It’s proven that buying new leads and converting them into customers via marketing and sales avenues is more costly than retaining the clients you already have in your business. Unfortunately, though, many entrepreneurs don’t focus enough on the latter and cost themselves dollars and sales.
While there are many ways you can encourage your clientele to buy from you repeatedly, one that you may not have concentrated on much yet is gathering and addressing honest feedback. You may worry about what you’ll have to read or hear, but the pros outweigh the cons. Here are some tips for gathering input so you can make the right business improvements.
Feedback Boxes
Customers typically won’t reach out to you to tell you when something is broken on your website or with ideas about ways they think your business could be better. But this doesn’t mean you can’t gain insights from them regularly. It helps to try to catch customers with relevant questions at the right time so you can learn about minor issues they might be having with the user experience, not just major ones that are more likely to prompt a complaint or other form of contact.
One excellent way to do this is via a feedback form. At the bottom or side of every page on your website, you could include a feedback tab or pop-up that asks people how you could make the page better for them or if they need any help. Make it easy for people to quickly respond with ideas, suggestions, complaints, questions, and the like, and you’ll discover all sorts of helpful insights that you can use to improve your site and processes.
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These forms should be short and easy to respond to so that shoppers can tell you right away when something isn’t working as it should. However, the form should also be tucked out of the way when they don’t need it. You might want to install a quality user feedback tool on your website to create triggers for optimal response levels, too. This software helps you catch users who are engaged or about to leave and ask them for feedback, whether on every website page or just select ones.
Surveys
Surveys can be beneficial tools for gathering feedback, too. They’re easy to set up, send, analyze, and scale, and affordable to boot. Many businesses use long surveys such as those sent via the popular SurveyMonkey program, where a survey link gets sent out to customer databases, social media followers, or other users.
With people so time-poor and overwhelmed with data these days, though, you may find that you get better results from short-and-sweet surveys. Rather than giving people a massive list of questions that take them ten or 20 minutes to answer and make them likely to rush through their responses, why not keep things brief? It’s usually more feasible to ask five or a maximum of ten questions in total.
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Stick with the critical queries you need to be answered and that you’ll do something about when you get feedback returned. It pays to ask open-ended questions to enable more free feedback, rather than setting up multiple-choice questions or rating scales where you restrict answers and can limit responses based on your assumptions.
You might want to try incorporating a brief survey right on your website, too, where you ask one or two targeted questions relating to the information on the page at hand. Avoid vague questions and focus in on a single feature of your site or product listing, etc.
Polls
You might like to utilize some online polls, too. These are popular because they’re quick for people to answer, and most consumers enjoy having a chance to share their opinions on things. You could create a poll on your company’s Twitter, Facebook, or other social media site or display one on your website or blog. There are various apps you can use for this, plus many of the social media sites have poll functions available.
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Direct Reach Out to Shoppers
Another strategy is to directly reach out to shoppers after they have completed a transaction with your business. You could send an email or even ring them, depending on the type of product or service you sell and the relationships you develop. Ask not only about what they just bought but also what their shopping experience was like and if there’s anything else they’d like to see from your firm’s range, website, or customer support offerings.
Another great way to gather feedback to help you improve your business is checking out the testimonials and reviews or complaints customers leave on your website, social media, and other platforms, such as forums, shopping marketplaces, and review sites.
You can also get valuable data from analytics info and usability testing tools. The more proactive you are with searching for and enticing customers to provide their feedback, the more quality information you can source and use.