How user feedback can boost your growth marketing strategy

Digital marketers are no longer confining themselves to the top-of-funnel metrics and customer acquisition rates. In fact, nowadays it’s all about the entire customer lifecycle and more importantly, making sure those same customers actually stick around; a trend which has introduced a new and more redefined type of marketing known as growth marketing. Growth marketers are data-driven marketers who are constantly looking for ways to fuel their growth marketing strategy. One way in particular involves gathering user feedback regularly from online visitors and customers. But just how does this data help boost their growth marketing strategy exactly and what can you do as a growth marketer to make sure you’re gathering these insights effectively? Let’s dive in…

In this post, we’ll further define growth marketing, look at the additional funnels analysed closely by growth marketers and how these marketers can leverage user feedback to keep the momentum going within their growth marketing strategies.

Ready to get started?

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a form of marketing whereby marketers “use growth hacking techniques to experiment with different channels and strategies frequently, optimising their tests incrementally to determine how to best optimise their marketing spend”. In contrast to traditional marketing which focuses heavily on brand awareness and reputation, growth marketing is very much experimental and uses unconventional marketing solutions to achieve growth.

Intrigued? Then you’ll be happy to hear that you’re not alone. In fact, this marketing technique has seen substantial growth in the past few years.

Exhibit A: the frequency in Google Search between 2016 and 2021:


Source: Google Trends

Focusing on the entire funnel

If we break it down, a growth marketing strategy – unlike traditional marketing strategies – focuses on the entire funnel from start to finish. In other words, from awareness all the way down to the revenue and referrals. This holistic view of the online customer journey enables these marketers to widen the scope and try new things across multiple touchpoints within the funnel.


Source: Business2Community

Also known as the pirate metrics, activation, retention, revenue and referral are really important in rounding off the process. Let’s take a closer look at each of these individually:

• Activation: this when users take the desired actions after coming across your product or website. The question to ask yourself? Are these people taking the actions we want them to?
• Retention: this is when visitors become and remain users of your product / service. The question to ask yourself? Are our activated users continuing to engage with the product?
• Referral: this is how your users see your product / service and what they tell others. The question to ask yourself? Do users like the product enough to tell others about it?
• Revenue: this is how you will understand if you are going to meet your revenue targets. The question to ask yourself? Are our personas willing to pay for this product or service?

Seems pretty straight forward, right? The question is, how do you gain (qualitative) insight into these metrics? Gathering hard numbers won’t tell you everything you need to know about their behaviour and that is where user feedback comes in…

How user feedback can boost your growth marketing strategy

As previously stated in this post, there’s a vast difference between traditional marketing and growth marketing: Growth marketing cares about all aspects of the entire customer journey and makes the most out of every point of contact. That being said, the most effective way to measure performance across the entire journey is to gather feedback at each individual touchpoint.

But for the sake of this article and to narrow it down a little, let’s take each of these individual pirate metrics and show you how to qualify them using user feedback.

Activation

The question: Are these people taking the actions we want them to?
In this stage, you can leverage user feedback to understand if your visitors are experiencing the value of your product or service the first time around. By gathering feedback in the initial funnels, such as during product demos, on landing pages and within shopping carts, you can gauge how they’re ‘getting on’ with your product or service.

Since growth marketing has become such a huge focus in the SaaS industry, let’s take a look at an example of gathering feedback from a product demo.

A visitor has just had a demo of your software. So what’s next? This may seem obvious but the best way to know whether the demo was successful in teaching the user how to use your product is to ask them directly.



With a form like the one above, you will know exactly where you stand, what you can improve upon and also how well the user understands the value of your product. A form such as this can, of course, be tweaked and rewritten, depending on the information you seek. For example, you can also include an open comments section that gives the user the opportunity to explain more about their experience in more detail.

You can then take these insights, share them with your sales team (or whoever is conducting the demos) and improve the process based on the feedback you receive.

Retention

The question: Are our activated users continuing to engage with the product?
Perhaps one of the most important factors of growth is retention. Maintaining a satisfied and loyal customer base is your #1 priority once you’ve successfully acquired a new customer. So how can you ensure these new customers remain engaged with your product?

The answer is to regularly gather feedback from these customers. Feedback surveys can be deployed all across the online journey, enabling you to keep a pulse on your customers and how they’re experiencing your website or brand.

So for example, by placing a passive feedback survey (or feedback button) on your website, your visitors can always leave behind feedback regarding any obstacles they encounter on that particular page.



Additionally, you can capture feedback based on certain events that take place on your website. We call this active feedback. For example, when a customer leaves their shopping cart without purchasing. This is a great way to understand why they left as well as determine how you can improve the process for future customers. Learn more about reducing shopping cart abandonment with user feedback here.

These methods for collecting feedback are ideal for retention in that you always offer your visitors an opportunity to share any hurdles they encounter, i.e. missing information, page errors, usability issues, etc, across the customer journey. Not to mention these types of surveys aid in maintaining a continuous feedback loop, meaning you can continuously improve online funnels and various aspects of your website (other channels such as mobile apps and email).

Referral

The question: Do users like the product enough to tell others about it?
An especially important stage of the process for growth marketers is the referral stage. In this stage, the hope is for customers to share their experiences with friends and family. Why is this important? Studies show that 92% of people actually trust recommendations more if they come from friends and family. In other words, word of mouth is very effective. That being said, in order to ensure your customers are recommending you and your brand to others you must monitor customer loyalty.

A growth marketer would rather gain a smaller amount of customers who are more likely to stay engaged than a large amount of customers who probably won’t stick around.

Referral Rock

When measuring customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) will be your new best friends.



It’s important to mention that NPS should never be used as a generic metric as it is only really effective when geared towards current and/or long time customers who are familiar with your brand. In other words it’s better to collect NPS scores from actual customers rather than anonymous visitors who have yet to build up any sort of relationship with your brand.

NPS can be measured in one of two ways: either to gather general insights on how the business is perceived by a customer (based on overall experience and the brand itself) or to gather insights based on a transaction the customer has made with your business. These two types of NPS surveys are referred to as Relationship and Transactional surveys and both contribute to generating useful insights regarding the loyalty of your customers.

Revenue

The question: Are our personas willing to pay for this product or service?
Now this one actually goes hand-in-hand with the aforementioned stages: retention and referral. If your customer is happy with your product or service and is loyal to your brand, odds are they will be willing to pay for your product or service. In fact, acting upon the insights you’ve gathered from user feedback in these previous stages will often fuel their desire to remain a customer.

Therefore in this stage, it’s important to focus on doing something with the feedback you’ve gathered and continuously improving your online offerings. Feedback software solutions such as Mopinion are experts in this area of user feedback, giving you the means to make sense of your feedback and put insights into action.

Growth across the entire customer journey

And there you have it. Now that you’re equipped with several ways to boost your growth marketing strategy, it’s time to get crackin’. With these insights you’ll be well on your way to quickly and effectively iterating upon various obstacles and errors within the entire online funnel – bringing you one step closer to your ultimate goal: GROWTH!