In the eCommerce world today, customers have become extremely important. If you do not understand the influence of customer feedback in today’s business model, you simply have nowhere to go in digital marketing. To ensure the long-term success of your business, you must collect feedback from your customers and learn from them regardless of whether they are positive or negative.
Recently, a very wrong tradition has been set within the entrepreneurs. They only focus on the positive feedback and ignore the negative feedback. They believe that by focusing on positive feedback, they can increase their website visitors. However, the results go completely against their expectations because one negative feedback is ten times more powerful than positive feedback. Regardless of whether you are getting criticized, appreciated, or simply given some suggestions, you must respect each feedback with open arms. You must have a strong character to resist the criticism coming from your customers on your end.
Importance of Customer Feedback
1. Improvement in Products and Services
When you bring a new brand, eCommerce product, or service to the market, you must know the customer’s perception. You must think like a customer and see what you can give and what the customers may expect from you. For this matter, it is necessary to conduct market research, which would help in collecting feedback from your customers about their intentions. Through customer feedback, you would get to understand whether they are willing to invest in the products or services you are selling.
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If they don’t intend to buy your products, it would mean that either your products aren’t good enough or your competitors have represented similar products in a better way than you. Market research can only influence your plans after your products and services are acquired by the customers. You can only learn about how good or bad your products or services are once you listen to the customer’s opinions. Therefore, you must adjust your services and products according to the customer's needs.
2. Valued Customers
When it comes to customer feedback, there should be no discrimination in terms of any element. Whether a person belongs to the United States or in a village in India, you must treat all your customers equally. You must involve yourself in gathering feedback regardless of their intentions and interpret it for the benefit of your online business. If there is a feeling that you value their opinions, you will see that the customers will be loyal to you. If you have differences in handling your feedback, you will lose some website traffic.
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If you are prioritizing brand ambassadors in the future, you must consider your customers' feedback. Recommendations from those who already have an established customer base are brilliant ways to attract new traffic to your website. If the customers feel that you are considering their feedback, they would understand that the business owner is doing everything in their capacity to fulfill their demands.
3. Customer Retention
Another massive talking point related to customer feedback is customer retention. For those who don’t know, customer retention is a strategy that enables website owners to bring customers back to their website (if they have not been to their website more than once). Nowadays, customer retention is vital for your conversion rate. You cannot have the approach that everything is going well for your website by just bringing the new customers to your website.
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Bringing new traffic to your website and bringing back customers who have already been to your website is different. However, both must be prioritized equally and for the benefit of your website. If your customers are satisfied with you, they will be loyal to your website. Strikingly enables you to add a review section on your website, in which you can include all the feedback from customers on your website and use it to attract new audiences.
4. Business Decision-Making
In a competitive market like today, you cannot create marketing strategies based on guesswork. Therefore, successful businesses always gather critical data, which assists in developing and formulating future strategies. If anyone is wondering what the data is, it is called customer feedback. If you see certain businesses flourishing in the market today, the biggest reason is that they always rely on their customer’s opinions.
Collecting feedback is a brilliant strategy and is pivotal to the decision-making of your business. It will help you understand the demands of your customers. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will always happen. If product development is no longer necessary for your business, you should drift away from it and focus on brand exposure. Even though feedback is valuable to your business, you must have the ability to translate the acquired into key points for your business.
Impact of Customer Feedback
1. Unsatisfied Customers
When we talk about customer feedback, the most significant talking point revolves around unsatisfied customers. It is all good to get appreciation from all the happy customers, but it takes a strong personality to resist the customer complaints and resolve them. Therefore, when you collect feedback, which turns out to be negative, you shouldn’t ignore it. Negative feedback is also essential for the welfare of your website, just like positive feedback.
Even though you have developed the website, you will never be able to see the problems in your website how a customer does. Negative feedback gives you a chance to improve all your website's deficiencies. If you ignore the criticism, you ignore the potential problems in your website.
2. Happy Customers
The easiest thing for an eCommerce website owner is to deal with happy customers. Happy customers are always there to appreciate your products and services. However, just because they are sending good messages about your website, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do anything in return. You should value their good opinions and write certain messages to them in a way that convinces them to come back to your website for future orders.
When collecting customer feedback, you shouldn’t just reply to the negative comments only. If someone appreciates your services or the products you are offering, you can thank them and convince them to return to your website again.
3. New Leads
If you have a high customer satisfaction score, there is no reason why you won’t receive positive customer feedback and testimonials. This will enable you to attract more leads and new customers for your business. By gathering feedback and making them part of your review section on your Strikingly website, you give yourself a chance to attract more customers to your products and services. This tactic has more power than a marketing campaign, as people rely on their peers more than a business advertisement.
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For any business to flourish, it is important to receive a reasonable amount of leads. If the rate of leads incoming isn’t good enough, there is something wrong with your brand or your customer service. It could also be the fact that you give a lot of importance to your customers' feedback. Therefore, whatever you do related to your website, you must always think like a customer.
Show Product Reviews on Strikingly
In eCommerce, very few website builders provide you with the kind of features that Strikingly does. The users are always collecting customer feedback and trying to understand their demands to better their website. However, Strikingly has also provided a feature that causes the users to show product reviews to their customers. However, you must note that this feature is only available for Pro users and above.
To display customer reviews on your website, you must follow these steps:
- Enable Product Reviews: Go to Product Reviews from your Strikingly web editor, and click “Enable Product Reviews”. After enabling this option, our system will send an email a week after fulfilling an order, telling customers to write a review
- Click on the “Complete” button to trigger the option of customer reviews
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- After the customer sends a new review, you will receive an email request. New reviews will appear in your pending list. After accepting the desired reviews, they will start appearing on your eCommerce website
- Your customers will receive an email of “Product Review Request” a week after the order completion
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Conclusion
Collecting customer feedback has become a crucial task for many eCommerce websites today. As a business owner, you should never have the mindset that whatever you say is final. At the end of the day, you’ve also been a customer. Though you have changed your roles, you are bound to make mistakes. Therefore, you must prioritize the feedback of customers at all costs.
Strikingly always focuses on keeping the customers satisfied through our tools, innovative features, and services. Therefore, we have created an Idea Forum, which allows the online community to come together and share their opinions on Strikingly’s website development features. If you are new to our website, waste no time building an excellent website for your business and take your customer’s opinions very seriously.
