Experts Talk | 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.

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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!

The 3 secrets of customer centric marketers in the Age of the Customer

Would you spend 200$ to sell a $20 pair of socks? What if the sock shopper collects expensive sneaker shoes and would refer you to his network?

Recently we noticed this really interesting article from Google about the three secrets of Customer Centric Search Marketers, in which the value of customer centricity was pointed out as the path of success followed by succesful brands.

According to this article, the three things that succesful customer centric companies do really well are the following:

They uncover the true value of customers. They identify most valuable customers (that can be a new meaning to the MVC acronym 🙂 ) by creating a customer scoring system, based on a mix of metrics, related to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
They apply customer segmentation to digital. They create segments based on CLV and examine the habits of high value segments (i.e. users who purchase twice in the first month are 3x more profitable than average).
They pick the right KPIs. They calculate lifetime profits of a customer and define a target CPA or RoAS for each segment.

Humans are not only users. Behaviour data and purchase habits do provide great insights and are a great way to segment customers, but to be able to really focus on the customer and be customer centric, the “citizen” part of humans (=customers) should not be forgotten. Trust, experience, (bi-directional) communication and many more details that cannot be measured by time on site or bounce rates should be an integral part of an insights system of a customer centric brand.

In this context, following we extend the excelent points made by Google, bringing the “citizen” part of the customer in the center of the discussion.

Behavioural metrics are good, but do not forget experience

In the process of creating a scoring system, the metrics mentioned in the article are mostly behaviour based (i.e. time on site, number of purchases). An addition to this would be to consider the value of a customer that would recommend your brand or business to 3 friends (or a customer that has already done it before). e-satisfaction’s Refer a Friend Humanize Marketing Automation is used on average by 28% of customers that are asked for a referal. The value of these customers has been automatically increased and an e-business should find ways to attract more of them or engage them with even more ways!

Data FROM the customer should be used to create segments

It is great to predict the value of a client based on behavioural facts and this should be an integral part of an insights mechanism, but there is a missing bit of information there. By working and researching on customer experience and customer satisfaction data in more than 160 e-retail businesses, we discovered 18 experience-based customer segments, related to prices, assortment, shipping and packaging. These segments are indicators on whether a customer will buy again or not and if the customer will recommend or not a brand to friends. Thus, it is important to create a customer insights system with data for the customer (such as behaviour data, CRM data or analytics data) and data FROM the customer, which can be collected by asking the customer directly.

Cost – Value KPIs are good, but where are loyalty KPIs

Developing cost – value KPIs for each customer segment is great but “softer” KPIs should also be in the mix. A great example is NPS (Net Promoter Score) which is a really important metric, linked to the positive word of mouth (and free marketing) your brand can potentially get from customers (or the negative effect detractors may have in your brand). NPS should be a core metric for any customer centric brand, despite the fact that it is not directly linked to CPA or RoAS. Whether you add NPS score in the equation of calculating CLV or you create a custom “Cost Per Ambassador Client” KPI, you should not forget to include this important metric to customer centric metrics system.

Today e-businesses and brands have lots of data about customers in hand and are in the process of structuring new KPIs that will help them make better and faster decisions. By extending the closing statement of Google’s article, we close ours by adding the section in italics “After all, an individual sales is great, but acquiring high-value, loyal customers and making sure they have a great experience that will share will pay off more in the long run”

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!

4 ways to increase your customer’s lifetime value!

Customer lifetime value is one of the most important metrics of your business. Discover 4 easy and quick ways to increase your customer’s lifetime value!

Customer Lifetime Value! What does it mean?

Customer Lifetime Value is one of the most important metrics of your business as it is the metric that indicates if your business will be viable and profitable in the long term. CLV refers to the projected revenue each customer will generate during their lifetime, so increased CLV means less acquisition cost and more revenue, thus long term profitability!

A study from ThinkJar revealed that it costs 6 to 7 times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one! Therefore, all efforts should be placed in increasing your customer’s satisfaction throughout their entire customer journey and extend their lifetime value.

How can CLV be increased through customer centricity?

The most important thing you can do to extend the CLV index is to develop a strong bond with your customers and make them feel that “this company gets me”, so the next time they will need something they will not search somewhere else, but they will come directly to you. There are a lot of ways to achieve this and the one thing that you should never forget is that there are real persons behind every transaction, so all you have to do is understand their needs and communicate with them in a personalized way, just like you would do with a real human.

This is not an easy task when you manage tens or thousands of transactions every day, so you need to get the right technology in place. e-satisfaction.com, taps into your customer’s mind and gives you the opportunity to trigger personalized communications based on the experience your customer had when buying from you.
This personalized communication comes from e-satisfaction.com‘s built-in marketing campaigns that you can use without having to bother your technical team. Easy, plug n play, fast and effective!

Refer a Friend – Ask your happy customers to refer you to their friends! You can have a quick look on a successful case study that generated a 3% revenue increase with no marketing cost!
Callback Request – Who said customer recovery cannot be automated? Have dissatisfied customers ask for a callback and solve any possible misunderstandings, converting them into happy and loyal customers! Click here to read more about the Callback Request mechanism.
Banner Campaigns – Usually customers leave when they finish checkout. Instead of this you can use the thank you page to create awareness, or even to transfer every client that completes checkout to the next action you want them to do. Check your loyalty program, discover your new stores, or a Free Delivery offer are some of the actions our customers have chosen.
Reviews Campaigns – Do you want to increase your Word of Mouth and inspire more trust to potential customers? Do you need more reviews in marketplaces, in Facebook or Google Places? See this case study to discover how to increase positive reviews by 79%!

Not all customers are the same! Personalize your marketing messages to show your customers that each and every one of them is unique for you! If you want to learn more, schedule a demo with our team and discover how your customers will reward you!

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