Customer Feedback: How it Helps You Increase Your Sales for Your Ecommerce Store

If you own an e-commerce website, you are probably aware of how customer feedback is important. It could give you crucial insight into every aspect of your company, helping you earn more money, and cut costs.

It a nutshell, customer feedback is a story of how a product or service helped customers meet certain requirements. Mind you, this is one of the most reliable sources of knowledge about the quality of your products and service.

Collecting Customer Feedback

Sure, customer feedback can help boost your sale. But the question is, how can you generate them?

Social Media

Social media is a great place to engage your customers. In fact, it is tailored for engaging with your audience and prospective customers. Its also made for one's opinion to be known to the rest of the world. 

Hence, the best place to start collecting customer feedback would be through social media. 

Survey

Surveys are known to be the bread and butter for getting customer feedback. What's great about it is that you could easily set it up and sent it out. You could also easily analyze the data, too. 

Customer Service Team

Another place where you can get vital customer information and feedback is from your customer service team.

So, get in touch with them to take note of the recurring issues that customers are telling them. From there, you can come up with a one-time solution to solve this problem to boost your sales. 

Website Reviews

Understand the context behind every review a customer leaves relating to your product or your brand. Mind you, a single customer review online should be enough to prompt you to look for an underlying issue. 

If customers are complaining about a particular product or function of your site, try to dig deep into it. That way, you will know how you can best serve them.

Live Chat

Live chat is much like customer support, although it is a faster and more convenient wat to try and help solve your customers' problems in real-time.

You can address a lot of issues here regarding the availability of your products, payment, shipping, and so on. It also helps you get closer to your customers.

Just keep in mind that the quality of your response still plays an important role in getting positive feedback from your customers. 

Other Independent Channels

Apart from gathering customer feedback through social media and from your customer support team, you can also collect valuable information through other independent channels. This can be review sites, blogs and vlogs, an online community of your target customers, and online forums. 

Using Customer Feedback to Improve Sales

Now that you know where and how to collect customer feedback, it is time to learn how you can use it to improve your e-commerce sales 

1. Convince your customers to come back

When your customer turnover is high, you lose money. A loyal customer, on the other hand, will return to your site with very little effort on your end.

However, attracting new customers involves spending an inordinate amount of time in your marketing and advertising efforts. 

Even if you can convince someone new to purchase from you, your earnings will be limited if that customer only buys from you once. 

So, how do you convince a previous customer to come back?

Most customers return because of an exceptional product or customer service. Moreover, creating a more positive customer experience can make a good product look great. So, to be successful, you must focus your efforts on improving customer satisfaction. 

2. Showcase your professionalism

If you take the time to respond to customer feedback (whether positive or negative) over time, this helps build a strong relationship between you and your customers. They would feel that they're an important aspect of your business.

Over time, this leads to stronger customer loyalty to your brand, and can even lead to positive word-of-mouth recommendations. 

For positive comments, take a couple of minutes to share some love and send a quick thank you to your customers. This simple act can already do wonders for your brand. 

Replying to negative comments can be a little trickier, though. Instead of taking things in a negative light, consider this as a truly valuable feedback. If the customer has a point, tell them that you're sorry and you’ll do your best to find a solution. 

3. Include it in your marketing material

Are you planning to go to a networking event or a tradeshow? Are you planning to give out marketing material for that event? Or are you planning a marketing campaign on social media? 

The next time that you come up with your own marketing materials, you can place a section that highlights the best feedback that your business has received. You can even add these testimonials at the back of your business card.

This gives a more personalized touch while educating your customer about your business without being sales-y.

4. Reward valuable and loyal customers

Creating loyalty programs make sharing customer feedback more important to your customers. They're tailored to provide your customers with something engaging. 

Once you offer them rewards for completing a particular action, like buying from you or following your business account on social media, you're showing your customers how you care about them. It also emphasizes how you value their engagement with your brand, and that you value their efforts. 

This encourages them to repeat the behavior in the future, transforming them into loyal, valuable customers in the long run. 

5. Create a business development roadmap

Another thing that you need to increase your e-commerce sales is to build a business development roadmap.

While sometimes, you can't act on every single feedback that comes in, it’s important that you address in one way or another.

For instance, you’re seeing a recurring issue based on customer feedback. Instead of addressing them one-by-one, you can instead publish an official statement. By giving them a response, even if the customer is requesting something you'll unlikely do, is always better rather than not responding at all. 

Just remember to be clear on your goals and what you want to achieve from the very beginning, and over time, you'll gradually build on that trust. 

Customer feedback is important to boost your sales and improve your brand as a whole. So, to keep your customers from coming back, you need to invest in the right practices to show your customers that you are listening and that you value them.