In this post, you’ll get seven actionable ways to ask for quality customer feedback so you can decrease churn, increase sales, and build stronger relationships.

By Kristian Jonsson | Source Digital Doughnut

Have you ever been at a loss when trying to optimize your emails, your website, and other aspects of your business?

Of course, you have! We all have.

The frustration keeps building as you try to figure out what’s keeping you from seeing the results you were expecting, but you can’t seem to identify the problem.

This is where customer feedback comes to the rescue.

Learning about the goals and pains of your audience offers valuable insights that help you build stronger relationships, reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction.

And that’s exactly what I’m here to help you do today.

In this post, you’ll get seven actionable ways to ask for quality customer feedback so you can decrease churn, increase sales, and build stronger relationships.

Let’s start!

Looking for email marketing inspiration?

Feedback is a foundational requirement for optimizing your email marketing efforts.

Once you’ve learned what your customers want and how they want it delivered, it’s easier to increase sales through your email campaigns.

To help you do that, we’ve put together 11 of our favorite marketing emails you can swipe to inspire your email campaigns.

Preparing for feedback

Before you start asking for customer feedback, you need to define the purpose of the feedback.

What part of your business are you looking to optimize? Your customer journey? Your onboarding process? Your product?

Once you’ve identified this, you can move on to the next question:

How will you use your collected data?

This is where you define how you’ll use your data to improve on your chosen area. Which in turn will help you develop the right customer feedback questions that will give you the answers you need.

Lastly, you need to figure out what channel to use. What audience are you looking to collect feedback from?

It’s important to mention here your customers aren’t the only valuable source of feedback. You can also turn to potential customers on third party platforms such as social media, or even reach out to lost customers via email.

Now that we’ve gotten the preparation out of the way, we can move on to the fun part — asking for feedback.

1. Optimize your checkout process through customer feedback

One of the most important processes on your website is your checkout process.

This is where visitors go from potential customers to paying customers. Visitors adding items to their cart does not entail a purchase (as much as we might want it to).

The average cart abandonment rate for online shopping carts is 67.45 percent. That’s potential revenue right out the window.

Some of the reasons people opt out before completing their purchase are complicated checkout processes, not enough payment options, obligatory registration, and so on.

While cart abandonment is inevitable for many businesses, there’s one thing you can do to reduce it:

Ask users why they’re not completing their order.

Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but you get my point.

By asking customers who actually make it to your confirmation page for feedback, you can identify failure points in your checkout and optimize your funnel for higher conversions.

After all, these customers have just bought an amazing product and are more likely to respond to your inquiry than any other person at this moment because they’ve already complied with another request — making a purchase.

Here’s an example of a feedback survey from Livingshop:

With a simple popup, they ask customers to rate their experience and leave a comment.

This form works for all types of feedback, and you can easily specify what type of feedback you’re looking for.

The type of questions you ask depends on the kind of feedback you want, but if we stick to checkout optimization, you can ask new customers if they experienced any obstacles, and how those obstacles prevented them from moving forward.

Here are some examples of questions to ask on your confirmation page:

• How was your experience with [insert name of store] today?
• Did you encounter any problems during checkout?
• How can we improve your shopping experience in the future?
• Did you find the checkout process complicated?
• Did you need more information during checkout?
• Do you have any questions regarding your new purchase?

Keep in mind that open-ended questions can shed light on problems you didn’t know existed. But they might also keep people from answering if they’re too complex.

2. Collect feedback from newly onboarded customers

Once your customers have signed up for your newsletter, service, or have in any other way registered their email address, you need to send them a welcome email.

Your welcome email is the most important email you’ll ever send because it sets the tone for the future relationship with your subscribers and customers.

(Psst… Read this article to learn more about the indispensable welcome email)

The welcome email needs to be the first email in your onboarding sequence, and it’s one of the best platforms to ask for feedback.

New subscribers, customers, and free trial users have just signed up, and the reason why is still top of mind when they receive your welcome email (that is if you follow best practices and send it immediately after signup.)

Depending on your target audience, there are a few ways to ask for insightful feedback.

Here’s an excerpt from Intelligent Change’s welcome email for blog subscribers:

They assure you they’ll do everything in their power to keep your inbox from overflowing with irrelevant emails, and then ask you to fill out a short form.

This particular link is to a form with two simple questions:

There’s always a reason why people join your email list, and typically it’s because your content helped them solve a problem (or has the potential to do so in the future).

Then you can create content that solves these problems.

This can potentially lead to an increase in subscribers starting free trials or converting into customers.

When users start a free trial or purchase your product, they should also enter an onboarding sequence where you help them get started using your product or service.

Once again, the welcome email is an optimal place to ask for feedback.

Read the full article here.