How to Use Customer Feedback in Marketing Automation

This post was contributed by Mikolaj Podgórski at Survicate.

How can you use customer feedback in marketing automation?With ActiveCampaign, you can use customer feedback to trigger marketing automation workflows. This lets you automate the process of both getting feedback and following up on it.You can send an automated survey to your customers when they buy from you. Ask them if they’re happy with the purchase. (If you’ve ever bought something from Amazon, you might have received a similar email yourself.) If your customer says that they’re happy with their purchase, use the automation to ask them to leave you a positive review on social media or customer review sites like G2, Yelp, or Trustpilot.The more positive reviews you have, the better your chances of winning over new prospects are. Prospects will compare you against your competition and read what other customers have to say about your company.If the customer says that they’re unhappy, you can use an ActiveCampaign automation to send an automated notification to your team. This lets you proactively resolve the customer’s issue before it escalates on social media. If you manage to turn a bad customer experience into a good one, the client will be more likely to buy from you again. They might also be prompted to tell others about how well your team dealt with their issue.By proactively requesting customer feedback and acting on it, you can improve the customer experience throughout the entire customer journey. When you automate these processes, you can grow your revenue more quickly and keep costs lower. And you’ll be able to scale up your business by focusing on what matters most: Your customers.In this post, you’ll learn:

• How to use customer feedback to improve the customer experience
• How to collect customer feedback and use it in your marketing automation
• How to set up NPS surveys with ActiveCampaign and Survicate
  • How to respond to unhappy customers (detractors)
  • How to use happy customers to drive new business
• How to segment your audience based on customer feedback
• How to use feedback to offer your leads and customers valuable content
  • How to use content surveys to create meaningful customer relationships
• How to measure and act on Customer Effort Score (CES) with Survicate and ActiveCampaign
• The benefits of running surveys to improve the customer experience

When you collect feedback at different stages of the customer journey, you can improve the entire customer experience. You should always keep customer feedback front-of-mind, whether you’re a solopreneur, run an ecommerce business, or sell donuts.You probably know by now how difficult it is to get a new customer. Luckily, it’s a lot less expensive to keep a current customer than to acquire a new one. Collecting customer feedback can help you win over new customers and retain existing ones. Let’s have a look at how to genuinely listen to customer feedback — and how to use it.

What stops businesses from collecting customer feedback?

When it comes to customer feedback, businesses often face similar issues. Even if they gather feedback, they don’t act on it or know how to truly benefit from it. Companies often lack the right tools to automate the process and make feedback collection easier.There’s also a common misconception that you should only deal with negative feedback. In fact, you should leave no piece of feedback unanswered, be it positive or negative. Each team within your company can get great value out of what your customers have to say. When you follow up and act on customer feedback, you can drive business growth.

If you want to give a voice to your customers, but don’t know which metrics to use, what questions to ask, or where to ask them, look no further. You only need two tools:

1. An NPS and survey platform like Survicate. Survicate lets you run surveys throughout the entire customer journey.
2. A customer experience automation platform like ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign lets you automate feedback collection and use it to trigger various marketing automations.

Survicate and ActiveCampaign have a native integration that lets you seamlessly push data from one platform to another.The native app integration between Survicate and ActiveCampaign lets you:

• Log in to your Survicate account and connect the integration directly inside ActiveCampaign
• Access a list of Survicate surveys from ActiveCampaign
• Send survey responses to ActiveCampaign as contact fields without leaving AC
• Create new contacts or update existing ones based on survey responses right inside AC

You can map Survicate survey responses to ActiveCampaign fields — right inside ActiveCampaign

The connection between Survicate and ActiveCampaign is now more seamless, allowing you to run feedback-based marketing campaigns even more effectively. Feel free to read this article for detailed information on how to set up and use the Survicate and ActiveCampaign native app.

What are the benefits of running feedback-based marketing campaigns?

If you listen to your customers and act on their feedback, you can improve your retention, acquisition rates, and growth.Next, we’ll cover the 3 most common use cases of using customer feedback in your marketing automation with Survicate and ActiveCampaign:

1. NPS surveys
2. Audience segmentation
3. CES surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help predict repeat sales, referrals, revenue, and growth. NPS surveys let you measure brand loyalty and how likely people are to buy from you again.NPS surveys ask: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a colleague or friend?” (0 means not likely at all; 10 is very likely.)There’s also a follow-up question: “What’s the main reason for your score?” This lets customers tell you what makes them particularly happy and unhappy. You can find an NPS survey template here. Respondents fall into 3 categories:

• Detractors give scores of 0-6
• Passives give scores of 7-8
• Promoters give scores of 9-10

NPS survey respondents fall into 3 categories based on the score they give. (Image source: Usability Hour)

Here’s how to send an NPS survey to your customer base with Survicate and ActiveCampaign:

1. Log in to your Survicate account
2. Click on “Add new survey”
3. Select “Start from scratch”
4. Choose “Email or shareable link” as your channel of distribution
5. Pick “ActiveCampaign” from the list of tools
6. Add an NPS question to the survey and customize it however you want
7. Head over to “Share” and copy the embed code of your survey
8. Embed your survey directly into an email. Your customers will be able to respond within the email, which can lead to higher response rates
9. In ActiveCampaign, go to “Campaigns” and click “Manage templates” on the left. Create a new template for your NPS survey email or edit an existing one by pasting the HTML code into the template.
10. Send your NPS campaign to your customer list in ActiveCampaign!

