Business owners who are engaged in online business must know the importance of customer feedback. Online there are millions of potential customers that you’ve never met. How can you build trust and reach a conversion?
Customer feedback helps you build trust, increase product rankings, drive traffic to your website, boost conversions, and build customer loyalty.
Positive customer feedback may be a make-or-break factor for your business.
How can you increase positive customer feedback? It need not be a headache for you; we will break this question down and give you our best tips.
1. Implement Live Chat Support
Live chat support is vital. We are living in an era of highly advanced instant message technology, and customers don’t want to wait to find answers to their questions. If you can’t answer instantly, they will find someone who will; this will undermine your conversions.
Adding live chat support will undoubtedly improve the customer experience and bring in sales. Potential customers will instantly get answers about availability, payment, size, and shipping so that they are confident to make a purchase decision immediately.
The questions your customers ask will help you understand what your customers want and give you hints for expanding your business.
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2. Send Post-Purchase Email
Do you want to get customer feedback from every shopper who bought from you? Send them a follow-up email. These people are the most qualified to leave comments about your products and services.
Make sure your customers enjoy their shopping experience because this increases the likelihood of getting positive customer feedback. It might be impossible for you to reach out to your customers one by one, but you can design an email and automate its delivery.
3. Make It Easy to Leave Reviews
Make it easy for customers to leave their feedback. Show them where and how to leave a review. You can use a tool such as a star-rating system to collect customer feedback. Make sure you check how easy it is for customers to use. Does the system work if customers bought more than one type of product? It’s easier for the customer if they can write one review for all products at the same time. It saves them time, and it means you are more likely to get more reviews.
4. Incentivize for More Positive Feedback
People are more likely to write reviews about unpleasant purchasing experiences. It’s harder to get customers who had positive experiences to write about them, but you can offer incentives.
Some business platforms prohibit incentives for customer reviews; find out what the policy is on your business platform and what you can offer in exchange for positive reviews. If incentives are allowed, you can give out gifts to customers such as discounts on future purchases, free samples, gift cards, or free shipping.
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5. Go Social
Social media is everywhere. According to research, the average person spends about 1hour and 40 minutes on social media platforms. Social media is a great way for you to establish your social footprint and reach out to your target customers.
There are a lot of ways for you to collect customer reviews on social media. You can pin a post on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to announce rewards programs, including discount codes, and free shipping coupons. You can share and ask for reviews. You can run retargeting ads to target buyers for reviews on previous orders. Given the huge user numbers on these platforms, you will get a huge number of customer reviews.
6. Collect Different Forms of Customer Feedback
There are different forms of customer feedback- text, images, and videos. Text is the most commonly used form, but images and videos are key aspects of strong customer reviews, visual reviews increase customer confidence when making a purchase decision.
If you want to encourage feedback incorporating photos and videos, then you need to make this format available.
7. Utilize a Trusted Rating and Feedback Tool
A rating and feedback tool will help you collect user-generated content and improve the customer experience. To decide which tool to use you have to understand your needs. For instance, you want a tool that will
- collect user-generated content from various channels,
- display customer feedback with customization,
- optimize your review content for search and increase traffic and rankings,
- syndicate all the reviews brands generated to retailers,
- streamline product questions and answers.
8. Start a Product Sampling Program
Are you worried about customer feedback for a new product?
Customers might be unwilling to buy a newly launched product without any customer feedback; product sampling can help with this situation. Get potential customers to try the product and leave their feedback.
Product sampling will increase brand awareness too and you can also target unique audiences, getting your products to customers who need them. Sampling can also help boost review quality and quantity.
9. Use Online Feedback Form on Different Purchasing Stage
Ensure you have multiple channels for the customer to reach out to you. Don’t forget to include a feedback form on your website as this remains one of the most effective ways to get customer feedback.
Further, ask the customer for feedback at different stages of their buying journey. For instance, if customers interact with you via live chat or online service, ask them to rate the service they received. This feedback helps you understand how your customers rated the help they received on the live chat session. When the customer confirms his/her order, then you can ask for feedback at that stage too. If the customer abandons his/her shopping cart, use a pop-up to find out why; you can give them multiple choices to share their reason for abandonment.
Asking for feedback at different stages allows you to figure out what the customer needs at each step of their journey. Their views will help you improve your business.
10. Respond to Negative Feedback
Negative reviews happen, but if you get too many, it will affect your business. A bad review isn’t the end of the world but doesn’t ignore it; you need to remedy the situation.
First of all, show empathy, understand the problem and think about how you can resolve the issue. If the customer is not satisfied with the product quality, offer a refund. If the order took too long to arrive, offer a special gift. Be polite and professional, take responsibility, and find a solution quickly. Respond efficiently to negative experiences, and you might find that your efforts gain you a loyal customer and not a disgruntled ex-customer.
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We hope this article will be helpful when it comes to building social proof for your business and increasing your sales with positive reviews. Try to improve customer experience, leave a good reputation among customers, and maximize the customer-generated content to affect customer’s buying decision.
Make it very easy for the customer to leave their comment about their shopping experience with your business. Always respond to the negative reviews efficiently, figure out remedy measures, and make the customer happy about your business. Turn the negative reviews into a positive one.
