Riding the feedback loop: best practices to increase lifetime value 

Increasing customers’ lifetime value (LTV) is a vital goal for brand marketers. It’s common sense to improve a single customer’s AOV (average order value) over a costly acquisition strategy. Retaining customers has always been a better strategy.  

There are many ways you can work with your consumers to entice them to spend more with you. By exciting them with new products. Personalizing their experience. Reaching them in places where they prefer to be contacted. Reducing friction throughout the buying journey. Heck, even all these things combined. But what if you’re not listening to your customer? What if you assume this is how you can increase their value? Have you considered asking for feedback and listening more intently?  

Creating feedback loops is a magical (ok, perhaps not precisely magical) way of increasing lifetime value because you’re removing doubt and no longer throwing caution (your hard-earned digital advertising spend) to the wind. Feedback loops help you to gather supplemental data and insights about your customers to improve products and services adoption quickly.  

Let’s take a quick look at some common feedback loops:  

Surveys and questionnaires: You bet the lowly survey is a popular method for collecting feedback. They can be conducted through online forms integrated into your website or by contacting segmented customers directly.  

Interviews and focus groups: If you have the time and resources, direct interviews and focus groups are among the best ways to collect real-time customer insight. This qualitative feedback can offer deeper understanding by allowing participants to express their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. 

Gamification: A feedback loop that we offer as part of our services. Applying gamification elements to feedback collection can increase customer engagement. By turning the feedback process into a game or competition, businesses can encourage customers to provide feedback enjoyably and interactively. 

Customer reviews: Monitoring customer reviews and ratings on platforms such as online marketplaces, social media, or dedicated review sites is an effective way to gather feedback. This feedback loop helps identify standard product or service issues, strengths, and weaknesses. 

User testing: User testing has previously been reserved for product development but can be just as important in marketing. By directly observing their behavior, businesses can identify pain points, areas of confusion, or opportunities for improvement. 

Customer support & chatbots: Customer support interactions, whether through phone calls, emails, or chat, can provide valuable feedback. Analyzing common customer queries and complaints helps identify recurring issues and areas that require improvement. 

Social media monitoring: Keeping an eye on social media channels allows businesses to gather real-time customer feedback. By monitoring mentions, comments, and direct messages, companies can address concerns, respond to feedback, and gain insights into customer sentiment. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS): One you’re most likely familiar with. This tried and trusted feedback loop helps identify promoters (loyal customers) and detractors (unhappy customers). 

But what do we do with feedback data?  

This magical gold dust (feedback data) can be seamlessly integrated with your existing customer data to enhance profiling, deepen insights and help improve retention and lifetime value. But seriously, here are some steps to effectively integrate and leverage this data: 

1. Centralize and organize your shiny new data: Ensure that data collected from feedback loops is properly centralized and organized within your customer data management system. Centralization, like that done through a customer orchestration engine, allows for easy access and analysis, enabling you to draw meaningful conclusions and identify patterns or trends. 

2. Identify key data points: Analyze the feedback data and identify critical data points that can enhance your understanding of customer preferences, needs, and behaviors.  

3. Segmentation: Use integrated data to segment your customers based on their feedback and preferences. By grouping customers with similar feedback or likes, you can personalize your marketing messages, product recommendations, and customer experiences to cater to their specific needs and interests. 

4. Enhance personalization: You can create detailed customer profiles by combining feedback and customer data (e.g., purchase history, browsing behavior, demographics). These profiles enable you to deliver targeted and personalized experiences, such as customized recommendations, exclusive offers, or relevant content. 

5. Identify customer pain points: Feedback loop data can help to reveal more significant problems. Use this information to proactively address these issues, improve the customer experience, and reduce customer churn. For example, if multiple customers express frustration with a specific feature, prioritize fixing or enhancing that feature to improve customer satisfaction. 

6. Tailor retention strategies: Use the integrated data to develop targeted retention strategies. Identify customers who have provided feedback indicating dissatisfaction or those who have requested specific improvements. Tailor retention initiatives, such as personalized follow-ups, loyalty programs, or exclusive access to beta features, address their concerns and demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction. 

Final thoughts  

Integrating supplemental feedback loop data with existing customer data is an ongoing process that can pay dividends for your bottom line and customer experience. Regularly analyze and update your customer profiles, refine your segmentation strategies, and adapt your retention efforts based on the insights gained from the integrated data.  

By leveraging this holistic view of your customers, you can enhance their experiences, foster loyalty, and increase their lifetime value. Good luck with your efforts, and if you’d like to discuss feedback loops in more detail with one of our data-wrangling experts, please do not hesitate to get in touch.  

Contact US for more information on how we can help you increase your customers’ lifetime value.