a6f8f_esat_admin - e-satisfaction.com

Smart ways to increase positive WoM in 3rd party review websites

Customer reviews can be a threat for businesses, but if used correctly, all 3rd party review sites can be used to create a significant competitive advantage and increase positive Word of Mouth.

According to a study conducted by Dimensional Research, 90% of respondents said that positive reviews influence their purchase decision. Customer reviews are getting more and more and their importance is continuously increasing. Companies across all industries do not have the option to ignore what customers are saying any more, as now customers are not saying it to them, but they are sharing what they want to say!

Customer reviews can be a threat for businesses, but if used correctly, all 3rd party review sites can be used to create a significant competitive advantage and increase positive Word of Mouth.

There are some small steps and actions you can take to make customer review services and websites help you and in this article I will try to walk you through them…

To increase positive WoM, you can follow a simple tactic…find your evangelists and make them talk for you to potential customers. Simple? How you can do that?

1) Say thank you

By thanking your customers with a personalized message (or a gift), you are acknowledging your gratitude for those who fuel your business success. This action will be noted by your customers and it will appeal to their emotions. See the video that follows about how even a bank can create an emotional bond with its customers!

But there are easier ways to do it (without giving away air tickets to Trinidad). Laura Ashley took this opportunity and made one customer’s day. They took note of the bedding she had ordered, and included a pair of comfy lounging socks to go alongside.

While connecting with your customers in an emotional way and providing a personalized and unique customer experience, your brand will be able to transform customers into evangelists of your brand.

2) Don’t be afraid to open the discussion

Avoiding complaints and problems is not working any more. Unhappy customers will speak up and guess what, they will not speak to you! Only 4% of unhappy customers will actually say their problem, while 96% of customers that get their complaint or issue managed say that they would come back and buy again. Speaking first, reaching up to consumers asking them what do you do wrong will provide a human aspect to your brand and if you do what you can to fix it, they will definitely appreciate it. Of course, if you speak first and act fast, you are saving this negative review in this popular review site or price comparison service that will haunt you for months, making it hard for users to trust you.

3) Know your evangelists

Ok, you know a lot of customers that had issues or faced a problem when you were providing them your service. They called, they wrote or they reached you. Do you know the happy ones? Do you know customers that buy again and again from you? And by “knowing” I do not only think of “how many they are” or “what is the maximum number of repeated purchases”, but knowing what their names are, what do they buy and why do they love you so much. Make sure you know them and make sure what they need, so that you can give it and keep them forever.

4) Ask them to spread the word

Ask from your happy customers to spread the word, share their love for your brand. There is no greater testimonial than a customer of yours saying to a friend or family “Have you heard of XXX.com? If not, you should totally take a look at it. I loved it!” It is really very simple, people love to feel needed, and if you kindly ask them to talk about your brand to friend and family, that request will be at the top of their mind!

There are a lot of ways and moments to encourage your happy customers to refer others to your e-Business by providing a small award for both of them. Whatever form your WoM referral program takes, try to make it easy and effortless. Make it easy for customers to connect with you and with others. This can mean to embed an engaging visual in your thank you page or your newsletters and motivate them to leave a positive review in a third party website.

Conclusion

The key is to make everything easy. Keep it simple and you will see your positive reviews increase. Word of mouth marketing is not only cost effective, but the new customers you will gain through this strategy will most likely stay longer and become loyal.

Customer Feedback: 3 Insights you shouldn’t miss!

Customer feedback can strengthen customer relations and improve overall business performance, helping an e-Business address problems which could undermine loyalty and lead to unsatisfying experiences.

Customer feedback can strengthen customer relations and improve overall business performance, helping an e-Business address problems which could undermine loyalty and lead to unsatisfying experiences and therefore, unsatisfied customers. McKinsey indicates that marketers who put customer knowledge at the center of marketing decisions improve their marketing return on investment by 15 –20%.

Customers will provide you with the following insights, which will give your e-Business clear actions on your path to build a humanized marketing strategy:

1) How to improve Customer Experience!

A primary objective to start gathering feedback from your e-Business visitors and customers, is the improvement of the customer experience you provide throughout their entire shopping journey.

The first thing you should do is listen. Listen to your customers’ voice and improve the small things that are of great value for your e-Business as well as aspects that seem to irritate customers or create difficulties in their path to purchase. For example, if a visitor doesn’t feel safe while navigating in your online store, there is a high probability that she/he will not proceed in buying your product. Making them feel secure while navigating, will make them happy and give them an incentive to place their order!

