Step Four Of The Inbound Marketing Methodology: Delight

f you’ve been tuning in to the previous blog posts, or are at all familiar with the inbound marketing methodology, you understand that the purpose is to provide value at every stage of your customer’s journey. You want your customers to be advocates for your brand, so in order to do that you need to continue engaging with them even after they’ve made a purchase.

Customers stick around if they’ve had a good experience. Sounds easy enough to provide, but how exactly do we translate that into business practices?

1.SURVEYS

There’s no better way to find out what your customers think of you than to straight up ask them.

There are multiple ways you can discover this information. You can use market surveys or questionnaires sent directly to previous buyers on your email list, or you could use an exit intent popup directly on your website. Exit intent detection tracks mouse movements so when your customer appears to be ready to leave your page they will be given a popup that gives an additional offer or asks a question.

When crafting a survey there are a few best practices to keep in mind.

1. Ask open ended questions. There is no better way to reach an audience than to speak to them in their exact words. I could write an entire post about this one (stay tuned, I probably will…), but it comes down to making your audience feel heard.

2. Be meticulous when you craft your questions. You need to be careful not to present leading questions that predicts their answers or sets up a particular response, because that may skew your data. For example, asking “how good was your experience?” leads a reader to automatically respond with “good”. Try something more objective like, “how did you feel about your experience?”.

3. Keep it short.  As a rule of thumb, 40 questions max is optimal--anything past that, the amount of people who will answer dramatically drops.

Surveys not only let you know how your customers feel about you, but can also provide valuable insight into specific pain points that you may not have known they had. So moving forward you can leverage that information to continue providing value.

2. Content

Now that you better understand your customer’s needs, you can design your content in a way that attracts more qualified prospects and builds brand loyalty and credibility for your business. Using the data and feedback you’ve received you can optimize your service in a way that reflects what you’ve learned. You can use direct quotes from the responses in your open ended questions to hone in on the fact that you truly understand what your customers need and what they desire, and you can create blog posts based on specific topics that your audience wants. Providing value to customers long after they have first become a customer is beneficial to everyone involved. It’s a win-win situation!

3. Listen

The process of providing value never really ends, it is a well tuned machine that you need to continue updating based on feedback and data. Long after your audience has already become a customer, you will want to continue nurturing that relationship. We all know that it costs less to retain a customer than it does to get a new one. Continue listening to what your audience says--about you and your competition--that way you can always continue to improve. Using social media, and google analytics you can view trends in the marketplace and develop a strategy that will continue to grow alongside you.

Thanks for reading the series on the inbound marketing methodology. If you have any additional questions. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask! Or if you need additional help on how to integrate the inbound methodology into your own business, reach out to our team of experts. We are here to help.