How to solicit better customer feedback

What’s the best way to learn about the customer experience? Ask your customers.

A strategic approach to soliciting and using customer feedback supplies you with valuable insights into how your marketing is working to improve the customer experience. However, a haphazard approach can reflect badly on your brand. Try these tips to give your organization the edge it needs to solicit better customer feedback.

Ask directly

Do you expect customers and prospects to intuit what you need from them, or do you give them strong calls-to-action that encourage them to share feedback? Feedback won’t lead directly to a sale, but you need to apply the same principles to engage customers in sharing feedback as you would at any stage of the buying cycle.

Don’t hide requests for customer feedback or assume that your customers will volunteer their opinions. Ask clearly and directly.

Focus your questions

Center your quest for feedback on one or two questions at any given time. Just as prospects will be reluctant to fill out an overlong request for personal information, customers will be less likely to complete a lengthy survey. Make it a quick and easy process for your customers to share their opinions. Similarly, don’t present your customer with vague questions such as “How are we doing?” Get specific. You might ask “Is there anything you want to find on our website but don’t see?”

Limiting the questions you ask at any given time need not mean limiting the information you gather. Monthly, sit down with the marketing team and discuss the burning questions that have come up over the past few weeks. Whittle it down to one or two to ask customers about this month, and pick new questions the following month.  

Incentivize your customers

Customer feedback provides actionable, valuable insights to your organization, so offer your customers something they want in return. Consider offering customers a discount on their next month of your service in exchange for feedback, or provide them the chance to try out a new, highly-demanded feature for a limited time if they fill out a survey.

Take a real-time approach

Your customers have their most valuable insights for you when they’re on your site, reading your marketing material or talking with your sales team, so take the opportunity to ask them for their feedback in real time. If you wait weeks or months to ask them about their experiences, you may have missed your chance to learn the things you need to know most. Add a feedback plugin to your site that is triggered when a user takes a specific action, like scrolling to a particular place on your pricing page or spending more than five minutes on your site. These can be great opportunities to ask specific, targeted questions that pertain to what the customer is currently doing.   

Once you’ve gathered all this information, use it to assess and improve your marketing tactics. Especially in remarketing to existing customers, feedback is invaluable insight into how your audience responds to your strategy. By refining your tactics in response to customer feedback, you can continually improve and delight customers.

If customers feel that their feedback is taken seriously and see your brand responding to their needs, they’re more likely to stay loyal. Did you know that research from the Harvard Business Review found a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits from 25 to 100%? Learn more:

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Three ways to encourage your targets to share their information

Downloadable content assets like white papers and e-books can and should be used to build brand identity, generate demand and contribute to thought leadership. They can be excellent lead generators, but only when used strategically.

To keep your content working for your business, make sure you follow these best practices to encourage potential customers to share their information in return for your downloadable content.

Create content that’s actually valuable

Marketers recognize the value of customer contact information to their own efforts, but need to remember that individuals value their own personal data even more highly. If you’re trying to get people to turn over their email addresses and phone numbers in exchange for generic or low-value content, give up: you need to offer your audience a fair trade.

Only ask for contact information in exchange for content that gives your targets something they can’t just find for free elsewhere online. Whether you’re offering original data, like the results of a survey or study you’ve commissioned, a well-researched white paper, or an in-depth case study, gated content must go above and beyond the scope of an average free blog post. Think of it this way: would you consider asking someone to pay real money for the content you are offering? If so, it may be a good candidate for a content gate.

Make a fair value exchange

Especially at the top of the funnel, a lengthy form soliciting reams of personal information will turn away more leads than it captures. Ease your targets into sharing by asking only for the most basic information (like name and email) in exchange for top-of-the-funnel content.

