4 Tips on How to Boost Marketing With Customer Feedback

Customer feedback has a complicated relationship with marketing performance. 

It's like the one you have with your GPS. You're often lost without it. Sometimes you listen to the directions. Other times you know better because "you've been down that road before." And now and then, the language changes, and you don't understand it.

What they also have in common is that they're both guiding your journey. So, the question is: are you willing to hit the road without it?

I'll make a wild guess. Probably not.

Why is customer feedback important in marketing?

Customer feedback can significantly influence your business's reputation, growth, and bottom line.

A study by Deloitte and Touche reveals that client-centric companies are 60% more profitable than businesses that don't focus on their customers. And we can easily see why. Here are 3 top reasons.

1. Your customers show you what you excel at through great reviews that indicate your strengths, their loyalty that highlights your best products or services, and their trust that shows up in their recommending your products to others.
   

2.  Your customers point out what you need to improve through angry customer service calls, weak ratings, lack of engagement, or unsubscriptions. 
   

3. Your customers often give you hints on how to expand your products and services by requesting product updates and new features, comparing you to the competition, and communicating their expectations.
   

Feeding your marketing with the customer feedback you collected helps you build intelligent campaigns. 

And one important step is to collect the right data the right way. And amongst the most effective customer feedback channels, you'll find NPS, surveys, email, live chat, website analytics, and customer interviews.

To tap into the different types of customer feedback, use the tools that you might already have in your organization: a form builder to create questionnaires and surveys such as 123FormBuilder, your email service provider to send customer surveys such as Hubspot, or dedicated software to conduct interviews such as User Interviews.

3 Customer Feedback Channels to Warm You up

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Probably the most popular one out there, NPS covers this one question: "How likely is it that you would recommend (insert brand name) to a friend or colleague?". NPS helps you evaluate your customers' brand perception and overall customer experience. But, before jumping into it, make sure it makes sense for your business and your product. Here's an example from LinkedIn that can give you some perspective. 

Of course, marketers talk about software and tools all the time and share their experiences. Nevertheless, ensure that your questions are something that your customers and product can relate to. And that is something you can draw valuable insights from.

In addition to collecting customer feedback, you need to track customers’ brand perception over time and visualize gathered insights to get an in-depth view of changes happening over time.

With this chart, you can see the percentage of promoters and detractors of your product, monitor the global trend, and understand what changes in the product resulted in an increased number of promoters or detractors.

🚀Get NPS and 33 more charts to build a comprehensive revenue dashboard in this article🚀

Social Media

By posting a question or a poll on your social media channels, you can get real-time customer feedback that can help you tailor your future marketing campaigns. Also, monitoring your mentions can give you valuable insights and help you stay in touch with your customers. I have to say, Elementor's customers win this one. 

You might find time-consuming tracking mentions on every social media channel. Tools like Sprout Social or Improvado can help with social listening and extracting performance metrics, that give you a more comprehensive view of your social media buzz. 

Usability Testing

Observe how your customers interact with your product by doing usability testing. You'll quickly notice where they have difficulties and where you can improve either the UX or the copy on your website or in your app. 

If done correctly, usability testing can result in a solid list of things you can fine-tune. 

🚀In this article we explained how McDonald’s utilized customer feedback to become more environmental🚀

How does customer feedback improve performance?

Now that you collected all this data, you might want to invest some time in customer feedback analytics, which will help you monitor and track the customer feedback running through your company. Because you'll be dealing with data from multiple sources, you'll need to generate customer feedback reports that will give an overall picture of where you stand and how you can use these insights. 

Let's see what you can do with customer feedback and discover ways to improve your marketing tactics.

Proactively address customers' concerns

If you spot a pattern in your customers' questions, use these insights to address their objections proactively. 

Let's say you own a clothing store, and your return rate is pretty high. When you look at why your customers return their order, you notice that most customers mention that the clothes are not true to their size.

This valuable feedback can help you reduce the costs associated with returns. 

Analysts estimate that no-return refunds for 2021 could cost retailers as much as $4.4 billion. 

Here's a hypothetical situation that can inspire you to juggle your numbers and see where your business stands.

For example, Loop Returns estimates average expenses for refunds at $244,800 per month if a company sells around 10,000 items a month.

So what do you do in the case of a high return rate? 

You might want to address it by improving the product description and the size guide. You can create a series of articles explaining how to choose the perfect size or include videos in your product gallery so clients can have a better idea of what the product looks like.

