How To Use Consumer Feedback To Your Advantage
Listen
Listening to your consumers is a huge part of creating consumer loyalty and satisfaction. Using this feedback to your advantage through systematic monitoring and utilization of social media monitoring tools is key to creating a relationship with consumers and growing your brand.
For retailers and brands, customer reviews online, in social networks, or on third party review sites represent primary sources of information about evaluations of their products and services.
Available in exponentially expanding quantities, online comments offer unprecedented access to consumers’ thoughts and evaluations. Scouring the vast number of digital channels can provide insights into what they really think and what they want from retailers. Accordingly, retailers can adopt quick reactions, such as product rollout, a new advertising campaign, or a coupon to soothe a dissatisfied customer.
Though it is impossible as a brand to monitor everything being said online, putting forth proper efforts allows you to grow your brand through consumer satisfaction.
Analyze
Analyzing consumer feedback and behavior is something every business should be taking advantage of. Understanding your consumer patterns allows you to establish a relationship and prioritize consumer needs.
A good way to analyze consumer feedback is through the process of sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis algorithms are being used to make sense of consumer feedback because it categorizes feedback as positive, negative, or neutral. This process uses word analysis to determine if a review or comment has a positive or negative word attached to it. Then, the sentiment analysis method assigns a general score, with positive scoring higher and negative scoring lower. This allows brands to efficiently analyze consumer reviews or comments on social channels.
Understanding consumer behavior is a key step to analyzing consumer feedback. Monitoring behavior can be done through tracking bounce rates, conversion rates, or customer attribution. Bounce rate analysis can track the percentage of times a visitor leaves a site after viewing a certain page. If multiple users leave after reaching the same point, then that may be where to focus on improvement.
Conversion rates and click paths work hand-in-hand to reveal what users might have wanted but did not find through your brand or on your site. A good conversion rate happens when users are taking the actions you desire, such as purchasing the product.
Customer attribution can be monitored by tracking the various touchpoints that a consumer encounters that led to a site or a purchase. This analysis most of the time reveals your conversion and click rates as well.
Keeping track of all the chatter around the brand that gets posted across digital channels is extremely overwhelming. However, by understanding your consumer behavior, you are more likely to understand the message and emotion behind the feedback given.
Put Analysis into Action
Once you have your consumer data, you can use it to personalize offers to a specific audience and aggregate the data to understand trends.
The analysis process means little to nothing if what has been gathered is not implemented into making positive changes for your business.
For example, if the sentiment analysis portrays repeated negative feedback surrounding a specific product, action should immediately be taken to improve that product and cater to each dissatisfied consumer. This helps grow your customer loyalty. Furthermore, if your bounce rate analysis shows site visitors leaving after seeing the landing page, immediate focus should be placed on upgrading your landing page to cater to what consumers are looking for.
Another notable reaction to consumer feedback is by offering a new brand campaign that caters to specific consumer behavior. This can be done by:
Identifying strategy and goals for the campaign to cater to your consumer base
Identifying the specific target of your campaign: to either emphasize positive feedback or challenge negative feedback
Develop the campaign through experimenting and engaging with your audience
Monitor and change. Make changes based on the feedback you receive.
Consumer feedback can play a vital role in your marketing strategy by portraying business transparency and differentiating your brand’s standing. By listening to consumers' feedback, analyzing it, and reacting in a timely manner– you can achieve brand authenticity and drive consumer loyalty.