Then, as leads continue to move through the funnel, you can begin requesting more detailed information in exchange for more substantial content. Think of this like pricing a commodity: your leads’ information is valuable to them, so you need to offer them something of equal value to compel them to give up more of their information. While a short 3-page white paper may be enough to capture a name and email address early on in a buyer’s journey, a larger piece of content like an 30-page e-book is justification to ask a lead for more detailed information like their position titles, phone numbers and places of employment.

Let your audience know what they are receiving

Whenever you offer a download in exchange for personal information, give people a meaningful preview into the content. Nobody likes to give up their information only to find that the content they receive has little value, just as no one likes to pay for a product and then find out it does not perform as advertised.

Show your leads why your content is worth it. For an e-book, provide the table of contents before soliciting personal information, and perhaps even an excerpt of the first chapter. If you are sharing the report from a recent survey, consider sharing an infographic with a few key findings to intrigue readers and prove the relevance of your piece.

A strong downloadable content program can keep your content generating leads long after it is first produced. When deciding what you should require people to provide in order to access that content, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask what it’s worth.
To learn how Movéo helped grow one client’s lead generation program, take a look at our case study:   

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How to get to know your customers via email marketing

Despite predictions a few years ago that it was dying off, email marketing is still alive and well in most industries. But are you exploring all the data you collect from your email campaigns?

Email analytics are full of valuable customer insights. Marketers can use these insights to improve the customer experience within email campaigns, personalize content and build stronger relationships and customer loyalty. Here’s how:

Get specific

Any email marketing tool will give you some level of data on your contacts, but only some give you the ability to drill down to the level of individual, contact-specific insights. Aggregate data like open rates and click rates can be valuable, but if you want to dive into information about how individual contacts are interacting with your content in order to improve your sales process, consider a tool like Hubspot, Act-On, Pardot or Marketo to obtain contact-by-contact insights.

This contact-level data becomes especially valuable when your marketing automation system is connected with your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Information about how each of your contacts interacts with your emails, website and other content can be flowed into the contact profiles in your CRM, giving your sales team deep insights into the interests and needs of each of their leads. Imagine how much better your sales rep’s next call could be if they knew, for example, that a specific lead was deeply interested in one feature of your product, but not another. With a CRM-connected marketing automation system, this kind of information gets captured and integrated into contact profiles automatically. You can even use data from your email campaigns as part of a lead scoring strategy to determine which of your leads are most likely to buy, and therefore most worthy of time and effort from your sales team.

A/B tests

Your team can use A/B testing to improve almost every facet of your marketing emails. It’s simple — pull out a small percentage of your contacts, split them into two lists, and send two versions of your email, with just one variable that is different between the two. It can be in the subject line, the formatting, the highlighted content, or any number of other variables. Track which email performs better with your test list, and then deploy that email to the full list and adjust your overall strategy accordingly.

Try testing from email to email as well. For example, you might try shifting the time or day of the week that your marketing emails are delivered, and see what impact this has on open rates and click-throughs. Avoid changing too many factors at once so that you can accurately determine which variable impacted your metrics.

Build relationships through content

Content-rich emails can be a tool for maintaining existing customer relationships and learning more about your customers. The key is to produce content that is relevant to existing customers and addresses their needs. For example, a B2B software provider could send customers a “tip of the week” about how to use a feature within the software to improve their operations. A business providing healthcare technology to practitioners could send out medical news updates relevant to their customers’ practice areas. Then, these companies could study the aggregate and contact-level data from these customer emails to determine what their customer base is most interested in and what they want more of. It’s essential to remember that quality is more important than quantity: only send out emails with information that adds value to your brand and your customers’ work, and resist the urge to send emails too frequently.

Email marketing insights can help you reach leads in every stage of the buyer lifecycle and nurture current customers to become evangelists. Pass your insights along to the sales team to ensure continued alignment.

To maximize your email marketing strategy, make sure your content is working overtime. Does your email marketing following the five new laws of content? Read our white paper to find out:

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Understand these four website analytics, improve your user experience

A deep dive into your website’s analytics will reveal all sorts of information about how your audience interacts with your company. Website data can can teach you what content converts leads and what drives them away, providing necessary insight to help you improve the user experience and grow the bottom line. Focus on these four website analytics, all accessible through Google Analytics, to learn what your visitors need.

