How feedback enhances your marketing and SEO

Carefully considered feedback options can enhance your marketing campaigns, pleasing your customers and boosting your profits.

This article explores:

•    How to use reviews for marketing
•    When to act to gain good reviews
•    How to use reviews to enhance SEO
•    Google’s new Penguin Update
•    How to use a bad review to your advantage
•    Comment from Paul Alexander of Beyond Analysis

As the focus of 2013 is on customer service and expectations feedback is viewed as an essential tool for improving reputations and selling more online. Every consumer is now a critic while comparison sites rise in popularity giving eTailers nowhere to hide.

There are ways to deal with feedback along with tools to please the consumer that help to ensure you always have a positive relationship with customers.

However, a fact often overlooked is that while you’re asking a consumer for their valued opinion, you can also be gaining information on buyer behaviour, consumer analysis and details to boost any marketing campaign.

Paul Alexander, the CEO and co-founder of Beyond Analysis explains why all feedback is beneficial, “”It’s not just a collection of numbers or patterns, but a company’s potential to put its customers at the heart of its decision making to generate future revenue and ultimately drive customer loyalty.

“All companies should ensure they are using their customer data to enhance business services, be it data from emails, social media or forums. Many businesses grappling with the firestorm that is social media, sometimes forget that all this customer interaction – however positive or negative – generates vast amounts of behavioural data.

“Not only is the data straight from the horse’s mouth, it represents a section of the wider population – feeding in to broader customer segmentation analysis, and can be tracked and measured for a clear and definitive understanding of ROI, especially in relation to campaigns and offers companies may be offering.

“For businesses, it’s not therefore about simply keeping tabs on their social media channels. The key is to capture data from these sources, interrogate the facts and act on that information. Despite the clear benefits of behavioural data, many well-known brands simply don’t know what to do with their customer behaviour data. Some don’t even collect it.

“Yet collecting, interpreting and acting on behavioural data can be a real differentiator in terms of loyalty. It can provide the best possible competitive advantage; a direct link to customers and a chance for businesses to make sure that they put their needs at the heart of their decisions.

“By doing this, organisations can start to make customer engagement a two-way street. For example, behavioural and customer communications data can be used to test ideas on the back of customer feedback and insight.”

“A good first step for businesses is to ensure they have a range of different customer feedback mechanisms feeding into testing strategies where real-time feedback and behaviour can be tracked and measured. This includes customer surveys, social media, live chat, web forums and blogs, as well as customer service centres.

“Businesses that learn to adapt themselves based on delivery of fast insight will be the most successful. Listening to customers is invaluable if you want to make your business a success. Through access to customer data, businesses can have a greater opportunity to engage with consumers and actively respond to their needs.”

Here are some other ways to make feedback work for you in more ways than one.

Reviews for marketing

When you receive reviews you can also receive information you can then use in email marketing campaigns or advertising. A study carried out by CBF3 showed that

•    Over 80% of reviewers leave their name
•    Over 70% leave their email address
•    Nearly half out of a thousand wanted to be contacted later
•    67% wanted to be recognised for their feedback while only 4% anted to submit feedback anonymously

This shows that if your timing is right, you can gain essential information that you can use elsewhere.

Marks and Spencer understand this and they seem to have the balance right, they’ll send a request for feedback a few days after the product has been received. This ensures that:

A)    The product is still in the customers mind
B)    They have a chance to rate the product
C)    They are still impressed by delivery
D)    They haven’t had a chance to rate it elsewhere

It’s a small window of opportunity but it can be advantageous to your campaigns while showing that you care.

Feedback for SEO

It can be overlooked by smaller etailers but feedback and reviews are brilliant for increasing SEO efforts.

Recently, ecommerce sites got in a spin about Google’s latest Penguin update. The update insists that for content to be favoured by Google it must be original, engaging, entertaining and informative. No longer will buying ten keyword stuffed articles from a college kid suffice, for your website to climb the search engines it must have quality content across the board.

Feedback and reviews are great for this, the content is always original as your customers are. It can not only fill your site with Google pleasing copy, it can also ensure that when a consumer searches for your product + review, your website is shown first.

To make this work effectively for SEO keep an eye on the reviews and make sure you update your Meta tags and descriptions to reflect any natural forming keywords. Reviews are also good for long tailed searches and keywords too.

Avoid over-promotion

Of course, when you receive a good review you are keen to share it everywhere. Be careful as with the Penguin update this could be seen as duplicate content. Consider using an image instead such as a star rating to encourage click through, or post just a little of the review to entice.

Platforms

Flash is almost dead especially in the world of eCommerce. It’s slow to load, almost impossible to rank and not supported by Apple.

To ensure your reviews have an impact on your SEO use text or HTML formats for displaying them even if the rest of your website is flash or JavaScript.

Add more…

You can’t have too many pages for reviews, the more you fill, the higher the chance of being found. Don’t limit your reviews to one single website page, spread them across, add more and make them a substantial part of your whole website.

Bad reviews

Even bad reviews can help your marketing especially if you show you’ve acted on the feedback. Consumers are more likely to trust a seller that has one or two bad reviews in a few hundred than a seller that has a 100% feedback rating. It makes it more real and gives them points to consider.

Bad reviews can even help with conversions as those looking for the negative side to your products or services are definitely in the frame of mind to buy, otherwise they wouldn’t be researching so heavily. Of course too many and you’ll find sales drop but one or two can give your brand the human touch while increasing customer loyalty with those you respond to.

In summary, feedback isn’t just a tool for the customer to share an opinion and the retailer to improve products or services, it’s also ideal for any aspect of marketing online, as long as it’s handled in the right way.

How to incentivise the customer to leave feedback

You know the benefits of feedback you’re confident it will be positive from your customers but you can’t make them write. You can however offer incentives such as entry into a prize draw, discount vouchers, money off the next purchase or simple recognition.

Timing is critical, as people are more prone to making an effort to leave bad feedback than good, so to ensure you receive good reviews you must make it easy, simple and rewarding for the consumer.