The Benefits of Ongoing Feedback
In the movie What Women Want, the main character, played by Mel Gibson, learns the distinct benefit of having real-time feedback by reading the minds of the women he’s interacting with. While this represents an extreme form of feedback, it’s clear that the more you know about what the person on the other end of the relationship is thinking, the greater the likelihood that you are going to be able to deliver what he or she is looking for.
While it’s unlikely you have the ability to read the minds of your customers, the next best thing is asking for and receiving feedback from them. In the next sections, I highlight the benefits you and your business can receive by asking for the gift of feedback from your readers.
FEEDBACK GIVES YOU A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Gathering feedback from your customers during the various stages of relationship development provides you with greater awareness of their needs and puts you in the best position to deliver the right solution at the right time. Gathering regular feedback is a best practice for any email marketing strategy; however, its importance is amplified in situations of uncertainty and change.
Feedback is your ability to keep your finger on the pulse of your customer relationships. If you are collecting it regularly, you will be able to get an early sense for changing trends and then will be able to monitor their development. This insight enables you to reposition, repackage, and redirect your business so that you are more closely aligned with the changing needs of your customers well ahead of the competition.
Feedback at the point of connection is a great way to gain insight into how your best new customers are finding out about your business. Did they come through a referral from an existing customer or find you through a search query on their favorite search engine? This type of feedback can help you channel your efforts to beat your competition to the next new customer.
FEEDBACK HELPS YOU MAKE GOOD DECISIONS
When you know where your best new customers are coming from, you can use that information to tailor your email marketing program so that you are adding new customers at the lowest possible cost of acquisition. This provides you with additional monies to be spent serving your customers, acquiring new customers, or investing back into your business. This information is extremely valuable when you need to make informed decisions on where to either cut back while minimizing the impact on your business or alternatively where to spend more to gain market share.
Businesses and organizations often host events as a way to draw existing customers back to the business and to introduce new potential customers to the value you bring in an interactive environment. In advance of spending the money to put on an event, one of the best ways to maximize the potential outcome is to get some feedback on what type of event would be of greatest interest to the individuals you are trying to attract. For example, a wine store could survey its customers to determine whether they are more interested in a wine tasting of French Bordeaux wines or Californian Cabernet. In addition, it could ask its audience if they would be more likely to attend an event if it were held on Thursday evening or Sunday afternoon. By collecting this feedback, the wine store can avoid the event of least interest in favor of the one that their customers are most interested in and avoid a costly mistake.
IT HELPS YOU DELIVER HIGHLY RELEVANT CONTENT
I believe that every email marketing communication should include at least one feedback mechanism through which your readers can respond to you. It’s also a great way to get content ideas for your next communications. By encouraging your audience to tell you what they would like you to educate them about, you are sure to deliver something of value to them. You can also create a more structured request for information that highlights five potential topics that you could cover and asks your readers to rate them in order of their interest. You can respond to your readers with the content of greatest interest first and let them know that they asked for it and you delivered. That’s a great way to build trust in a relationship!
Another great thing to do with feedback that engages your audience in the content is to credit them for their suggestions. Add a section to your email that challenges your readers to try and stump you, then select an award winner each month with the best question. This not only provides you with great content ideas, it also encourages your readers to open your email to see if they won.
In addition to writing more interesting content, you can also use feedback to segment your list into interest groups. For example, a sports store owner with one general list of contacts could use an online survey to ask its customers about their sports interests. It can then use this information to send special offers regarding Callaway golf equipment to the audience that provided feedback that they were golfers. The more closely tied a communication is to the interests of the reader, the more likely he or she is to open it, read it, and forward it on to others.
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