2) How to improve your product/service in the online and offline world!

Listening to your customers is the only way to guarantee you will create a product or service that they actually want to buy.

As Bill Gates once said: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. This is why you should learn from your customers by firstly admitting your weakest points and then start improving!

For example, if a customer has rated your e-Business with 2, on a 10 point scale, in the availability of products it means that most probably they didn’t find the product they were searching for! Asking them which product they wanted to buy will provide you with more details about their preferences and you may consider adding this product in your online store.

BOOK A DEMO

3) How engaged and loyal your customers are!

Customer feedback offers a direct line of communication between you and your customers, helping you to determine if they are happy with your e-Business and the exact reason that is hidden within; for example: good prices, good shipping methods, availability of products etc.

Evangelist are your ambassadors. They offer tremendous value at very little cost on acquisition! When you gather feedback from your customers, happy customers, your evangelists, will give you high scores. By rewarding them, in a personalized way, you will be able to build stronger, mutually beneficial relationships.

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers to recommend you to their friends or colleagues! Your evangelists will play an important role in the promotion of your e-Business, by spreading their positive feedback!

These 3 insights, will help you base future actions on real data! Customer feedback will guide you towards creating a product that customers want to buy by also creating an experience that exceeds expectations and keeps customers coming back for more! If for example, a large percentage of customers suggest a new product category, listen to them! Your customers are your livelihood and listening can be a virtue and a blessing which will trigger your future actions!

Remember, there’s never too much feedback – the more the better!

3 easy ways to make e-satisfaction’s Customer Experience Badge work for you

We give you a big applause for keeping your promise of providing an outstanding customer experience! Here are 3 easy ways to make e-satisfaction’s Customer Experience Badge work for you and get you more customers.

You do keep your promise of providing an outstanding customer experience and it is shown in e-satisfaction’s Customer Experience Badge! We give you a big applause for that!

Several customers have asked us:

“How can I use the Customer Experience Badge to get more customers?”

Here are 3 easy ways to promote your customer experience scores, shown through Customer Experience Badge, using e-satisfaction and with no involvement of your technical team.

1) Share through our social share automation

The first and simplest action you can do is to use the power of social media to show your customers your Customer Experience scores, through a Facebook Post with a snapshot of the Customer Experience Badge, demonstrating that your customers had a great shopping experience while purchasing from your e-Business! It is your time, to spread the good news.

By using e-satisfaction’s social share Humanized Marketing Automation you can further improve the engagement of this post by showing this Facebook post to clients that just provided feedback. This way you let them know that they are part of a happy customers clan and you provide them the with a clear action…like, share and comment! This is why engagement rate is really high, reaching up to 28x the average engagement rate of a normal post, as show in this case study.

2) Show your scores and call for action

A good score is something you don’t want your customers to miss and a great place to show it is to customers that just left feedback, but these are engaged customers with full attention that just finished a purchase funnel, help them make the next step!
What would the next step be? You know better (i.e. join our loyalty program, visit our stores, follow us on Instagram) but this is a good time to remind them that you really care about them and you are doing great job while serving your clients! Create an engaging visual with your Customer Experience Badge that has a great score on it, say thank you for helping us being the best and add a call to action button that takes them to the action you want them to thank you more!

3) Ask for a Referral

You may have heard about the Refer a Friend mechanism, one of the out of the box Humanized Marketing Automations provided by e-satisfaction, that you can use to help your customers share their love about you, increasing profits and generating revenues with no marketing cost like Maison Marasil did in this case study.

An idea that you could use to further increase the effectiveness of this mechanism is to include a snapshot of your customer experience score in the referral mail, so that the friends of your happy customers better understand that you are really doing a great job, their friends are telling you do and hundreds other customers say that you do! Build trust in the first mail and be sure they will come!

Conclusion

No matter what, all you need to do is be creative and human oriented. E-satisfaction’s Customer Experience Badge is a summary of your customer’s voices and you should think “how can I let people know that I am that good, now that I have it documented?”

Make your future customers know that you care about them and make them trust you! Make them say “I know that when I will be buying from there, everything will be perfect!”.

Want useful analytics? Switch to metrics!

We live in a time where data is everywhere and tons of them pass through our eyes every day, making it difficult to measure performance and success. So, which metrics should you track to identify the level of your e-Business success and get on a direct flight to your goals?

We live the time of Data. Data is everywhere and it is not difficult to collect tons of data, not knowing what to do and how to analyse them. In this case, less is more and the rule of thumb is prefer quality over quantity and to achieve this you need to have a set of carefully selected and continuously monitored metrics, linked to your business goals.