Bounce rate and bounce data

Google Analytics defines “bounce rate” as “the percentage of single-page sessions” your website sees. Your bounce rate shows how many visitors to your site only see and interact with one page before leaving.

While a portion of your bounces may come from users who find what they need on the first page they visit, a high bounce rate typically suggests that visitors find your site unappealing, hard to navigate or lacking in necessary information. It’s an indicator that you’re failing to capture your visitors’ attention, integrate them into the marketing funnel and aid in their progress to becoming a lead and a customer.

You should look not only at the bounce rate for your homepage, but also for specific landing pages, blog posts and other, deeper pages to see how and where visitors are having valuable interactions with your content.

Some sites experience high bounce rates because their keywords are not well aligned with the content on each page, which frustrates visitors who arrive via search engines. Other sites have trouble keeping visitors around because they’ve failed to utilize calls-to-action in a way that helps guide site visitors to what they are looking for. Still others are lacking an understanding of their target customers’ wants and needs, and have failed to develop content that truly engages. Any of these problems (and many others) could be to blame for an above-average bounce rate.

Behavior flow

Your site’s behavior flow report maps the journey users take through your site, and it’s a key tool for understanding the user experience. This tool shows the landing pages at which users arrive when they first come to your site and where they go from there. It provides a tool to visualize where users exit your site and what CTAs lead them forward as they progress through your pages.

Looking at the behavior flow, you can answer several questions about your site. Is the site optimized to lead users down the path you want them to take? Are they being warmed for a sale? If visitors are not going through your site on the path you intended, where are they going instead, and how could you redirect them?

Use these insights to improve the user experience by making changes to pages where users leave the site, or stray off the path. Improve the navigability of the site where necessary by developing a site map that outlines how you would like visitors to proceed, and make CTAs clear and easy to follow. Most importantly, make it easy for site visitors to find exactly what they are looking for, exactly when they need it.

Site search

If you have a search bar on your site, you can glean insights into exactly what visitors are looking for. The site search report, which shows the keyword phrases users type in your search bar, is a goldmine of data.

You should use site search to learn not only what people are looking for, but also what content is difficult for them to find. Site search shows you the content that is getting lost on your website, requiring users to resort to the search bar. Insights from this report may encourage you to improve your navigation, creating a clearer path to pages that users typically have to search for. And if visitors are searching for information you don’t currently have on your site, consider creating it in order to better serve your users’ needs.

Time on site and time on pages

One of the simplest ways to gain insight into your website user experience is to measure how long visitors are staying on individual pages as well as the site as a whole. Like bounce data, low average session duration suggests that users aren’t finding your site useful.

Optimize your landing pages to be sure that your target keywords and page content tell a consistent story. This will increase the likelihood that users will find content that addresses their needs and take the time to engage with it. In turn, these engaged sessions will be more likely to convert leads.

Using data to build strong brands is at the heart of everything we do at Movéo. Interested in working with us? Contact us today.

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How data and analytics can help you delight your customers

Data and analytics are rich sources of knowledge about your customers’ likes, dislikes and needs. Marketing shouldn’t just be about reaching new leads, but also about continuing to engage with current customers and keeping them loyal. What sets savvy marketers apart is their ability to understand the insights in data and how to act on those insights to delight current and past customers.

In the new marketing value chain, actionable data insights drive all decisions. Use data and analytics to learn what your potential customers want and craft a great customer experience that doesn’t end once they make a purchase.

Why delight?

For B2B companies, current customers are a valuable source of ongoing business. They need to be nurtured as effectively as new prospects are. This is where the concept of “delighting the customer” becomes most critical. Happy customers recommend your business to their friends, while unhappy customers seek out alternative services. Great customer experience is a key factor in customer delight.

