Process of Building Brand Authenticity Using Customer Feedback

Customer’s opinion has more substance than ever towards purchasing and becoming a prime asset for brand marketing. A currently done survey identified 95% of the customers relying highly on the ratings and reviews prior to buying a product online. This kind of recent shopping behavior builds opportunities and challenges for the brands as they look for stronger connections with their consumers.

As consumer feedback gets higher in influencing, a nagging challenge remains. The increasing concern regarding the transparency and authenticity of reviews and ratings. In order to protect the customer’s reputations, brands must be constantly vigilant to make sure that the consumer feedback of their brands provides an honest source of recommendations for the product. This is the reason why customer feedback software is used to understand customer requirements to create an excellent brand reputation.

Collecting a larger amount of high-end customer feedback

Consumers want brands should help them to inform their buying decisions. They do this by including content embedded with videos and images on product pages also through sharing authentic reviews. Collection of that content is necessary to enable brands in increasing their conversion. In fact, the data from customer feedback surveys show there is a 25% increase in conversion rate on products that come with reviews rather than those without. It has been observed that the conversion rate shoots up with the climbing of the number of reviews.

A customer feedback app is the best option as customers look to reviews so that they can answer important questions on products. This should encourage brands towards collecting more customer reviews and feedback. While a user wants a certain specific answer to a given question, others need a complete evaluation of your product/service. Also, a study conducted recently shows consumers believe that a greater number of reviews that are positive regarding a brand is rather a more important indicator for the quality of the product than a brand name that is trusted.

Some leading brands believe, “Along with increased conversion, gathering a greater number of high-quality reviews helps brands draw significant insights throughout all their consumer feedback so that they can reach more of the consumers who are relevant also to activate the community of buyers they have.

However, brands can’t stop just merely collecting more high-end reviews as authenticity matters. In fact, almost 86% of the consumers feel authenticity is a significant factor while deciding what brands they prefer also support, and 85% of the supporters look for negative reviews before they have gone to buy. To put it simply, brand content is rather more prone to convert when they buy from one trusted source.

So, how will the brands collect a higher amount of content and amplify the authenticity? Let’s check the three best practices towards collecting more customer feedback:

Engage your everyday influencers using product sampling

More credibility and cost-efficient than high-end influencers, also easier to work with, everyday influencers are exactly a community of common people like you and me. They leverage their Instagram handles towards generating authentic, and meaningful interactions within their community and followers, mostly made comprising of family and friends. While the influencers are typically between 1,000 – 6,000 followers, their voice is strong as their product recommendations are considered seriously by their communities.

With the help of innovative campaign techniques of sampling, businesses target the right kind of everyday influencers representing their brands, giving them a product coupon or sample along with the zeal to write an authentic, timely review or about sharing content on their product via several social media handles. This leads to the brands seeing the industry’s submission of best reviews and a huge engagement on social media.

A study found that in certain cases, those influencers with mere 1000 followers will generate 85% greater engagement than influencers with 100000 followers. And those Instagram accounts with higher than 10,000 followers will generally carry a similar ratio of like vs follower irrespective of the count being 11 million or 11,000. In contrast, those handles with 5,000 to 10,000 followers will gain 3% greater engagements, plus everyday influencers having 1000 to 5000 followers gain 2% more than that.

Most of the time, finding the right audience could behalf of the entire struggle. But you can make a target of the exact person you need using a sampling campaign. This can be followed by asking for a review. Customer feedback software is the best tool for this purpose.

Those brands that are targeting everyday influencers using sampling campaigns signify spending less yet generating a greater volume of engagement and authentic reviews. The consumer feedback they collect could be shared throughout the eCommerce platforms, search engine platforms, social media handles, partner websites, and via integrations. Also, through encouraging customers to give out their experiences on respective social media channels, there is further reach of product information, also to their authentic social media channels.

Ultimately, the individual reviews generated through customer feedback applications with sampling campaigns are of higher quality and about 29% more than the rest as they come from one engaged community comprising everyday influencers and would go through advanced target, screen, and qualification.

Speed up your customer feedback using a social collection

A critical element within customer feedback effectiveness is the visuals as watching products in use within the real world provides a kind of trust. A popular study says that 42% of the shoppers state that it is rather important or highly important that the review of a product includes videos and photos submitted by users, and the figure jumps to 58% among 20 -29 users.

Another best practice is social collection because one of the most proven ways to improve the authenticity of content is encouraging reviewers to submit videos or pictures. We are aware that 88% of the consumers specifically ask for visuals that other consumers have submitted before making a purpose. User-submitted pics provide products in the wild thus giving a real-life context to the user stories. This is specifically important in the younger generations.

Through the implementation of strategies like social collection, brands could collect and manage visual elements from everyday influencers, brand hashtags, and social channels. Certain highly developed customer feedback apps help implement the smart solutions at large, so brands could use the visuals customers have already posted on Instagram, identifying quickly the right kind of content also requesting permission of sharing it.

Providing easier modes for customers so that they could give feedback

Creating a greater number of high-quality reviews needs brands to build an easy path so that customers can post or write their feedback. Today, even though 95% of the customers use the reviews, only a small percentage say 45% takes the time to write a review. This could be due to several reasons, yet most of the time it’s the technology that is not accommodating, or maybe there is no benefit observed or even could be because they are waiting for companies to ask.

Even though it could look obvious, simply seeking reviews online may encourage customers to provide feedback who are in dilemma whether they should leave feedback or not. Further by following up through post-purchase emails, brands would be able to collect further content.

Moreover, brands could use advanced features of collection to collect the further amount of customer feedback information:

• With a progressive collection, customer feedback apps allow the user to work through taking a review of multiple products in a manner that is optimized, presenting one product at one time, and getting your second question pop up after the consumer answer the first one.

• A visual collection of content gathers a greater amount of content in the form of video and image by giving them the access to seamlessly upload visual content right from their social media handles or devices.
• By giving empowerment to customers so that they could submit reviews via text, some businesses produce higher open rates than email through reaching consumers where they spend maximum time.

By adding a Q&A section of the page is also another good way of customer feedback collection. This makes it easy for customers to not just ask questions but also encourage them to provide responses to other customers’ questions.

Most of the time shoppers use this portion of a page so that they could learn more information about a certain product, where having questions that are user-generated about the product enables the business to highlight certain use benefits or cases of the product that other shoppers maybe didn’t identify as an authentic way as it comes directly to your customers. And through responding to customer questions, you are showing that you care for engaging with them. Building community rapport is a significant portion of making customers know you as a business are listening to your consumers by taking their opinion into consideration. It is all concerned with building trust.

Final note:

By working with some trusted partners of review collection like power reviews, brands come with the ability to collect a greater amount of content that is high quality and customer-generated, simultaneously following the best practices to increase authenticity plus trust using product sampling, sprucing up social collection, and creating smoother methods so that customers can leave feedback. These practices help you to make sure that the reviews you collect are content of high quality that would be trusted by your customers. Using some of the best customer feedback software one could easily receive consumer feedback, much needed for brands to understand their position and create a reputation.