Customer surveys play an important role in understanding your customers, their needs, and what really matters to them. As such, surveys are an essential part of a marketer’s toolkit for gathering, analyzing, and using feedback to improve the customer experience.
Keeping existing customers happy (and turning first-time customers into lifelong customers), is a key competitive edge in today’s world. So, how can marketers use surveys to support customer retention? Below are three ideas to inspire your next move!
Tap into customer loyalty with a Net Promoter Score survey
A Net Promoter Score (also known as “NPS”) is the leading metric for analyzing customer loyalty by asking your customers one simple question: on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to refer us to a friend or colleague? When used in a survey, NPS helps you understand your customers view of your company, product or service.
To start gathering insight on customer loyalty, consider sending an NPS survey after a customer has completed a key interaction in your industry. Here, it is important to think about what points in the customer journey have the potential to encourage your customer to offer feedback. For example, below are “quick wins” for three different types of organizations:
- Consultancy firms can benefit from sending an NPS after a consultancy project ends in order to more deeply understand the customer’s experience
- Companies in the Real Estate sector can extract valuable insight into their customers’ genuine experience a few months after a move-in date
- If your organization offers digital courses, it might make sense to collect NPS feedback right after a course wraps up
Another great option for tapping into customer loyalty is to send targeted NPS surveys throughout the fiscal year. Sending the same survey to the same customer base a few times a year (with whatever cadence makes sense for your business cycle), will allow you to develop an overview of what your customers generally think of your company, product or service. By using NPS this way you also gain the ability to start benchmarking your customers’ perception of your company over time, which can lead to valuable insights on how you can improve your company.
Boost email engagement with surveys
Surveys present an exciting opportunity to improve your email marketing over time by informing content decisions. Use customer insights to engage your readers more with your content. Repeat the cycle to keep improving your content and your email marketing. Below are a few tips on how to use surveys that adds more value to your email marketing and keep your customers more engaged:
- Use customer insights from surveys to segment your existing audience in new ways and share content that resonates with their interests better
- Personalize email content based on customer preferences that you’ve collected through surveys and tinkered with in your CRM
- Engage readers by adding fun Call-To-Actions (CTA) that direct your customer to take a survey and inspire them to share their voice
- Bring customers into your world and share survey results so they understand the value that their perspective brings into real-world decisions
Enrich CRM data with survey insights
In many organizations, surveys are designed and sent by the marketing team; however, the outcome of a survey is interesting to coworkers across many different departments! Everyone has an interest in more deeply understanding customers and building better customer relationships. For survey results to be more easily accessible by different teams, having one cross-team platform is a huge asset. Cue the entrance of a flexible CRM system like Lime CRM. Luckily, many CRMs can directly capture survey responses and serve up the results in a way that’s easy to digest, so whether it’s a Sales Manager or Event Coordinator who is digging for customer feedback, they’ll strike insightful gold with just a few clicks.
A CRM serves you and your team as a single source of truth when it comes to your customer data – including survey data.
If you’re looking for a way to start learning more about your customers and use this knowledge to improve customer retention, Lime Survey might be the perfect tool to help you achieve your mission. When paired with Lime CRM, the survey add-on empowers your team to easily design and send surveys, and most importantly, track and learn from your customers’ responses!
Do you want to know more? Let us show you what Lime Survey can do for you and your company!