As an ecommerce brand owner, you’ll have to make important decisions every day.
And you can make better-informed decisions if you create a habit of collecting customer feedback regularly.
To help you get started, we’ve covered everything you need to know about gathering customer feedback:
Tune in!
Resources we've mentioned in this episode:
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
As an ecommerce brand owner, you’ll have to make important decisions every day.
And you can make better-informed decisions if you create a habit of collecting customer feedback regularly.
To help you get started, we’ve covered everything you need to know about gathering customer feedback:
Tune in!
Resources we've mentioned in this episode:
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
Hi,
You’re listening to Getsitecontrol Insider, a monthly podcast where we discuss marketing tips to help ecommerce businesses grow.
In this episode, we’ve covered everything you need to know about gathering customer feedback: 5 types of feedback, 5 ways to collect it, and 5 ideas for implementing it in your strategy.
Let’s dive right in!
As an ecommerce brand owner, you’ll have to make important decisions every day.
And you can make better-informed decisions if you create a habit of collecting customer feedback regularly.
You’ll know what your customers value most and what they feel is missing in your online store.
So how do you understand what’s going on in your customers’ minds?
Let’s start with the 5 types of customer data you can collect to find out.
Number 1. Post-purchase surveys
Picture this. You’ve just converted a visitor into a customer — awesome!
But you can turn that conversion into something even more valuable by collecting immediate post-purchase feedback.
Did your customer hesitate before purchasing?
If so, what made them almost not buy?
How was the checkout process?
The data you obtain will help you win back some of the sales you may be losing. Plus, you’re showing your new customers that you care about their experience.
You can start with a star rating scale for quick feedback, but you should also give customers an option to leave comments.
Number 2. Customer satisfaction survey
“Customer satisfaction” is the type of data people typically think about when discussing customer feedback as a whole.
And while it can take many forms, it boils down to one question:
How satisfied are customers with your products, customer service, and shopping experience?
Here are some questions you can ask to understand customer satisfaction:
● What did you like the most about our products?
● What did you dislike the most about our products?
● If there was one thing you could change about our products, customer service or checkout process, what would it be?
● How likely are you to purchase again from us?
● Why did you choose our product over a competitor’s?
You don’t have to include all these questions in your surveys. The longer the survey is, the more people will drop off before completing it — but the more valuable each answer will be.
Check the link in the episode description to find more examples of questions you can ask.
Number 3. Cart abandonment survey
Abandoned carts are the bane of ecommerce brands!
So, why do your customers change their mind before checking out? Is it the price? Is the experience too complicated? Is it the payment options?
The best way to find out is to ask using a survey.
Cart abandonment surveys are an alternative to abandoned cart emails. The difference is, instead of trying to win the sale back, you’re trying to find out what the issue is – and help your customer resolve it.
Send this survey to the abandoned customers via email or display it right on the website using the exit-intent technology.
Number 4. Customer loyalty
Are your customers loyal to your brand?
Or are they one bad interaction away from switching to your competitors?
Customer loyalty surveys can help you calculate your Net Promoter Score, which is a value between 1 and 10. It represents how likely customers are to recommend your brand.
Evaluating customer loyalty can help you fix the issues that are pushing customers away — which, in turn, can help you gain more repeat customers and find superfans who can become your brand ambassadors.
To calculate your Net Promoter Score, all you need to do is ask your customers:
“How likely are you to recommend [name of your brand] to a friend or family member?”
Then give respondents a choice from 1 to 10 and calculate the average value.
Number 5. Proactive troubleshooting
All of the examples I’ve just mentioned focus on trying to fix a problem that has already happened.
But you can also be proactive by using dynamic forms.
For example, you can create an inactivity survey that appears when a website visitor stays on a product page or checkout page for a long time without proceeding. When this happens, it’s good practice to ask whether there’s something stopping them from purchasing.
You may discover that your customers are comparing the product price on different websites, searching for more information, or looking for a way ask you a question.
Now, to collect all 5 types of customer data, you’ll need different survey types. Let’s quickly cover them as well.
First, you might need dynamic website forms
Dynamic website forms and popups can be triggered based on customer behaviors so that you can collect feedback at just the right moment.
Dynamic popups are ideal for all 5 types of customer feedback, especially post-purchase and cart abandonment. And for proactive customer feedback, they’re critical.
While you can create triggers to send emails based on customer behaviors, customers won’t immediately see those emails. On the other hand, they’ll see popups while they’re scrolling your website, which allows you to take action before it’s too late.
Second, you can survey customers during live chat conversations
Live chat boxes are a great way to collect customer feedback. Whether you’ve got a live agent available or rely on AI instead, live chat tools can help you guide your customers in the right direction after you’ve collected the feedback.
Live chat is especially useful when you have a real person available to speak to customers. When this happens, you can have an organic conversation with real shoppers.
