Marketers, this is why you need a customer feedback tool.

No matter the size of your business, creating a product or offering services is just part of the puzzle. We need customers to hear about, and use these products. In the online world this is generally in the form of trying to get more website visitors, more subscribers, more prospects, and eventually customers.

Satisfying the customer is the crucial part. It is not uncommon for marketers to infer “customer satisfaction” when it’s too late, e.g. based on the conversion rate of traffic to leads, or the “churn rate” but if you want to proactively understand if your website visitors, prospects, and customers are satisfied, there’s another instrument that should always be in your marketing toolkit.

That instrument is the humble customer feedback tool.

Bill Gates says, "We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve".

Every business needs customer feedback tools to gain real insights into the satisfaction level of your prospects and customers, and take informed decisions accordingly.

So customer feedback is an indispensable tool. Let’s delve further into why marketers need a customer feedback tool for effective marketing, with specific examples:

Turn website visitors into customers

Bringing traffic to your website with some good SEO hacks, content distribution, email campaigns, and paid promotion, is relatively straightforward, but converting these visitors into convinced customers is not always as easy, even if you think you have great UX, great content, and a good contact or signup form.

With the help of a customer feedback tool you can directly generate leads from website visitors without need for guesswork.

Innovative marketers use feedback forms as the perfect complement to bring leads by placing the form, (or link to the form) somewhere on a webpage. This form can even appear as an automated popup, or incorporated into whatever product you use for customer support web chat, directly asking customers for feedback. This lets you collect website visitors’ feedback regarding the product or service. This way even if the visitor is not happy or convinced, you still have some real value out of their visit as you now know “why”, and they are not simply “anonymous traffic” which would otherwise have simply disappeared without a trace.

After collecting the feedback, you can include the questions asking for their email and name - “Would you mind sharing your email so that once we have the feedback applied we can keep you posted?”

Try to put yourself in the prospects shoes while creating surveys. Think about what would drive you to complete a survey quickly yourself. Ask not more than 5 questions. The fewer the better.

Here’s an ideal questionnaire for turning your website visitors into customers:

1. Were you able to find the features you’re looking for? (yes or no)
2. Awesome, get started with a free trial and play around with the product. (with a link to the signup page, if the answer is “Yes”)
3. Could you tell us what’s missing so that we can improve our product? (if the answer is “No”)
4. Please share your email so once we have the feature rolled out we can keep you posted.
5. And your name as well.

So here we have an example of an otherwise lost opportunity now delivering definite value to the business.

Your value per visitor will most certainly improve.

Get 5-star reviews on directories and marketplaces

Directories and marketplaces are among the best spaces to generate leads and demand for companies products. Prospects often visit directories to check customer reviews and compare products with the competition before making a purchase.

So, here’s an easy method to avoid negative ratings and get your happy customers included in your reviews, giving a boost to your 4 and 5-star reviews. This is super important because happy customers generally don't leave reviews anywhere unless they are asked, whereas angry customers will on their own initiative go out of their way to post unflattering reviews, often in multiple locations, this skews ratings and rankings to your disadvantage unless you are using an NPS as part of your marketing efforts.

All you have to do is create an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey and send it to your customers via email or other channels. NPS is a form of feedback survey to measure customers’ willingness to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10.

This way you can find the most satisfied customers who rate 9 or 10, and explicitly request those happy customers to leave a 5-star rating on your preferred directory or marketplace in the thank you page of the survey.

When you have more 5-star reviews you get better ranking in the directories which in turn improves the visibility, trust of prospects, website visits and finally conversions.

You can get started with one directory initially and reach out to the same audience requesting them to leave the same review on another directory. To increase the review conversion, you can offer your customers some incentives for their time, like shopping gift cards or one extra free month etc.

Generate “Case Studies”

Now you know who your happy customers are.

Reach out to them via email by creating a form with a set of questions as follow:

• What was the challenge you were trying to solve?
• What was the solution you had in mind?
• How was our approach to this challenge?
• What’s the end result you achieved?

The good part is that neither of you have to waste any time or energy by getting on a call. The customer can fill out the form whenever he/she feels like. Once the “Case Study Form” is filled, you’ll get the notification. You can take it from there, create the first cut of the success story, and send it back to the customer for approval.

On another note, case studies are often ignored in the marketing world, even though marketers know it increases trust and conversion rate significantly. The prime reason for this is that approaching the customer and gathering the needful information from the customer to create a use case is considered a mammoth task. Having an online form or customer feedback tool in place, you can sort it out with a lot less effort.

Improve web page user experience and content

Have you ever come across websites prompting you to share about the overall experience with their brand?

Did you respond to them with a note to improve on a certain aspect?

Yes, this is a great way to improve user experience on your webpage content.

With a customer feedback tool, you can quickly create a customer satisfaction survey and embed it on your website wherever you want, focusing on the webpage experience and content improvement.

It provides insights like what website visitors liked and didn’t like on the website. Maybe the site loads too slowly for them? Or perhaps it's too difficult for them to find what they are looking for? Whatever their feedback, you can work on those insights and plan a strategy to improve your website experience and content.

Wrapping up

As we can see, a customer feedback tool is meant not just for surveys but to improve your business as a whole. With them you can:

• Convert more prospects into potential customers
• Gain business value from otherwise “anonymous traffic”
• Rank higher in marketplaces
• Create powerful testimonials and use cases with a lot less effort
• Improve website experience
• And most importantly make informed decisions faster

Now we’ve covered some of the major benefits of customer feedback tools, and why every marketer needs such a tool in their toolkit to improve customer or prospect engagement and drive up conversions.

Are you looking for a powerful customer feedback tool to take your marketing to the next level? Get started with a free trial with GlobalPatron.

Happy marketing!