Your Customer Reviews

Heey,

Ever wondered why some products soar in sales while others barely make a dent?

The secret is often much simpler than you think: customer reviews.

In today's course with Steffen Hedebrandt, we dive deep into the 'Review Economy' and why your brand's growth engine could be hiding in plain sight.

Check out the full episode with Steffen for more insight on how you can leverage data for your business.

But first.

Did you know that the first-ever email marketing campaign resulted in a staggering 70% open rate? 📧🤯

I'll let you know why at the end of today's course.

However, if you find these insights valuable, the best way to support our work is by inviting your friends to become Dot Connecters and learn more about Connecting The Dots between marketing activities and financial goals.

Topic Of Today

🎙 Episode Highlight: The Power of Customer Reviews

• 📚 Deep Dive: Leveraging Customer Voice for Business Growth

• 📌 Actionable Advice

• 📚 Homework

• 💡 Pro Tip

📽️Connecting The Dots: Building Community Over Category📽️

In an episode of Connecting The Dots, Steffen Hedebrandt talked about the often untapped potential of customer reviews and how leveraging them can be a game-changing growth strategy for your brand

1. 🎙 An Episode Highlight: The Power of Reviews and NPS

   
   Steffen draws on the importance of funnelling reviews and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a simple yet effective tool for understanding customer satisfaction and automating actions based on it.
   
   Key Takeaways:
   
   Volume & Ranking:
   Steffen points out that platforms like Amazon are not just marketplaces but powerful search engines. A high volume of sales and good rankings on these platforms can significantly boost your visibility. The algorithm favours products with better reviews, pushing them higher in search results.
   
   This creates a virtuous cycle: better reviews lead to higher rankings, which in turn leads to more visibility and sales, further improving your reviews and rankings.
   
   Even if you don't sell on platforms like Amazon, you can still use them to gain valuable insights into how your customers think about similar solutions. There is a great story by Joanna Wiebe, where she talks about a service that did not have any reviews, so they looked for books covering the same subject matter & checked reviews from the target audience to get an idea about how and what they are looking for.
   
   Net Promoter Score (NPS):
   NPS is a simple survey where customers rate how likely they are to recommend your product or service. Steffen recommends automating actions based on these scores.
   
   For scores of 8-10, you can funnel these satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. For lower scores, you can initiate a conversation to understand their grievances and improve their experience. This proactive approach not only helps in customer retention but also has the potential to turn detractors into promoters.
   
   The Review Economy:
   Steffen introduces the concept of the 'Review Economy,' which is the idea that each new review has a tangible impact on a business's profits and turnover. After all, now perhaps more than ever, reviews are social proof that can significantly influence purchasing decisions.
   
   Steffen's experience with Airtame shows that a structured approach to gathering reviews can lead to incremental growth. He even aims to automate this process, ensuring that every customer is prompted to share their experience, good or bad, thereby continually feeding the review economy.
   

_{2. 📚 Deep Dive: leveraging Customer Voice for Business Growth}

Steffen brings to light the importance of the customer's voice in shaping a brand's growth strategy. Here, we'll explore various facets of this concept, supported by insights from external sources.

Authentic Customer Relationships:
The voice of the customer is crucial for building authentic relationships. When you listen to your customers and reflect their language and concerns in your marketing, you're not just selling a product; you're selling a solution to their unique problems. This creates a deeper emotional connection, which can lead to higher customer retention rates.

Voice of Customer is essentially the collection of feedback, opinions, and insights from your customers. This data can be gathered through various channels such as surveys, social media, customer reviews, and direct interactions. The aim is to understand the customer's needs, preferences, and pain points to improve your product and overall customer experience.

Why is VoC Important?

Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers often draws attention to the fact that everyone wants to believe in the brands they buy from. This is especially true for those who might be against you but need you, or those who feel like there are no real solutions focused on their specific issues. VoC helps you understand these segments of your audience and allows you to tailor your brand voice to resonate with them.

