Digital marketing professionals no longer limit themselves to metrics such as reach, traffic, or bounce rate. In fact, it’s all about the entire customer lifecycle these days and, more importantly, making sure the same customers actually stay your customers. A trend that introduced a redefined type of marketing known as Growth Marketing. Growth marketers are data-driven marketers who are constantly looking for ways to advance their growth marketing strategy. One possibility, in particular, is to regularly collect customer feedback from online visitors and customers. But how exactly does this data help drive your growth marketing strategy, and what can you, as a growth marketer, do to ensure that you are gathering these insights effectively? Let’s dive in …
In this post, we’ll go into growth marketing strategies further, we’ll look at additional funnels that growth marketers analyze in-depth, and how these marketers can use customer feedback to keep their growth marketing strategy moving.
Are you ready to grow?
What is growth marketing?
Growth marketing is a form of marketing in which marketers use growth hacking techniques to experiment with different channels and strategies, and gradually tweak their tests so that they can be tweaked. Unlike traditional marketing, which is heavily focused on brand awareness and reputation, growth marketing is very experimental and uses unconventional marketing solutions to generate growth.
Fascinated? You are not alone! In fact, this marketing technique has seen significant growth in recent years.
Figure A: Frequency in Google searches between 2016 and 2021:
Figure A: The frequency in Google Search between 2016 and 2021 :
Source: Google Trends
What are the components of a growth marketing strategy?
When we take it apart, a growth marketing strategy – as opposed to traditional marketing strategies – focuses on the entire funnel from start to finish. In other words, from awareness to revenue and referrals. This holistic view of the online customer journey enables these marketers to expand the scope and try new things across multiple touchpoints within the funnel.
Source: Business2Community
Also known as Pirate Metrics, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral are really important to complete the process. Let’s take a closer look at each of them:
- Activation: This is when users take the desired actions after they come across your product or website. The question you should be asking yourself? Are these people taking the action we expect them to take?
- Retention: This is when visitors become and stay users of your product/service. The question you should be asking yourself? Are our activated users still interacting with the product?
- Referral: This is how your users see your product/service and what they are telling others. The question you should be asking yourself? Do users like the product enough to tell others about it?
- Revenue: How to Know If You’re Reaching Your Sales Targets. The question you should be asking yourself? Are our personas ready to pay for this product or service?
Seems pretty clear right? The question is, how do you get (qualitative) insights into these metrics? When you collect hard numbers, you don’t find out everything you need to know about their behavior, and this is where user feedback comes in …
How customer feedback can boost your growth marketing strategy
As mentioned above, there is a big difference between traditional marketing and growth marketing: Growth marketing takes care of all aspects of the entire customer journey, getting the most out of every touchpoint. However, the most effective way to measure performance throughout the journey is to collect feedback at each individual touchpoint.
But for this article and to narrow it down a bit, let’s take each of these individual pirate metrics and show you how to use feedback to qualify them.
Activation
The question: are these people doing the actions we want?
At this stage, you can use user feedback to understand whether your visitors are experiencing the value of your product or service the first time. By collecting feedback in the first few funnels, e.g. For example, during product demos, on landing pages, and in shopping carts, you can assess how they are “getting on” with your product or service.
Because growth marketing has become such a huge focus in the SaaS industry, let’s look at an example of gathering feedback from a product demo.
A visitor has just had a demo of your software. What’s next? This may seem obvious, but the best way to find out if the demo taught the user how to use your product is to ask them directly.
With a form like the one above, you’ll know exactly where you stand, what can be improved, and how well the user understands the value of your product. Such a form can of course be adapted and rewritten depending on the information sought. For example, you can also include an open comment area that allows the user to explain more about their experience in more detail.
You can then share these insights with your sales team (or whoever is running the demos) and improve the process based on the feedback received.
Retention
The question: Are your activated users still interacting with your product?
Perhaps one of the most important growth factors is retention. Maintaining a satisfied and loyal customer base is your number one priority when you have successfully acquired a new customer. So how can you make sure these new customers stay in touch with your product?
The answer is to collect feedback from these customers on a regular basis. Feedback surveys can be used throughout the online journey so you can keep track of your customers and their perception of your website or brand.
For example, by placing a passive feedback poll (or a feedback button) on your website, your visitors can leave feedback at any time on any obstacles they encounter on that particular page.
In addition, you can collect feedback based on specific events that take place on your website. We call this active feedback. For example, when a customer leaves their shopping cart without making a purchase. This is a great way to understand why they left and how you can improve the process for future customers. Learn more about how to use user feedback to reduce shopping cart abandonment here
These feedback gathering methods are great for customer loyalty as they always give your visitors the opportunity to share obstacles they encounter like missing information, page faults, usability issues, etc., throughout the customer journey. Not to mention, these types of surveys help maintain a continuous feedback loop, which means you can continuously improve online funnels and various aspects of your website (other channels like mobile apps and email).
Referral
The question: do users like the product enough to tell others about it?
A particularly important phase of the process for growth marketers is the referral phase. At this stage, customers hope to share their experiences with friends and family. Why is that important? Studies show that 92% of people actually trust recommendations more when they come from friends and family. In other words, word of mouth is very effective. However, to make sure that your customers recommend you and your brand to others, you need to monitor customer loyalty.
When measuring customer loyalty, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) are your new best friends.
It’s important to mention that NPS should never be used as a general metric as it’s only really effective if it’s aimed at existing and/or long-term customers who are familiar with your brand. In other words, it’s better to collect NPS scores from actual customers than from anonymous visitors who haven’t yet established a relationship with your brand.
The NPS can be measured in two ways: either to gain general insights into how the business is perceived by a customer (based on the overall experience and the brand itself) or to gain insights based on a transaction that the customer is involved with Your company has made. These two types of NPS surveys are known as relationship and transactional surveys, and they both help provide useful insights into your customers’ loyalty.
Revenue
The question: are our personas willing to pay for this product or service?
Well, this actually goes hand in hand with the phases mentioned above: retention and referral. If your customer is happy with your product or service and is loyal to your brand, chances are they are ready to pay for your product or service. In fact, responding to the insights you gained from user feedback during these previous stages will often fuel their desire to remain a customer.
It is therefore important in this phase to concentrate on doing something with the feedback collected and continuously improving your online offers. Feedback software solutions like Feedsocio are experts in this area of user feedback and enable you to understand your feedback and put insights into action.
Growth across the entire customer journey
And there you have it. Now that you are armed with multiple options to advance your growth marketing strategy, it is time to get started. With these insights, you’ll be well on your way to iterating various obstacles and errors within the entire online funnel quickly and effectively – and get one step closer to your ultimate goal: GROWTH!
