Research shows that 69 per cent of online visitors are leaving your sales/ordering funnels without completing the order. However, increasing conversions by just one per cent can mean huge increases in new leads, revenue and profit. Unfortunately, many digital marketers fail to leverage the power of customer feedback to increase online sales, despite 38 per cent of customers being willing to give feedback after a negative experience (Temkin, 2013).
When it comes to measuring feedback from your website and converting interest into sales, it can appear to be a very complicated process. However, the basic principles are remarkably simple and straightforward.
I like to use the analogy of the three pillars:
- Collect feedback
- Feedback analysis and reporting
- Going from insights to action
Every approach needs to cover these three points, so here are tips for each:
1. Collecting feedback within the ordering funnel
You need to identify client issues during the order process and where you are most likely to lose or retain them. Online feedback tools collect relevant and timely feedback, without hassling your customers.
Exit feedback
Look at exactly what it is you want to achieve by collecting feedback. This will likely be increasing online conversions by standing out from the competition, on price and also in ease of use.
An excellent method is to identify where visitors are leaving your purchasing funnel (exit behaviour). When customers exit the process, present them with a relevant feedback question – they are far more likely to offer useful feedback at this stage.
This also offers invaluable insights when a client abandons their order or stalls. Be it price or technical issues, it is vital you are aware and can rectify any issues.
Passive feedback
You should also provide visitors with an opportunity for passive feedback, such as a button or a link they click themselves. This is insightful, and in our experience, an average of 23 per cent are willing to leave their contact details as well.
Confirmation page
Feedback at the end of the funnel is also helpful. This may seem strange after the sale is complete, but will tell you how much effort it took the customer to succeed. They may have struggled to complete the purchase. Willingness to give feedback is quite high at this stage and the information is incredibly valuable.
2. Effective analysis and reporting on feedback
The next stage is making sense of the client feedback data, which is just as important as collecting the data effectively. Ideally, this involves rapidly sorting through feedback and identifying trends, rather than singling out individual cases (especially when feedback volumes are increasing and from multiple online processes).
Funnel steps
You need to be aware of the critical steps within your sales funnel and the potential fallout when these fail – client expectations are highly useful. It is important to relate feedback (metrics/scores) to the right steps.
This also makes it easier to track improvements. Increasing sales and clients is an important indicator, but you want to know if complaints or feedback volumes have decreased over time related to the improvements you have made with your feedback. Identifying where and why clients leave the funnel will often depend upon fully understanding this feedback in a wider context.
How far you drill down through the feedback depends on your business needs. An effective feedback solution will let you design the criteria to be relevant to your clients as well as to your needs.
Role-based reporting
Good reporting also needs to alert the right teams and individuals within your organisation with the right information. Pricing and technical issues need to be addressed by the right teams and front-line customer service teams will need to placate and help potentially frustrated clients.
Text analysis
With large amounts of feedback, it is handy to use more specialised tools to analyse text and sentiment. A simple start would be to use Excel or a word cloud but with more advanced tools you will be able to combine text analytics with sentiment analysis: for example, which words are used most, and in combination with which others.
Marketers should also automate learning capabilities to identify topics or issues that occur most and use machine learning to automatically assign feedback to these topics. You will also be able to see how these topics behave over time: for example, are certain topics getting more or less feedback and is the sentiment for an issue changing over time?
3. Closing the feedback loop – turning insights into action
It’s time to take necessary action – yet all too often organisations fail to close the feedback loop. With the right process in place, you can engage with at-risk clients immediately, to improve retention.
You also need to understand the market, clients and your business proposition very well. If key teams or people struggle to do this, all the feedback in the world would simply fall on deaf ears.
Closing the feedback loop means your business benefits from this information. This might involve lowering your price, offering additional benefits, or some form of special offer for buying more as part of a special pricing deal. You can react and make the right choices to stay competitive and outmanoeuvre your competitors.
Back to basics
The basic three pillars of optimising online sales with customer feedback will give you a clear strategic view. Collecting and interpreting customer feedback can be overwhelming, so you need to know exactly what you want from the end results and what action may need to be taken to improve matters, otherwise it can rapidly become simply a vanity tool.
Advanced intelligent software makes the effective management of customer needs and sales optimisation much easier, but you must understand the basics. Knowing when a well-targeted interaction with customers is required is the ideal solution and is fully achievable with the right planning and full collaboration by all the stakeholder departments within the business.