Your team member can ask follow-up survey questions to gain more insight on any answers they receive. It’s the closest you can get to speaking to customers one-on-one in a brick-and-mortar setting.
The third type of surveys you should use is email surveys
You’re probably collecting your customers’ emails during checkout. Why not take advantage of that and survey them directly?
And because surveys aren’t promotional material, you don’t need your customers to opt into your email list to ask for their opinion. As long as they’ve purchased from you, you’re good to go.
Using email is ideal to send surveys that are longer than just one or two questions. You can use them for general customer satisfaction surveys, product reviews, and customer loyalty surveys.
Because you have more information about email contacts than you have about random website visitors, you can send more tailored surveys.
For example, you can ask for feedback about specific products or collections. You could even send a survey to long-time customers about what they like and don’t like about your newest collections compared to your older products.
Number 4. Social media polls
Social media doesn’t give you the personalized touch you get from email, but it can reach a wider audience.
Keep in mind that a social media audience will be more general than the people on your email list or your website visitors. That means social media isn’t the place to ask about customer satisfaction or brand loyalty.
For example, you can create polls on social media to get some ideas of what your customers prefer or what they think about your new product.
Finally, you should collect reviews from 3rd party websites – because that’s valuable feedback, too
The best part about this method is that you don’t need to do any additional asking. Instead, you can check out what your customers wrote on 3rd party websites such as Trustpilot, Reddit, or any other platform that’s relevant for your niche.
It’s also a good idea to ask your customers to leave these reviews. If you don’t ask, you can’t be certain your customers will proactively visit these sites when they have something positive to say.
(little pause to transition to the next part)
I hope you’ve a few ideas to start collecting feedback from your customers. Now, here are 5 ideas for what to do with it.
First, inform your messaging and copywriting
Let’s say you need to revamp your website copy or come up with a brand-new social media strategy. You want to attract your ideal customer’s attention with on-brand messaging that resonates.
Skip the guessing game and use your voice-of-customer data!
There are two main ways it can influence your messaging:
For one, you understand your customer avatar’s personality. Plus, you’ll be able to adopt the exact language they use to talk about your products.
So, whenever you review your messaging or write copy for your store, you can ask yourself:
What would my ideal customer resonate with?
You can even pull direct quotes from your customer feedback forms to make your copy more realistic.
For example, let’s say you’re selling loungewear that looks good enough to turn on your camera during a Zoom meeting. Before gathering customer feedback, your tagline could sound like:
Calm and comfort without compromising your fashion sense.
But after collecting customer feedback, you realize your ideal customer doesn’t care about being fashionable. One of your customers may even say she feels ashamed of the disapproving scowl her boss gave her the last time she wore a loose hoodie to a Zoom call.
With that information, you could rework your tagline to something like:
Cozy loungewear your boss approves of.
With your customers’ permission, you could even use their feedback in social media posts or emails to provide some social proof.
Number 2. Customer feedback can help you improve your products
There are endless possibilities for improving any type of product. But there isn’t one objective best choice.
Your customers can help you decide which improvements take priority. But they can also help you spot improvement opportunities you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
Even a team with a solid quality assurance process won’t have the same perspective as a paying customer. That’s why it’s so important to collect feedback consistently so you can see a trend when it starts growing.
Number 3. Build a better customer service experience
Products aren’t the only part of your online store you can improve! The feedback you receive can help you provide better customer service, too.
For instance, your insights may show whether you should hire a new customer service rep or shipping company, or if you need to rework your onboarding.
Wondering what else customer feedback can help you with? It can help you fix a broken sales funnel
Your sales funnel is the process every customer goes through, from first contact to purchase.
It usually looks something like this:
● Click through an ad to your website
● Navigate your website
● Add products in their cart
● Start the checkout process
● Complete checkout information
● Purchase confirmed
But if you’ve got some broken steps in that process, your bounce rate and cart abandonment rate may be higher than average.
For example, is your home page too slow to load? Does it take too many steps to complete the checkout process? Is the “Proceed to checkout” button hard to find?
Use what you learn from your customer feedback to patch any holes in your sales and checkout process.
And finally, develop new product ideas
Just like product improvement, there are endless directions in which you could take your new product development.
But what’s more likely to sell? What products do your most loyal customers want to see?
Based on what they like and dislike about your existing products, you can develop new product ideas. You can even ask for product suggestions if that’s a route you’re willing to take.
***
5 types of customer feedback, 5 collection methods, and 5 ways to put that feedback into use — now you have plenty of ideas to start collecting insights.
And if you’re now looking for an app to create dynamic website surveys – look no further. With Getsitecontrol, you can collect post-purchase feedback, survey abandoning customers, ask inactive customers what’s holding them back, and more.
Head over to the episode description for templates and examples.
Thank you for listening,
Until next time!