A mistake that is commonly made is the mix of measurements with metrics. These are two distinct terms, with different use and of different importance. In a nutshell, a Measurement is a number (i.e. NPS Score, or General Satisfaction Score), measured in a specific point in time, while a Metric is the change of this measurement, compared between different periods or different departments. Measurements are data, while Metrics are data in context (which is the definition of Information). Measurements might trigger actions but Metrics indicate if the actions worked!

Not all metrics are the same and there is no recipe for “the best metric that suits all businesses”. It is important to choose specific metrics over measurements that will get you on direct flight to your goals! A good point to start is by defining two kinds of metrics, outcome metrics and performance metrics.

Outcome Metrics and Performance Metrics

Performance metrics measure key activities that lead to successful outcomes. These metrics are analyzed on an ongoing basis to make sure everything is on track. If you don’t reach your performance metrics, you know that meeting your outcome metric won’t be possible and these are the metrics that will help you make changes to alter the ultimate outcome and improve your outcome metrics. For example, your customer’s satisfaction score is a metric that identifies your performance regarding customer experience. Other, performance metrics are the number of dissatisfied and satisfied customers, the number of customers that are willing to buy again from your e-business, your NPS score etc.

On the other hand, outcome metrics look back at what has happened, providing useful insights on future steps. After measuring your performance metrics, it is time to identify your next steps and improvements. Let’s assume that you noticed 5 dissatisfied customers this month and you immediately contacted them to resolve their compaint. Thus, your outcome metric will be the number of dissatisfied customers which made a purchase after contacting them and which actions can take place to improve this number and therefore, increase customer happiness.

Both performance and outcome metrics are essential, regardless if they consider the entire organization, specific customer segments or even individual customers. In any case, metrics are only valuable if you can manage them, so choose them carefully and choose the ones that you will be able to monitor and improve.

Piece of Advice

Create metrics related to individual customers or customer segments (i.e. frequency of purchases, change of NPS score) and define specific, personalized actions in response to these metrics. The more you care about your customers and learn from them, the more stronger you will make the bond you develop with them!

e-satisfaction is entering the Cypriot market

In the 9th e-Commerce Conference, in Cyprus, e-satisfaction presented to dozens of companies how they can develop and increase customer loyalty through Humanized Marketing. e-satisfaction in also entering the Cypriot market with two valuable collaborations!

In the 9th e-Commerce Conference, in Cyprus, e-satisfaction presented to dozens of companies how they can develop and increase customer loyalty through Humanized Marketing. The conference had over 200 participants from different industries, representing major companies such as Cyta, Apivita, GAP and Nielsen. Interest was oriented towards e-Commerce and how digital marketing can help the offline business world.

Evaggelos Kotsonis, CEO of e-satisfaction.com described and analyzed the human era of modern business and suggested a personalized marketing strategy, based on the buying experience that each customer had when interacting with an e-Business.

eCommerce conference in Cyprus

For the conference, Mr. Kotsonis commented: “The 9th e-Commerce Conference was a pleasant surprise as it seems that e-Commerce in Cyprus is constantly evolving. I was impressed that in an e-Commerce Conference there were so many and so frequent references to the value of the human element in e-Commerce and in e-Business”.

At the same time, e-satisfaction.com is entering the Cypriot market welcoming the continuously growing and customer-oriented Supermarketcy.com.cy! Sypermarketcy.com.cy is the first (and only) online supermarket in the country.

supermarketcy.com.cy logo

For this new partnership, Mr. Kotsonis said “We are delighted to partner with Supermarketcy.com.cy, a pure play online supermarket founded on the basis of good service, consumer investing and implement customer centricity in the eBusiness world as envisioned from e-satisfaction”. In his statement, Mr. Idomeneas Sarantinos, CEO & Co Founder of Sypermarketcy.com.cy said “Our promise to provide our customers the best possible shopping experience ties in absolute terms with e-satisfaction. Customer service is in the center of our strategy, as it strengthens customer loyalty, which is our big challenge. We believe that our new partnership will bring us even closer to our goal; to be close to our customer”.

e-satisfaction is also discussing for a possible collaboration with AMP and specifically, Famous Sports, which is the largest sports retail chain in Cyprus in the online as well as the offline e-Business world. AMP’s core values stand in creating an excellent relation and communication with customers, providing quick customer service and respecting each and every customer.

famousports Cyprus logo

To conclude, our presence in the 9th e-Commerce Conference by IMH was successful and we have a lot of work ahead and a long road to walk on.