Five reasons to start collecting feedback over your emails now
Nowadays, a successful email marketer is obviously tasked with more than solely sending sales generating email campaigns; this channel is used as a way of communicating with customers. Enabling your customers to leave feedback makes it possible to initiate a dialogue and get to know all about them. You’ve probably heard about asking for feedback through email already. But do you truly know why it is so important? We’ve outlined five reasons why email feedback collection is your next best step.
1. Increase your conversion rates through superb personalization
There are a number of factors that influence the email’s conversion rate, e.g. personalization, the email responsiveness and the value offer. Let’s zoom in on the first factor: personalization. Why? Well, KPMG found that, in the Netherlands, the most important factor for driving loyalty, is the organization’s ability to personalize its offering.
According to The Daily Egg, personalized email messages can improve the CTR by 14% and conversion rates by as much as 10%. Paula’s Choice took this even a step further by personally following up on the negative feedback they’ve collected through their emails. This eventually led to a higher customer satisfaction score and a 29% sales uplift! So, creating a personal, one on one customer experience will ensure you beat the competition. In order to find out all about your customers’ personal preferences and email satisfaction, collecting email feedback is essential.
2. Reduce your email churn rate by retaining your customer base
Once you start collecting feedback, you’ll understand what emails your base rate mostly positive or negative. After time, you’ll be able to draw conclusions on the overall satisfaction rate. And that’s real valuable data; I’ll show you why.
MarketingSherpa researched how often customers disengage with marketing efforts. They’ve made a distinction between generally satisfied and generally unsatisfied customers, and found that a satisfied customer is 154% more likely to stay on your subscription list than an unsatisfied customer. So, I think there’s an obvious conclusion we can draw here: make your customers as happy as possible!
To make a distinction between these two types of customers, ask them what they think of your emails and what they expect from your business. Find out what part of your base is mostly unsatisfied and make sure to offer them that extra bit of relevant content and personal attention. If you do well, they’ll switch to positive and are more likely to stay subscribed.
3. The email marketer's role in customer-centric business decisions
The email marketing field has changed tremendously over the last years. Whereas in the 90’s sales-driven emails were being sent in bulk, nowadays, every touch point needs to be customer-centric in order for you to stay competitive. This is easier said than done, but every step towards customer centricity counts.
Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index shows that companies, in different industries, still have difficulty with creating a personal connection with their customers. It states that companies work with a number of business silos that frustrate customers and negatively influence customer journeys. By asking your customers what they think of their touch points with the company and the journeys they go through, you’ll be able to create a deeper connection with them and uncover the frustrations in the processes.
Don’t forget to include other departments within your company when sharing insights. Try to understand where cross-departmental collaboration may be possible by breaking down business silos. Make your email marketing team the main driver of your voice of the customer program and take the first step towards customer centric business decisions, driven by customer feedback. You don’t want your email marketing team underperform by that 154%, do you?
4. Stay relevant by learning about customer preferences
Let me start this fourth reason with something you should bear in mind: your customers are the only people who can tell you what it’s like to be your customer. Maybe you’ve learned all there is about email marketing and think you have all the insights. But you’ll truly learn about who your customer really is, by asking their opinion on a regular basis. Continued learning is the key to improving.
Increase email campaigns’ relevancy by applying the collected customer insights. To quote Campaign Monitor: “Relevancy is the marketer’s secret weapon, and the fastest path to revenue.” Personalizing your subject lines increases the open-likeliness with 26%, and once you start segmenting your campaigns, it is found that there is a 760% increase in email revenue.
Sounds appealing to you? Then start investing time now in listening to your customers and learning all about how others experience connecting with your company.
5. Motivate and improve yourself with every email you send
Feedback not only gives you insight in the performance of your emails, but also in the performance of your individual work. It might seem scary at the beginning; being evaluated by your customers. However, look at it from a different perspective and see this direct feedback as an opportunity to improve!
Think about setting a goal to improve the email satisfaction per email, campaign or month. Bear in mind that reaching the goal may not be within your powers entirely. You may need work together with your colleagues from UX design to improve the order experience or collaborate with the content marketers to optimize newsletter content. Armed with your email feedback data, it’ll be easier to build a business case and motivate each other to perform better and increase the customer satisfaction rate with every email send.
Curious how collecting feedback with CloseAlert looks like? We’ve selected 10 real life examples for you, take a look to get inspired!