Provide a live chat option, where customers can quickly drop a question if they're unsure of something. Because if they're doubtful and can't figure it out immediately, there's a big chance they'll buy from a business that makes it effortless for them. 

Use these actions to reduce the return rate and improve your customers' satisfaction.

Use customer feedback in content marketing and paid advertising

While some marketers still put organic and paid marketing in the ring, they work very well as a team. And one thing that connects them is customer feedback. Whether you create a pillar page or a Facebook ad, you'll need keywords that can effectively target the audience. 

Customer feedback is a gold mine of keywords. So, use customers' language to craft your content. 

Yes, you might feel that "be in shape" sounds better, but it won't bring you any results if your audience talks about and researches "fat loss." 

Notice what words your customers use when they leave reviews, talk to customer service, or explain their actions during a usability test. And take it a step further and look at your competition's customer feedback. That's also a great source of information.

The next step would be to make these keywords the stars of your content and ads. It will help you improve your SEO and create more targeted ads that boost lead generation performance. And that's because your content will feel more relatable and relevant to both humans and search engines.

Increase retention through product improvements

When your customer retention increases by only 5%, your profits increase by 25% to 95%. 

That's one good reason to explore ways to keep your customers close.

But while some customers are vocal and make sure to let you know when something's not working for them, others just walk out. More specifically, 91% of customers will leave a brand they're unhappy with without complaining once. 

Why don't they say something? Well, because they don't feel like anybody is listening. And the cost of customers feeling like nobody is listening to them is a 75 billion dollar problem for industries around the U.S.

Every product and marketing team has a roadmap and a strategy. Make sure to include some of your customers' requests in that planning. 

You can even apply some of their feedback on a daily/weekly basis. You can even apply some of their feedback on a daily/ weekly basis. Based on your data, analyze which changes could have the most impact and test to see how it affects your marketing efforts. Others may take longer to start drawing conclusions from, but nevertheless, you’ll create a foundation for a customer-driven approach.

Loom is doing a great job releasing features that clearly resonate with their customers and feed their loyalty.

Use customer feedback to build a more targeted funnel

Your website, app, and email analytics are top customer feedback resources. By looking into this data, you learn about your customers' behavior and how they actually interact with your channels. 

🚀Learn how to track the customer journey and monitor all touchpoints with a custom attribution model🚀

If you're using a customer feedback analytics tool, it will be pretty easy to have a complete overview of your customer journey. If you're analyzing it platform by platform, it could be helpful to connect the data and track your customer's interactions across all of them and see how they influence each other. It can help you build a more targeted marketing funnel and better qualify your leads with higher converting assets.

For example, you get great feedback from people that cancel their plans or unsubscribe from your emails. The feedback is valuable because it's honest and doesn't sugarcoat the truth.

Let's do a quick exercise. Take, for example, the answer "the emails are not relevant to me." 

There are possibly one of two things going on here. 

1. You targeted the wrong people. They got carried away by some undeniable promise. Hat off to your copywriters for sweeping them off their feet! But, the segmentation probably wasn't quite right. 
   

2. Either the frequency or the content of the emails doesn't strike a chord with your customers. Maybe you don't offer value with your content, at least none that helps them with their problem. 
   

Ask yourself a couple of "why's" to get to the root of the issue and then brainstorm solutions.

So, what can you do in our example above to reduce email unsubscribes?

1. Give them options. Offer a personalized subscription. Allow them to opt-in to a particular interest or a more comfortable email frequency. You're halfway losing them, but that doesn't mean you need to give up on them. 
   

2. Review your segmentation and content. When people sign-up for your newsletter, collect essential data about their profile and interests so you can put them in the right segment and share relevant content. We know that 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience. Correlate this data with where they are on their buyer's journey and create a more targeted and customized funnel. 
   

Make the most out of customer feedback

Customer feedback doesn't serve your business only by feeding your marketing tactics. It's also beneficial to your customers. 

Take Uber, for instance. You might often come across this example, and for a good reason. 

They make it easy to leave feedback by also putting it in plain sight, so customers can access this input and even change it at some point. And it's also a two-way street. Customers leave feedback, and drivers do, too.   

Can this model be applied to any business? That's for you to figure out if this or any other model works for your business and helps you in any way. 

Microsoft reports that 77% of consumers view a brand more positively if the business proactively invites and accepts customer feedback. 

Everything in marketing is a mix of data science and emotional triggers. Customer feedback somehow fits into both, making it an invaluable tool to help you uncover secret gems.

Merge customer feedback with marketing insights to accelerate your growth.