How to respond to unhappy customers (detractors)

Sending out the NPS survey is just the beginning. After you send out the NPS survey, you should engage with both detractors and promoters. They can help you achieve different business objectives.Detractors can potentially damage your company’s reputation by leaving negative reviews, or they can simply stop using your services. You should try to do right by them and turn them into promoters. Here’s how.When you create a survey in Survicate, you can decide whether you’d like to send responses to ActiveCampaign. This means that if someone’s a detractor, passive, or promoter, you can have them tagged as such in ActiveCampaign.You can map survey responses into ActiveCampaign contact records as either tags or custom fields, then use those tags or fields to trigger marketing campaigns. You can also trigger internal notifications (through Slack, for example) to tell your teams to take action.

If a customer is unhappy with your business, you need to take action and try to remedy the situation. Depending on the urgency of their comments, you might even want to offer compensation so you don’t lose them as customers. Even in less serious situations, you should always follow up with the customer so that they can point out areas of improvement (and know that you care). You can even invite them to an extended feedback session by sending an automated follow-up email, like in the example below:

How to use happy customers to drive new business

We live in a customer experience economy, and whether or not someone buys from you can depend on what people say about your company online. Marketers are constantly looking for new, effective ways to get more positive customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, or social mentions. Running the NPS survey and identifying your most loyal fans helps you achieve that!First, create the NPS survey with Survicate and send it to your customers via ActiveCampaign. If someone picks a score of 9 or 10, they’re your biggest advocates, ready to recommend your company to others.Send them an automated (but personalized) follow-up email asking for a review, referral, testimonial, or case study participation:

Why is social proof so important?

The ability to obtain positive customer reviews can make or break your business. 90% of customers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions. That’s why it’s so important to build up social proof. (And, as you can see, surveys are a great way to do that.)

Ask your leads or customers about their preferences and pain points to segment your audience. This lets you craft more targeted, personalized email marketing campaigns and offer resources that they’re genuinely interested in. All you have to do is send a survey or two and set up feedback-based automated messaging in ActiveCampaign.

How to use feedback to offer your leads and customers valuable content

If a potential buyer is still in the consideration stage, you can ask them the one biggest issue they want to solve. Depending on the response, send them persona-targeted content with ActiveCampaign. Direct your leads to the resources and assets that will truly help them make a buying decision. Make sure they see added value in what your product offers, what problems it solves, and how it’s better than your competition.

Discover your contacts’ pain points with a Survicate survey, then automatically send them persona-targeted content in ActiveCampaign.

How to use content surveys to create meaningful customer relationships

Research by Clutch reveals that 73% of respondents have made a purchase as a result of viewing marketing content. Your blog can be one of your biggest lead sources — what better place to ask prospects what they’d like to read about next, then incentivize those leads with more personalized content?Put up a non-disruptive website widget survey on your blog articles. Ask people to rate your content or tell you what they’d like to read about next. You can use these responses to create new leads and automatically add them to specific ActiveCampaign lists (and even automations)! If you give your users the content they want, you’ll forge more meaningful relationships with them, and ultimately improve your conversion rates.

Customer Effort Score (CES) is another metric every business should track.

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

CES measures how easy your customers find it to interact with your company.Suppose you just released a brand new online course. It’s different from your previous courses when it comes to design and navigation. You could send the CES survey to your customers and get them to rate the following statement:“I found the course easy to complete and navigate around”. The available responses would be:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Somewhat disagree
• Neutral
• Somewhat agree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

You can also ask customers to rate CES on a numerical scale, just like the NPS survey, with 0 being difficult and 7 being very easy. So, the higher your score, the better.

Why Customer Effort Score (CES) matters

CES lets you measure ease of use of your products and services. If someone says it’s difficult to get things done with your business, you should flag it and reach out to the customer right away. If their issues are not resolved, you run the risk of losing them for good.The CES survey asks customers how much effort they had to make to resolve their request, challenge, or any other task. This will have a direct impact on whether you’ll manage to turn customers into repeat customers.

Automatically follow up on CES survey responses with ActiveCampaign and Survicate.

The CES survey can help you identify struggle areas and remove obstacles. It also has the potential to predict repurchasing. If customers are happy with your resources and any support interactions they’ve had, they’ll likely buy from you again. Here’s a CES survey template to help you get things up and running.

As we enter 2020, there’s increased competition in every market as businesses offer very similar products and services. The better your customer experience is, the more customers you’ll acquire — and the higher your retention rates will be.This post shares just a few examples of how you can act on customer feedback to make sure your customers are happy throughout the entire customer journey. Figure out which interaction points are most crucial to your business, then ask customers for feedback at those interaction points —and take the right follow-up actions.Suppose you’re an ecommerce business losing money because people abandon their carts too often. Try running an exit-intent survey to find out what’s preventing shoppers from placing an order — then remove those obstacles from the purchase flow.All teams in your company can benefit from running surveys. Customer Success can boost customer retention by learning why your clients churn and their most common pain points. They can also monitor and improve customer satisfaction with NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.

If you turn customer feedback into action, you’ll see your retention and acquisition rates grow. And so will your business!Integrate Survicate and ActiveCampaign to stay on top of your customers’ expectations and win new business. To help you get started, check out these Survicate survey templates and the Survicate and ActiveCampaign integration guide.Mikolaj is the Product Education Manager at Survicate, an NPS and survey platform for businesses. Mikolaj loves running webinars and doing videos. When not at work, he enjoys listening to regional accents of Britain and likes all things English.