Optimize your offerings

Use data to consistently and incrementally optimize your digital offerings in response to the things your customers engage with most. This isn’t just about boosting your own leads, it’s also about responding to customer feedback. In general, people will spend more time with your content if they find that it speaks to their needs. Delight your customers with an attractive, easy-to-use website and educational content that they actually want.

Use all buyer insights available to you

When working to generate demand across channels, recognize all the sources of data available to your company and utilize them to gain greater insight about your customers and their habits. Examine all of the content your business produces and determine how leads and customers interact with it. Are your webinars attended mainly by current customers or by prospects? Are customers or leads more likely to watch your educational videos through to the end? These insights can be used to delight leads and customers by offering them more tailored content that fits their needs.

Don’t limit yourself to digital insights: if you interact with leads in person, such as at a marketing event, review any information you gathered on who attended and use it to improve your buyer personas. Take a look at all your data holistically to better create marketing materials that will delight your audience.
Learn how Movéo helped one company improve their data and analytics processes:

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Listening to data: what are your customers telling you?

It doesn’t take a face-to-face meeting to learn what your customers and leads are seeking online. They are already telling you through their behavior on your website and their interactions — or lack of interactions — with your content across channels. Once you have a robust understanding of these behaviors, you can predict your customers’ future behaviors and use those insights to cultivate brand loyalty.

Find insights in site analytics

The path visitors take through your site holds a wealth of information into what content your customers find valuable and what they could do without. Start by investigating where your visitors leave the site. Are there pages on your website where people seem to be spending much less time? Do visitors routinely leave the site after viewing a given page? If so, this will tell you that your audience isn’t finding what they are looking for. Take the time to figure out what gaps exist. Also assess what kinds of content encourages website clickthroughs and longer session duration. With these key insights, you can make the most out of every page on your site.

Just as valuable is information about the different paths leads take through your site, especially when they go on to initiate contact with the sales team. Examine patterns in these behavior flows to learn what aspects of your site are successfully pushing leads down the funnel.

Think of every action taken on your site as a comment from your audience. Learn to read the data and you can begin to understand the messages your customers are sharing about their likes and dislikes.

Gather data from multiple sources to understand your audience

Your marketing is cross-channel, so your data analytics needs to be cross-channel as well. Every platform on which you engage with your audience is a valuable source of intelligence on your customers. Use a CRM to track lead engagement, paying careful attention to what marketing materials entice them further down the funnel, and tracking these interactions as precisely as possible. Monitor what engages leads on every channel, whether it is links in your email marketing, a particular video in a video series, or a given slide in a Slideshare presentation. Knowing the specifics about what content catalyzes conversions will allow you to make better decisions.

Again, pay attention to your audience’s implied feedback. When you invite customers to share their personal contact information in order to subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or join a webinar, how many of them complete the form? A high degree of interaction with these aspects of your marketing indicates that your audience trusts you and finds your content valuable. However, if most visitors leave these pages without following your calls-to-action, it’s a sign of the opposite. Experiment with new types of content and topics until you find something that attracts leads.
Download our white paper for more insights into engaging B2B prospects early in the funnel:

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Are you putting the customer experience at the center of your marketing?

Is the customer experience central to each and every one of your marketing efforts? If not, you might as well just throw in the towel now. Sound harsh? It’s not. After all, satisfied leads are the only ones who continue through the sales funnel and become customers, and satisfied customers turn into loyal brand advocates who will help generate more growth for your organization.

So this month, we’re honing in on customer experience. Here’s a sneak peek into what you can expect:

Delighting customers with data

Improving the customer experience should be as data-driven as any other aspect of your marketing. Use data and analytics from past marketing efforts, sales calls and customer surveys to learn what information your potential customers want and when. Then, based on this information, design your marketing content to provide a more organic, enjoyable experience — both throughout the marketing and sales process, and once they’ve become customers. This adds value to your customer relationships, endears your brand to customers and increases your marketing ROI.

