How to Use Feedback to Boost SaaS User Engagement and Sales

Feedback in SaaS products is crucial to understand users' needs and drive sales and engagement. SaaS sales are different in the sense that most of your customers aren’t won over in a few minutes and landing pages. The SaaS sales process is longer, more complex, and involves a lot of changes for your customer. It takes more research and information for your customer to make a decision on a product to work into their current processes. The more reassurance that your product and service is the choice for them, the quicker and more likely they are to choose your product. The unique thing about SaaS as well is the sales process also never really ends. You should make sure your users are engaged to keep using and choosing your product over time.

Here’s how you can use feedback to boost SaaS user engagement and sales:

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1. Testimonials and quotes
2. Loyalty and NPS
3. Indirect sources of feedback
4. Replies to customers
5. Analytics
6. Replies and action

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[anchor id="testimonials-and-quotes"]Display testimonials and quotes from current first class customers.

With over 80% of customers using feedback in their purchasing decision process, good reviews are good as gold for any company! Social proof and peer recommendation hold a lot of weight with potential customers. 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Customers will go looking for reviews if they do not readily find them on your site. Presenting reviews and strong testimonials from your best customers on your homepage helps communicate your product’s value to new customers. Strong reviews and testimonials help speed up the purchasing process by cutting out the research that customers do online before signing up with one product. When you display reviews, you show the product’s value and earn their trust through customers’ words - not yours. Displaying reviews is like having personal influencers advocate for your product throughout the buying process, boosting sales and building trust with customers. Other places to include reviews to help boost engagement and sales are on landing pages, on ads, and your social media.

[anchor id="nps"]Measure users loyalty with NPS.

To find your evangelist customers and customers who are likely to be ambassadors for your product, you’ll want to utilize NPS or your Net Promoter Score. Your Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer loyalty to your brand and overall satisfaction with your product. You can measure this with a simple survey. Your NPS helps you determine your top class customers who will vouch for your product, give you great feedback and reviews that you can use to drive sales. You can also work closely with your top class customers to better understand how you can improve your product, winning you stronger customer loyalty. Read the article "Effective NPS Implementation: A Guide for SaaS Companies" to get a deeper dive into why leveraging NPS is crucial for modern SaaS businesses. Learn more about measuring NPS with Beamer.  

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Ask for feedback in context:

Customers are more than willing to give feedback. They love to! 70% of consumers will leave a review for a business when asked. However, asking for feedback in an appropriate way and at an appropriate time is a must. Normally, emails after purchase depending on the product are an easy way to ask customers to share their experience. Directing them to a survey link or embedded survey on your site also helps bring customers back to your site. Some companies are also known to offer discounts or other incentives to those who leave feedback. Now, sending out emails is great but they don’t always get the best open and response rates. Naturally, right now, response rates for emails are in the low single digits if you’re lucky. When you do ask it should be in context and time appropriate. Customers these days are used to leaving comments and reactions to voice their opinions quickly and in context on social media. You can bring elements like that into your customer experience to get higher engagement. A great way to both boost engagement and collect feedback from customers is Beamer. Beamer is a newsfeed and changelog you can include on your site where you can share new products, features, company news, offers, etc. All customers have to do to open your feed is click “What’s New” in your navigation or an icon in your interface. A sidebar of new updates appears for them to scroll through which boosts engagement and CTR on any page of your site. You can include videos, images, GIFs, and CTAs to other pages on your site in your updates. Customers can leave reactions and their comments like a social feed. Your team can respond and track open rates and reactions on your updates, giving you a really simplified look at your customers’ sentiment. Quick interactions and feedback like this help boost engagement easily while collecting valuable data.

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[anchor id="indirect-feedback"]Scan other indirect sources of feedback.

Outside of survey responses and support tickets, there are plenty of other places where feedback from customers can be found. One of the most popular places for customers to leave feedback as of the last few years is social media. Customers consider companies to be entities that they can directly interact with about their concerns. They’re also much more likely with social media to share either complaints or praise for your product or make suggestions generally to their audiences. It’s important to be scanning for posts or comments where customers may be giving you insight into what they want. You can set up Google alerts to watch where your product or company’s name are mentioned. You can even set up a Google alert for competitors’ names or products so you can see where they are falling short or pleasing customers. Read our blog "10 Tips for Collecting Meaningful Customer Feedback" to learn the best practices.

[anchor id="replies-to-customers"]Reply to customers.

One of the best ways to win customer loyalty, build trust, and build advocacy is to reply to customers and show active interest in improving your product for them. Customers stick with companies that take care of them. Every SaaS product is going to have tech problems, bugs, and improvements necessary. If your customers see that you are active in helping them through problems and improving the product to their expectations, they will be willing to stick through the rough patches. They also tell their networks about exceptional customer service which in turn helps you attract better qualified leads. Replying to customer emails, comments on social media, comments on blogs, and chat bot messages are great ways to show customers you’re on top of it.

[anchor id="analytics"]Apply analytics.

Your users are giving your feedback all the time as so how they like your product and the changes you’re making. Analytics are what give you insight into that. You can collect data on your customers interactions at many different touch points with your brand and product. Heat maps collected through Hotjar on your website can help you learn what is working and what is not throughout your sales process and make necessary improvements. As your product is changing and developing, it’s important to watch data on how your customers react and what they like and dislike. When you make announcements for new features, updates, etc., you can track data from emails. With Beamer, when you announce new changes on your feed, you can see exactly how users interact with your updates comparatively. On the Beamer backend, you can track click through and open rates on all your updates as well as the reactions and comments customers leave behind. With this information, you can better understand what customers are looking for to keep them engaged with your product.

[anchor id="replies-and-action"]Reply to customers with action and show it.

Feedback is useless if it’s not put into action to improve either your customer experience or your product. Improvement is useless if your customers don’t know about it. Show your customers you’re listening and actively working to meet their expectations by communicating with them after they’ve given you feedback. If you’ve collected feedback via a customer survey, sending a thank you email with a perk like a discount is a gesture greatly appreciated that can win customer loyalty. Sending updates on your teams’ progress as a result of feedback is the best way to use feedback to engage all customers. You can do this via email but open and click through rates are rarely as successful as they should be. Using Beamer to send out updates on improvements is much more effective. With Beamer updates, you can send out push notifications when you post an update and get customers back to your site, engaging with improvements right away.Great customer feedback and reviews can get you a long way in terms of selling to new customers but great customer service can help build your trust and reputation far beyond your efforts. Show customers you’re working on improving your product for them, you’re addressing their concerns, and you’re a comment away with Beamer. Try Beamer to boost user engagement today.Read our blog "How can PLG Teams Build Better Products from User Feedback" for a deeper dive into best practices.Learn how to best summarize and share your analyses to help developers fill and prioritize your product roadmap and build positive, productive relationships with your customers from the new artice "How to make sense of all your customer feedback" .