3 Digital Marketing Roles that need Customer Feedback

Lauren, a digital analyst starts her work every day by grabbing her coffee, switching on her computer to read her email and then proceeding to sign into her dashboard to pull up a report on all website feedback from the previous day. This report is generated by a feedback form that was triggered when a customer ended their website session without purchasing one of her company’s insurance products.

While looking through the feedback data Lauren is able to view quantitative data and read written feedback left by visitors who gave low or high ratings for customer metrics. Lauren notices that there are several customers who voiced negative comments about having their insurance packages mixed up every time the page refreshes. She knows she must use this insight to brief the digital team of this blunder that could potentially be costing the company sales. This is one of many examples of how customer feedback is important to Lauren, or any other digital analyst’s role.

Since Big Data arrived on the digital scene, marketing and sales initiatives have increased and changed drastically. With the influx of selling your products and services online, digital transformation affects every area of business. Because of this, it is more vital than ever to have a successful digital customer experience. This of course can be obtained if you know what your customers’ thoughts, opinions and feelings are – all of which can be uncovered by collecting their feedback at relevant moments during their experience on your digital channel.

Many think the only person who should really concern themselves about online customer feedback is the Digital Marketing Manager but this is so wrong.

I have identified three digital marketing roles where customer feedback plays an essential role:

1. Ecommerce managers
2. Digital analysts
3. Product managers

In this blog I explain why online customer feedback is vital for these three roles.

According to an American Express survey, 78% of customers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor customer service experience. If you can pick up on these, you can deal with the underlying problems.

1. Ecommerce Manager

Ecommerce teams are responsible for managing a company’s onsite experience, product overviews, description and finally pricing. An Ecommerce Manager plays that critical role in coming up with online sales and marketing strategies, developing these initiatives and managing the execution of website and mobile app projects. The key idea is to ensure the website drives ‘conversion’ or acquiring useful customer feedback. In order to optimise the digital experience, customer feedback insights are always vital.

By collecting customer feedback, as an Ecommerce manager, you could obtain insights very easily into why a customer is not purchasing certain products and services on the website instead of guessing. By understanding this, you would be able to use that data to drive plans, perform analysis, make decisions, exploit opportunities and optimise marketing and conversion effectiveness.

Increase conversions
For example, you pull up a report on shopping cart abandonment on the ordering page for the previous month and compares it to this month, you realise that 41% of them abandon because there is confusing navigation and another 59% of them abandon because shipping costs are too high. You can uncover this valuable insight in real time and immediately implement measures to drive improvements for website performance and customer experience.

Capture leads
If the customer in question left their contact details, you will get the relevant people in your organisation to either respond back to the customer directly to learn more about their experience or send potential leads to the sales team to convert the feedback to revenue.

Ultimately this is important for the Ecommerce manager because they are often judged largely on online performance based KPIs such as sales figures and loyalty.

2. Digital Analyst

The responsibility of the Digital Analyst is to consolidate and interpret data for decision making and strategy development. They play a vital role to provide reporting, analysis and insights to help marketing and Ecommerce teams to identify opportunities to increase revenue and improve the customer experience.

The Digital Analyst should be using customer feedback to provide insights into improving their online customer experience. Whereas an Ecommerce manager really focuses on the website conversions and optimisation. The digital analyst uses different analytical software tools like Google Analytics, sentiment analysis and feedback tools to analyse and visualise data daily in order and report their key findings and recommendations to stakeholders of the business. For example, a new product is launched on the website and feedback forms were triggered when a customer reads the content but is not interested in applying a call to action to proceed.

Feedback analysis
As a digital analyst you work with all that data provided by customer feedback. Reading all of that data would be an incredible waste of time, so you have to use analysis tools to classify positive or negative data. The answers are all right there in the data that is collected and it’s your job to read what the data is telling and provide other teams with the relevant information at the right time in the right format.

All that data could tell several teams that the content information on this new product is not relevant for your customers and needs to be changed. This results in saving valuable time but also uncovering key insights from thousands of pieces of data, proving that analysing customer feedback is imperative to the success of an organisation.

3. Digital Product Manager

The fundamental responsibility of a Product Manager is to be the company’s leading expert on the customer, this is so true in many areas. Product Managers act as a mediator between their customers and their design teams to identify where their product or service is lagging and understand the underlying needs for their online customer is aligned to their service or product offering.

Product insights
As a Product Manager you would ideally prioritise customer feedback at the top to clearly identify a product’s strengths and flaws. The feedback acts as a digital sales person gathering insights to help improve your product or service offering. This sometimes saves you so much time and effort in asking sales people what sort of insights they have gathered from conversations with customers about the product, the sales team would have too much on their plate to bring feedback back to their product managers and even if they did, it would not be easy to measure that digitally.

For example, a product manager who visualises the feedback report is able to identify consistent themes within the data that was collected, let’s say on a passive feedback form where it was asked how they would like to improve this service or product. From there, you would then analyse those trends and patterns and communicate these into action items for their product management teams.

Improving digital experiences
As a Product Manager you are able to really identify key customer insights from knowing what their customers want without guessing. These insights allow better product developments, launching smarter marketing initiatives and improving offerings. This results in outsmarting and getting ahead competitors, generating potential new customers for your company and retaining customer loyalty because you took time to listen to their opinions and improve your customer’s online experience.

Customers are the most important aspect of every business. That is why it is important to listen and collect their feedback. But this is only the first step, it’s what you do with the feedback that really matters. This is where the roles within a digital team come in – they convert the collected data from their online customers into valuable insights. These Insights could be then turned into vital actions like understanding where to trim marketing budgets, strategically plan marketing initiatives such as product pricing or fixing an issue like a bug or an error.

By asking for your customers to provide you with feedback, you’re communicating that you value their opinion and you care about what they have to say. If online customer feedback is used correctly, it can provide that brand a competitive edge. Digital teams can understand areas for improvement, provide key business insights, and optimise various workflows for higher efficiencies.

For marketers and entrepreneurs alike, customer feedback is a gold mine of knowledge, and it’s important to tap into it consistently throughout the lifespan of your business or campaign.