Customer Feedback is Gold

Get Customer Feedback a Essential Key to Providing a Great Product or Service:

Small businesses have an advantage over larger corporations: being much more closely connected to their customer base. Customer feedback—theirideas, comments, and feelings—can be a force that helps shape a slam-dunk marketing campaign for small businesses.

Benefits of Customer Feedback:

1. Assess customer satisfaction.
2. Know when to add or eliminate products or product lines.
3. Test a new product or service.
4. Get qualitative feedback.
5. Keep customers engaged.
6. Use feedback in marketing literature.
7. Be able to fix problems or address previously unknown issues.
8. Understand customer questions.
9. Obtain demographic information.
10. Rate product popularity.

Low-cost Ways to Get Customer Feedback:

Notepad at Checkout: A retail store owner I know asks every customer when they check out to rate their shopping experience from 1 to 10. She uses the numbers to compile a quick statistic on customer satisfaction, but says that it actually helps improve the customer's overall experience because they consider her store more appreciative overall.

Survey: Online sites like Survey Monkey or Constant Contact offer easy customer surveys. Offer an incentive, like a $5 coupon or promo code, if customers fill out a survey.

Suggestion Box or E-mail: For physical business locations, a good old fashioned comment card and suggestion box can go a long way to get customer feedback. The local grocery store I shop at actually calls when they get a requested product in stock—what a great marketing tool for them!

Enable Blog/Website Comments: If you operate a blog, consider turning on the "comments" feature to get customer feedback. Not only will you get responses, but other customers are more likely to join in the conversation. If you're hesitant to publish comments before reading them, simply turn comment moderation on and you can approve or reject comments before they are published on your website.

Product Reviews: If you operate an online store, have your web programmer add a feature for writing product reviews or set up an autoresponder that asks customers for feedback after they make a purchase, with a link to do so.

Leave Feedback for Buyers: If you sell on popular auction sites such as eBay or Amazon.com, make sure to leave feedback for buyers if you expect them to leave you seller feedback and help you improve your ratings.

Online Contact Form: Make it easy for customers to ask questions or leave comments online right away with a contact form. Be sure to add a security feature (like those "jiggly letter" boxes) to filter out some of the spammers.

Poll/Question of the Day: Whether you use a Blogger widget or Twitter, you can ask relevant questions to find out who's viewing your site and what your customers' opinions are.

Focus Group: Calling together a group of key customers or potential customers from your target market to ask questions, have them sample products, or offer feedback can be a very useful marketing tool to help small business owners understand what actual people think about their products or services.

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What's Next

Next In This Guide
Part 34:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Learn the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for marketing your small business website.

Previous In This guide
Part 32:
Know Your Competition - A key part of a small business market strategy is to know your competition, and find out how to deal with them. Asking a few questions will help you understand who you're competing against.

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