eCommerce brands large and small have come to the realization that investing in a better customer experience (CX) can be the difference between growing and shutting down.
In fact, studies found that 86% of consumers are willing to spend more money on better experiences. And it’s becoming so important that many studies have predicted that CX will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator by this year.
And let’s be honest, you and both have this expectation from brands and products we use all the time too, so this really isn’t much of a surprise.
But to provide great customer experiences, you can’t just assume what customers want.
Have you ever made an assumption in a relationship? And how did you feel about things when that backfired?
Probably not great.
Well, just like you shouldn’t assume in your everyday relationships, you also shouldn’t make assumptions about what your customers want, like, or don’t like about your brand and products.
You need to have conversations with them; you need input and feedback.
And the most effective way to go about collecting that much-needed information without spending hours and hours every week is through an automated Post-Purchase funnel designed to get product feedback.
If you don’t have one already, it can be a bit confusing to know how your funnel is triggered and what it should look like.
Below we’ll go a bit more in-depth about both so that you can move forward in creating a product feedback funnel that gets you the info needed to help improve your customer experience.
But before we do that, it’s good to get an idea of what a well-executed product feedback request email should contain.
What Should Your Product Feedback Email Look Like?
After someone makes a purchase, they should be put into a post-purchase funnel.
The first email that goes out to them in this funnel will be where you ask for their feedback about the product/service that they used.
Here’s an example from other brands and some takeaways you could apply to your own email.
This feedback email from Airbnb is short and sweet, which is something you’ll notice as a recurring theme with these types of emails.
Here’s what else this does well:
- Personalization. This email uses the customer’s name which is always a nice touch.
- Use Your Logo. Your email should make it clear that this email is from your brand, and using a logo conveys that perfectly.
- “Thanks…,” “We really appreciate you…” The tone of gratitude is important here. Airbnb knows this person could have gone elsewhere but they chose them so they thanked them for it.
- “It’ll only take 3 minutes.” People’s time is precious so they let them know that this survey will only take a little bit of time.
- Bold CTA. The bright color with a direct call-to-action button provides a clear and simple next step for the customer.
That is the basic template that most brands use for this sort of email.
As you can see, even Lyft follows a similar template by keeping it short, making it clear that the survey is very quick, and giving an easy-to-follow action step with the CTA.
The only difference is that they used an image to help the email pop a bit.
So while you can definitely add your branded spin on it, this first email shouldn’t be too long.
Medium’s email is even shorter with a completely different style, but we love this type of email because it’s a straightforward and easy way to quickly allow someone to leave feedback.
Those 3 things are KEY in getting people to respond to your feedback request.
Clicking on the number then takes you to a form where you can add more information behind your rating.
Then, all of that data is harnessed in a dashboard (in this case, a third-party tool called Delighted) where you can review all that input and get a general consensus about your brand customer experience.
When looking to up the chances of garnering feedback, this is a great email style to try out. There are a lot of third-party tools that can integrate with email marketing tools like Sendlane to help make these sorts of options possible.
With so many tools out there that you could integrate with your email marketing to make a survey possible it’s honestly impossible to cover how to use every single one out there.
But no matter what survey tool you decide to use, the other side of the coin that’s just as important as the design of your emails is the design of the funnel itself.
Once you have the copy and design put together with links to your desired survey, it’s important to both strategically and automatically trigger them to go out at the right time to the right people.
If you’re wondering how to effectively do that, then here is our suggestion for that.
Designing an Effective Product Feedback Post-Purchase Automation
So you wanna build a post-purchase funnel for feedback do ya?
Great! I love the enthusiasm.
Let’s get right to it, shall we?
What you’ll notice above in the photo here is the beginnings of what your post-purchase funnel will look like.
The flow goes a bit like this:
- Someone makes a purchase from your store (in this case a Shopify store).
- Right after they make this purchase, your funnel adds a tag to the client. This is important when you want to segment your email list by customer and non-customer.
- After the purchase is made, you should wait 4-7 days before your Feedback Request email is sent. Why the wait? Simple. Because you need to give enough time for your product to ship and land in the hands of your customer. Asking for feedback before they’ve even received the product is a bit like a server asking how someone’s dinner was before they’ve even eaten yet…
- Once you’ve waited enough time, your first Feedback Request email will automatically send to your customer.
That’s the first part of it, but your funnel isn’t quite over yet.
What happens if you send the email, but they don’t open your email? Or what if they open it but they don’t click through to the survey?
Since the aim is to really dig in and get results in the form of feedback, then you shouldn’t leave that first email as the last communication you send in when your customer doesn’t respond.
Here’s how the rest of your automation flow can go:
- After your first email is sent, wait for two days.
- Next, set up your automation with some sort of conditional split like you see above. This split will check if your subscriber opened and clicked through in your email.
- If they open and click through, they won’t get another email. That click-through is mostly like to have resulted in them leaving feedback
- If they didn’t open and click through, they will get another email asking for the feedback one more time. And after that, the automation can end. The reason for that is that we don’t want to annoy the customer. Asking twice is enough so leave it at that.
And that’s about it.
This is just the bare bones of a funnel structure like this and you can tweak it to fit things you notice from your own data.
Obviously, depending on the survey tool you’re using your workflow for responding to feedback and data collection will shift. But this funnel structure is automated with the aim to get results no matter what tool you’re using.
Get Customer Feedback and Make Improvements
Customer feedback can be a bit nerve-wracking.
It’s easy to feel yourself resist the idea of reaching out to customers especially when there’s a chance of getting a critique that’s less than stellar.
It’s tough to hear, but don’t hold yourself back out of fear.
Feedback is vital. It gives you a fuller picture of your customer journey. It helps provide a better interaction with customers so they feel heard, and it can ultimately help you spot areas for improvement that are hard to come by from your perspective.
The funnel above (designed in our email marketing automation platform) can help you garner feedback for your online store and only takes a few moments to put together.
If you haven’t already, why not give Sendlane a try? You get 14-days with full access completely free — and no, we don’t even ask for a credit card.
Your product feedback email funnel is just a few clicks away, so go for it!