This month, you’ll learn how to invite customers to share relevant, actionable data you can use in the development of these efforts. We’ll cover how to interpret website analytics as well as content and email marketing engagement in order to improve the customer experience.

Closing the gaps

Marketers lose leads throughout the buying cycle, but an improved sales experience can cause fewer prospects to be lost. By examining data in new ways, you’ll gain insight into where and when leads fall out of the buying cycle, and from there you’ll be able to make the adjustments needed to keep them moving down the funnel.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore how to identify and mend trouble areas in your customers’ journeys. Through both data gleaned from customer interactions with your content and direct feedback, we’ll discuss how to make sure the buying cycle is as streamlined and efficient as possible.

Learning from success

Your brand can save a great deal of time and money by learning from the successes and failures of other companies. To close out the month, we’ll take a look at some brands that have meaningfully transformed the customer experience through data, and see what others can learn from their examples. We’ll share a Movéo case study to showcase how tailored messages, driven by insights derived from data, can have measurable benefits to your marketing efforts.

Can’t wait for more data-driven marketing advice? Check out our white paper on the New Marketing Value Chain:

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Four ways to optimize your content for search today

Search engine optimization (SEO) is something companies can no longer afford to ignore. How can you be sure that every piece of content you create is working to boost your website’s performance in search? SEO is an ever-changing field, so even if all your content was perfectly optimized just a few months ago, it may be time for an update.

As you take another look at your content through the lens of the search engine, ask yourself these questions:

Do I know what keywords I’m focusing on?

Does your company have a short list of targeted keywords for which you want to move up on the search engine results page? Is your entire team aligned around that list? If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and conduct initial keyword research. This post from MOZ is a great place to start.

If you are already working with a master keyword list, you’re a step ahead of the game. Next question: have you picked 1-2 specific keywords from within that list to focus on for each individual piece of content? A single piece of content cannot possibly deliver on all your keyword goals, and you should never try to write a piece with a focus on more than a very small group of targeted keywords.

Can I actually make an impact on these keywords?

If you’ve done a good job of conducting your initial keyword research, the answer should be yes. Your company should be focused only on keywords that strike a healthy balance between search volume (enough people are actually searching for them) and competition. If competition is in the low to moderate range for a keyword with a reasonably high search volume, you’re directing your efforts in the right place.

Choose “long-tail keywords” that feel natural when incorporated into your content, and add them into your URLs and image alt tags as well as the visible body of your content. Effective keyword usage is about incorporating keywords naturally, not stuffing them into spots where they don’t fit or make sense.

Am I using text and images in a way that is helping my cause?

Search engines like to see significant text content on a site page. In fact, data tells us that top ranking blog posts run an average of ~2,500 words. Rankings also take into account whether images are used appropriately and incorporate the effective use of alt tags. Add value for both your readers and search engines by incorporating both in-depth text and visuals in your content.

Am I optimizing for mobile?

After recent changes to Google’s ranking algorithm, mobile-friendly digital content is more important than ever. To keep your content ranking, do as much as you can to adopt mobile-responsive design and best practices for small screens. For example, keep links separated so that someone using a touchscreen can easily select the one they want to open, and use larger text with adequate spacing that improves readability on a phone or tablet.

Want more of our thoughts on best practices for B2B and healthcare marketing? Check out our white paper on what makes strong brands:

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Is your content really getting found?

Top-notch content can only build your brand if people can find and appreciate it. Even content that initially engages your audience quickly loses value if you do not continue to promote it.

The good news: you can make your content work harder for your business. By creating evergreen content and tailoring it for use across channels and audiences, your business can make a more meaningful impact.

What is evergreen content?

“Evergreen content” is content that retains its value over time. It’s not tied to a specific event, time-sensitive technology or date, and so can be repurposed again and again through different channels or with new packaging. While a holiday-themed lead gen campaign may be great to use in December, it won’t be nearly as effective in April — so focus on creating lasting content that stands the test of time.