For instance, GitPrime, a platform designed to help engineers get the recognition they deserve, faced resistance from the very engineers it aimed to help. Through founder interviews and VoC data, they discovered that engineers love building cool stuff but often feel under-recognized. This insight led to the positioning statement, "Engineers build business," which resonated with the engineers and helped in brand adoption.

Risk Mitigation (Conversion Copy):
Understanding the voice of the customer can help in risk mitigation. By knowing what your customers value, you can tailor your products and services to meet those needs, thereby reducing the risk of market failure or customer churn.

Shortening Customer Journeys:
According to Martech, customer journeys that begin at review sites are significantly shorter. This is because reviews serve as a form of social proof, reducing the time customers need to make a decision. By leveraging reviews effectively, you can shorten the sales cycle and improve conversion rates.

Structured Approach to Reviews:
Steffen's strategy involves a structured, automated approach to gathering reviews. By using tools like Delighted.com, he can make sure that every customer is prompted to share their experience. This not only helps in gathering more reviews but also in identifying areas for improvement.

How to Implement VoC in Your Strategy

1. Collect Data: Use surveys, social listening tools, and direct customer interactions to gather VoC data.

2. Analyse & Segment: Break down the data to understand different customer segments. Are they against you but in need of you? Are they feeling unloved but in need of you?

3. Tailor Your Brand Voice: Based on the insights, tailor your brand voice to resonate with these segments. For example, if your VoC data shows that customers value sustainability, you might want to emphasise your eco-friendly practices in your branding.

4. Test and Iterate: Always be ready to adapt. Use message testing to see how changes in your brand voice or positioning statements are affecting customer engagement and conversion.

5. Feedback Loop: Keep the lines of communication open. Make it easy for customers to provide feedback and make sure to act on it to continually refine your brand voice.

A key thing to remember here, however: yes it is extremely useful to implement VoC for your brand's growth 👉 it shouldn't mean that you change everything constantly based on customer feedback. 👇

The idea is to find common patterns, and recurring feedback, and to use those and the way your customers talk about your brand in your messaging. These can just as well be positive reviews. If there is a common positive your target audiences talk about with regard to your, or similar solutions 👉 that is something you should consider implementing/emphasising in your messaging.

5. 💡 Pro Tip:

While it's essential to gather reviews and Voice of Customer (VoC) data, the real magic happens when you do it consistently. Consistency allows you to:

Track Trends Over Time: Consistent data collection helps you identify patterns and trends in customer feedback, making it easier to prioritise improvements.

Build Trust: Regularly asking for and acting on feedback shows customers that you value their opinions, which can strengthen your brand's credibility.

Optimise Messaging: Consistent VoC data collection can help you fine-tune your brand messaging to better resonate with your target audience.

Adapt to Market Changes: Regular reviews and feedback can alert you to shifts in market demands or customer preferences, allowing you to adapt more quickly.

Remember, reviews and VoC aren't just one-off activities but ongoing processes that can continually fuel your brand's growth. So, make it a habit, not a one-time campaign.

Fun fact answer:  Gary Thuerk, the "Father of Spam," sent the first mass email to 400 recipients in 1978, promoting DEC machines. Despite the primitive technology and the lack of established email etiquette, the campaign generated $13 million in sales!

Isn't that just fun?

Keep learning and growing! 🚀 ❤️

New episodes of Connecting The Dots & Business Companion are coming out regularly, so stay tuned.

Subscribe to our podcast and keep an eye on your inbox for the next edition of our newsletter as well.

LinkedIn posts worth reading this week:


1. Focusing on Metrics that Matter

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2. Thought leadership that helps you sell

Not all awareness is created equal. Reach for the sake of reach is lazy marketing.

3. Product Launch Process

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The 1 best tool of the week:

Are you thinking about starting a podcast or looking to create short episodes of your current ones?

Try this tool:

1. Riverside

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