,” “W,” “N,” or “Prefer not to say” will go a long way towards making your customers comfortable. That stands for “Man,” “Woman,” and “Nonbinary,” with an additional option not to disclose a preference.
- What is your ethnicity?
This question is, give or take. Some people might be uncomfortable asking this, but for B2C brands, knowing your complete demographic profile includes ethnicity, you can determine how best to use your marketing spend and where.
Open-ended questions
Open-ended questions are the hardest to get answers from, so use them sparingly and only for the information you need. Short-form boxes can answer these questions, allowing the attendee to write out their response rather than be limited by their options.
Rather than quantitative, these results are qualitative, helping you measure the quality through similar answers across respondents. In fact, an open-ended question is more likely to get you constructive feedback.
- What did you most enjoy about today?
Celebrate what you’re doing right! You never know what surprising answers you’ll get from asking what was great about your experience or event. If you see a positive pattern about your event, you can expand that great achievement to other parts of your experience to keep a good thing going.
- What could be improved about your experience?
The flip side of question 21: the negative feedback. It happens to the best of us; never will an experience be completely perfect. Knowing what you can improve outside of a 1 to 10 rating is incredibly valuable. You get to hone in on what needs to change, and you can gain customer loyalty by giving them an open platform and seeing change happen.
- How did this experience compare with other similar events you’ve been to in the past?
Learn what your competition is doing with their events and how you stack up! This is great for getting an idea of where your event lands in the overall competitive landscape and gives you an idea of success or failure when it comes to standing above the rest. You can also get ideas for your next event based on what your competition is doing.
- Do you have anything you’d like to see from us or ideas for future events?
Suggestions are always welcome! You might have brand ambassadors who know your event inside and out and have ideas for new experiences that will perform. Also, ideas from attendees take the guesswork out of what will be effective and what won’t be.
From Burnt Church Distillery, Chris Crowe used this feedback to refine his distillery tour offerings. For example, he shared: “A lot of people have commented that they’d like a takeaway, like a glass, so we’re working on that and other things we can do to add more value while also allowing us to increase how much we charge.”
- Please share any additional comments, thoughts, or suggestions for future events.
Sometimes, you won’t think of everything! And if you’re trying to keep your post-event survey short, this is a must-have. It covers all your bases in case your visitors still don’t feel heard or have any final feedback. You’d be surprised what pops up in the answers!
When Is The Best Time To Send Out Your Post-Event Survey?
The best time to send out your post-event survey one to two days after the event. Your guests still think of you in a positive light and will be more likely to give positive feedback or feedback at all.
Go a step further with pre-event survey questions.
Why stop at the post-event survey? When you ask pre-event survey questions, you can better understand your attendee’s frame of reference even before they participate in your experience like question 1 or 13. You can send these via a confirmation email or during booking if you’re hosting a ticketed event.
For example, Diageo used pre-event questions to personalize their Journey of Flavour tour and increased their NPS score by 16 points!
Event Feedback Questions Help You Scale
Post-event survey questions help you understand your consumers and point the way for where to grow your next event. With the right combination of interval scale, multiple choice, psychographic, and open-ended questions, you can pinpoint exactly what to change next. From marketing spending to customer profiles, you’ll be able to dig deeper than before into not just the who but the why.