While repurposing evergreen content across channels is a great way to extend your reach, you can also remix this content on the channels on which it was originally published. For example, try creating a “highlights” blog post introducing and linking back to some of your most popular or most useful posts from the past year.

Stretch content to serve several audiences

Optimizing content to work on a variety of channels can help you reach a diverse audience and engage several different targets at the same time. But how do you do it?

Think of a recently-published white paper housed on your website: it undoubtedly contains valuable content and gets at the heart of a topic your target customers have been dying to learn more about (right?!). So why is it buried on a deep, infrequently visited page of your site? The white paper should be released as a series of blog posts and shared in bite-sized pieces on social media. You can invite other thought leaders at your company to write posts elaborating on specific sections of the white paper, and linking back to it to drive downloads. At the same time, the content of the white paper can be used to create infographics or other visuals that are highly shareable.

Assets that were never intended for use in a digital environment can even be repurposed and utilized as part of your content marketing effort. Turn a deck you used for a recent speaking engagement into a video or a Slideshare. Turn key quotes from your presentations into social media images, and write tie-in blog posts that touch on the same topics. The possibilities are (almost) endless.

Quantity should never trump quality, but with all the opportunities that exist to create, extend and repurpose content, you can stop approaching each content marketing effort as a multi-month project that requires significant research and resources. If you’re having trouble striking a balance between amateur and professional content, download our white paper:

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Three KPIs for measuring cross-­channel content marketing successes

If you want to maximize the impact of your content, you need to track the right KPIs. With the appropriate metrics and measurement practices in place, you can monitor outcomes across the entire lifecycle of a campaign.

Here are a few metrics you might be missing:

1) MQL to SQL conversion

One of the best ways to understand your sales cycle is to gather data on how and when marketing qualified leads (MQLs) become sales qualified leads (SQLs).

As long as your organization has agreed upon the criteria used to define MQLs and SQLs, you should be able to track the specific moment the conversion occurs. Advanced CRM and marketing automation systems can help.

It’s important to remember that not every channel or piece of content is meant to serve the explicit purpose of capturing contacts or converting leads. Some tactics and content will be used to educate prospects or nurture leads at the top of the funnel, but will rarely serve as the spark that converts a MQL to a SQL. That’s not a problem, as long as top of the funnel content and tactics lead to more in-depth or actionable content that will help make that conversion. Tracking MQL to SQL conversion is meant to help you understand what role different channels and content pieces play in the sales funnel, and whether certain aspects of your campaign are performing up to par.

2)  Cost per acquisition and cost per action

To determine whether your efforts on each channel are worth the investment, track the amount you spend on each acquisition, conversion or desired action. Decide which actions are important to your team on each channel. For content pieces such as webinars or white papers, you might be tracking the number of direct sales contacts or email list sign-ups. For social media channels, you may instead focus on an action earlier in the sales funnel, such as page engagement or website click-throughs. Regardless, note what costs went into each action and whether they had the desired effect. If you’re using an advanced marketing automation and CRM system, you can even set up formulas to track attribution and the total cost of acquisition for each new client or customer, from their first interaction to their last.

Remember to consider all of the variables that can be included in the cost of each acquisition, including the time that your employees spend creating, promoting and optimizing content.

3)   Cross-channel engagement

To get a more comprehensive picture of how people engage with your content across channels, track how, when and where content helps to move leads across platforms and through the sales funnel. For example, gather data on not only how email marketing recipients interact with your email content, but also the pages they investigate on your site once they click through to it. Within your site, watch the behavior flow of visitors across various content pieces and key pages. The clearer picture you can develop of how leads engage with multiple styles of content throughout their buying cycle, the better you will understand their needs and whether your content solves them.

Want more insights on creating and tracking the impact of your content across channels? Download our white paper, The 5 new laws of content:

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