How To Turn Customer Feedback Into a Marketing Strategy: 4 Tips

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When you receive customer feedback, how do you use it to improve your marketing strategies and grow your business?

Too many marketers and business owners view feedback as a natural part of their brand and fail to pay attention to all the ways it can benefit them. Whether it’s praise or a complaint, customer feedback is essential to understanding your consumers, catering to their needs, achieving your marketing goals, and much more.

Let’s look at four ways you can turn customer feedback into a marketing strategy that improves your business.

1. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Did you know it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain current ones? Moving consumers through the sales funnel takes time, money, and resources. For existing customers, however, they’re already familiar with your brand and its products. They already know what they want and that they like your brand if they keep coming back. Plus, if you continue providing opportunities and deals for their loyalty, they’re guaranteed to continue purchasing from you.

That’s why customer loyalty programs are so effective. They cater specifically to existing customers who already spend on your business. They’re also likelier to spend more because they’re familiar with your company and its products, which adds value to your business by catering to higher-spending customers.

If you want to generate sales and keep recurring customers happy, create a loyalty program that caters to them. A little appreciation goes a long way, and if you take the extra step to make your consumers happy, it will benefit you both.

2. Improve Customer Support

Your customers have different preferred methods of getting in touch with your brand, whether that’s through a business phone line, live chat, social media, or email. Because of this, it’s important to pay equal attention to all channels so you can provide solutions to everyone.

The steps you take to improve your customer support system depends on the feedback you get from customers, which varies across businesses. It’s crucial to gather customer opinions in one place to look at the bigger picture. That way, you can more clearly see what’s working and what’s not.

It’s important to respond to customer feedback when it comes in so they know you hear them and are working towards a solution. Use a customer feedback form so you can ask the right questions and receive the answers you’re looking for.

When responding to customer inquiries and comments, you should:

  • Have a strategy in place.
  • Respond quickly. Don’t wait longer than 24 hours to address an issue or concern.
  • Offer solutions.
  • Thank the customer for taking the time to reach out.

3. Refine Buyer Personas

When customers tell you what they want and what they’re looking for, they’re giving you insight into how you can improve your business to cater to their needs. Leverage this information to refine your buyer personas and create customer profiles that better reflect your ideal customer.

Without knowing your customers, it’s impossible to create content, products, and services that interest them or give them value. If you can’t offer them something valuable, then you can’t move them through the conversion funnel, generate leads, or produce sales. Buyer personas are crucial for marketers to gain insight into what customers want. The more information you have, the more streamlined your marketing strategies will be.

If your brand doesn’t meet customer needs, there’s likely a gap in your personas that’s blocking you from providing for them. That’s why customer feedback and data is crucial for any business. It gives you direct insight into what your company must do to cater to consumers and bring in more revenue.

Take every piece of data from every platform and compile it together to look at the bigger picture. It’s easier to see where your business needs improvement when you can see all the moving parts. For example, if consumers complain about a complicated checkout process on your website and you notice a lull in sales, then this feedback is a direct route to potentially solving the problem.

Anything your customers tell you about what isn’t working with your business must be taken into account and applied to a new marketing strategy, especially if it’s recurring. If there’s consistent feedback about something that doesn’t work or is inconvenient, then your team should address it right away.

4. Upgrade Blog Content

If you receive recurring feedback about improving your blog content, then it’s time to figure out ways to better cater to your readers. Perhaps your website analytics show a low volume of traffic to your blog posts or they receive negative comments. If that’s the case, then your content marketing strategy needs a revamp.

If you already have your buyer personas outlined, then finding content to suit your audience’s needs is the next step. You already have their interests and pain points in front of you, which makes it easy to create content that provides solutions and keeps them engaged.

You can also create new content for your website to inform and help visitors, including case studies, whitepapers, checklists, etc. Anything that brings your audience value will help your business grow its email list, boost sales, and improve lead generation.

Conclusion

If you want to expand your business, then listen to your customers. Every piece of feedback matters because it helps improve your current strategies so you continue getting better and receiving positive results.

Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

1 COMMENT

  1. Hi Syed. I like the way you’ve summarised some important issues, but I’m not quite sure about loyalty programs. Let me start off by saying that they definitely work – giving customers, whether existing or new ones – an incentive to keep coming back does work. However, most businesses don’t think this through properly. Here are a few problems:

    1. They are enormously expensive to set up. The hardware, software, training of staff, promotional materials, and so on can run into millions. Then you have to have infrastructure to manage everything

    2. Then you have to spend a fortune again to give your own or other companies’ stuff away. Does it “cheapen” the brand in some way, and does it hint of some desperation in marketing efforts?

    3. The first company in an industry may have an edge for a while – until all the others imitate and all customers have all cards in their wallets.

    4. In many companies, it is seemingly impossible, or at least very difficult, for customers to redeem what they have earned. That creates its own set of problems with unhappy customers.

    5. Many companies report that there are a lot of customers who try to defraud them or cheat.

    6. And now the tax authorities all over the world are starting to clamp down on the “free” things that customers earn. So, for example, the pleasure of receiving a bonus from your insurance company for driving well is now spoilt by the fact that they are obligated to take off up to 40% of the amount credited to you.

    As I said at the beginning of my comment, there is no question that these incentives work, but do you want to actually do this considering all of the problems? I really deeply believe that there are many, many other ways to show your customers appreciation for their support, and you have touched on some of these in your article.

    Great post,and thank you for sharing your ideas.

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