Customer feedback is a crucial insight for any business. Discover seven methods for how to improve your feedback response rates with Feefo.
With the average survey response rate UK at 33%, it can be difficult to collect the insights you need when consumers are reluctant to offer them.
As the world's largest verified reviews platform, Feefo knows the benefit of receiving customer feedback as soon as possible. From understanding customer satisfaction to implementing learnings to better your business, feedback from your clients is invaluable.
From grabbing the attention of your customers to sending emails at the right time, here are a few changes you can make to help improve your feedback response rates.
What are the benefits of having a high response rate?
Online feedback is one of the easiest ways for businesses to quickly understand how their customers are feeling.
Here are some of the main benefits of having a high response rate:
- More feedback —Companies can easily collect a large amount of feedback from a wide portion of their customer base
- More valuable insights — When businesses ask the right questions, they can identify crucial insights that they can leverage to retain existing customers or attract new ones
- More content to utilise as a conversion tool — Customer feedback encompasses a range of methods, like surveys, reviews, and social comments. This gives businesses more content to use as a conversion tool. For example, positive reviews can be displayed on product pages, they will also benefit SEO, and can count towards a website’s Google Stars
How to Improve Your Response Rate
1. Send your emails to the right people
No matter what product or service you’re selling, not all your consumers’ journeys will be the same, so there’s no reason why their emails should be.
Creating multiple campaigns to target these different customers won’t just provide the best customer journey, it will also give you better business insights.
You can segment your data and create an unlimited number of bespoke campaigns. This means you can target specific customers with tailored requests and even adapt questions to specific customer journeys.
2. Send feedback requests at the right time
Optimise the time that your emails are sent to improve your click-to-open rate and, therefore, response rate.
If you're building a calendar, the highest open and conversion rate tends to be in the middle of the week: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. According to Hubspot, emails sent at 1 pm have the highest click-to-open rates (22%), followed by 10 am (21%). There is a third spike in the evening, around 6 pm when people get home.
Businesses that operate in multiple territories will also need to take into account various time zones and build out separate emails that target the optimal feedback request time of their customers.
3. Customer journey
Consider at which point in the customer journey you want to reach out to your customers. For example, do you want them to provide feedback on the ordering process, delivery, or the actual product or service itself?
You’ll need the email to arrive at exactly the right time so that the experience is fresh in their minds, which should improve the chances of getting a reply.
4. Craft effective subject lines
A well-crafted subject line is one of the most important elements of promoting your customer feedback survey by email. A low open rate directly impacts the response rate, so focusing your efforts on crafting enticing subject lines is well worth your time.
Feedback requests are an extension of your customer’s interaction with your brand, and they should reflect the tone with which you speak to your customers across other marketing communications.
Research from Mailchimp suggests that attention-grabbing subject lines should be:
- Engaging — “How did we do?” and “What did you think?” are both effective ways of utilising open questions that instantly engage with the reader.
- Personalised — Whether this is with a name or location, personalisation is shown to increase open rates in many cases.
- Simple — Remember that lots of your customers will be checking their emails on their phones, so the shorter the subject line the better. Keep it clear, concise, and relevant.
5. Personalisation
While you can program email subject lines to speak directly to each of your customers, you can also personalise review requests. Personalised feedback requests tend to perform better than generic requests sent.
To make review requests as relevant to each customer as possible, base them on recent interactions that they’ve had with your brand. Tailor your request questions to the product or service that they’ve just experienced.
6. Feedback reminders
Always follow up on your feedback request with a quick reminder — they provide another chance to contact customers who may have forgotten to respond to the initial request.
It’s key that your reminders aren’t sent too soon after your initial feedback request, as this may seem overwhelming for your customers. As a general rule, we would advise leaving a delay period of five to seven days as a gentle reminder to encourage them to leave their feedback.
7. Monitor performance
Make sure you’re monitoring performance effectively by measuring the right metrics.
The key metrics to look at are:
- Open rates — The number of emails opened compared to the total number of emails sent.
- Form conversion — The number of users who successfully completed a request form.
- Click-through rate — The proportion of users who click on a link out of the total amount of emails sent.
- Click-to-open rates — The total number of clicks from a link within the email out of the total number of emails opened.
This enables you to review customer feedback performance over a given timeframe and hone in on specific aspects of your request. Open rates give a good indication of how well your subject line has performed, while form conversion and click-to-open rates tell you how user-friendly and engaging your request content is.
You can track any changes made to your feedback request through performance metrics; they help you to identify what worked particularly well or failed to generate an uplift in responses.
One thing to remember is that if you amend too much at once, it’ll become more difficult to monitor which change had the most impact.
Start collecting customer feedback with Feefo
There's never a bad time to review your approach to getting more insightful customer feedback. Get in touch with a member of our friendly team today to find out how Feefo can help.
