Everyone knows that clients can offer priceless insight into your business.Your clients have a fresh perspective. They notice things that you don’t. They can tell you if you’re successfully meeting their needs. Or not.And some businesses like design, marketing, or branding agencies; interior design firms, freelancers, and contractors; among many others absolutely rely on client feedback and collaboration in order to do their jobs.Creative work of all kinds demands a constant feedback loop between client and service provider.
But, it’s not always easy to get clients to spill the beans. And, it’s not always clear what to do with the client’s insight once you have it.Client feedback, like any data, is only valuable if it’s actionable. So, we’re here to help. As a creative business, we’ve become experts at collecting and acting on client feedback. And, we’re excited to share what we know.Here are our top techniques for collecting actionable client feedback.
- Send follow-up emails
One of the most effective techniques for gathering client feedback is a simple email.Email is still king when it comes to reaching people.Hubspot shares that 99% of consumers check their email daily and that 73% of millennials prefer business communications to come via email.It’s best to contact your clients after they’ve had the opportunity to experience your service. So, give them time to do so and process the experience a bit before reaching out.
Now, you could just make a blanket request for feedback.But if there’s specific information that you’re hoping to learn, that’s not the best approach. We recommend that you include a survey with targeted questions (more on that below).Keep your message short and sweet. Provide a link or clickable button to take the reader directly to the included survey. And, sweeten the pot by offering a reward for completing the survey. This could be a discount for a future purchase, a gift card or any other reward that your clients would value. And make sure it’s clear the email is from you. Far too many emails are generic emails that could have been sent by thousands of other businesses. This is where you should smartly incorporate your agency’s or business’s brand identity (including your logo and brand colors).
Finally, automate your email campaigns so that they send on a regular schedule triggered by your clients’ activity. Tools like Constant Contact , Intrecom, MailChimp, and Drip are all worth looking into. And, once you’ve set these email campaigns up, they run automatically making this a low-time-investment technique with great potential returns.
- The Art of the Survey
There’s a right way and a wrong way to create a survey.Include too many questions and you’ll discourage most users from participating.Include too few questions, and your data will be incomplete or unreliable.We recommend that you aim for 3-5 questions. This means that you need to design your survey with a targeted topic in mind.You’ll gain the most from specific, but open-ended questions. When gathering feedback you should be completely open to whatever opinions and observations your clients think are important enough to share.
Limiting the participants to multiple choice answers or rating systems really curtails the depth and range of responses that you’ll get.If there’s room, leave a free field for the user to provide any other info they think you should know. This “wild card” field is invaluable for learning what you don’t know you don’t know.Survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform make it easy to embed a link to your survey right in your email. These services also store all of your responses for you to review and analyze.So let’s recap:
- Send follow-up emails after clients have had a chance to experience your product or service.
- Automate your email delivery.
- Offer a reward in exchange for completing a survey.
- Aim for 3-5 questions per survey.
- Ask specific, open-ended questions.
- Have a plan in place for processing responses.
