How to Encourage Your Users to Leave their Feedback
Not all users are the same. Some may be very eager to make their opinion heard and will leave a great deal of feedback. Others are shyer and will use your platform quietly, or quit if there’s something that bothers them. And there’s a third category of users who aren’t aware that they can leave their feedback. They simply don’t know that’s possible or that you care about hearing their thoughts about the experience they have using your product.And although there are no official statistics, we believe that the majority of users don’t leave any feedback. As user advisor Esteban Kolsky notes, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest just leave. According to SuperOffice, “For many companies, the absence of negative feedback is a sign of satisfaction. But, as the research shows, this might not be the case. Your customers may not be happy, or worse, they’re sharing their bad experiences with others.”Having this in mind, it’s important to encourage people to leave their feedback and build this bidirectional communication, to empower your users, and let them know that their opinion matters and their bad (or positive) feedback will be taken into consideration.This is the ultimate way to build a long-lasting business connection with your paying customers and reduce the churn rate. But with this challenge at hand, what are the practices for getting people to leave their feedback?To answer this question, we’ve put together a series of tips:
Create an email campaign letting users know their feedback is welcomed
User feedback email
Feedback email subject
One of the reasons why people don’t leave feedback is because they simply don’t know that’s possible.Also, some may forget. So one way to prevent this is to launch an email campaign and tell people that you’ll appreciate any feedback or suggestions. You can send different emails at different user stages. For example, once the customer will access to your platform, you can send them a welcome email (before the onboarding), stating that they can leave their feedback at any time.You can send another email a few weeks later once the customer is used to your platform. Also, you can send periodic emails reminding them about the option to leave feedback. But also remember to include a brief explanation on how users can share their suggestions in the email. If you want to make the email more personal, you can record a Loom video and show users how easy it is to leave feedback, as well as highlight how important these insights are to keep improving the product.
So one way to prevent this is to launch an email campaign and tell people that you’ll appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
Make it easy for your users to leave feedback
Upvoty feedback software
Feature requests and bug reports
And since we’ve mentioned “easy” in the previous step, let’s talk about the user feedback software. It’s not by accident that we’re focusing so much on making things simple for your customers. Nobody will want to waste their time trying to figure out how to leave their feedback. But if you make it easy and seamless for your paying customers to share their thoughts, they’ll be more than eager to let you know what improvements they’re expecting or what feature requests they have.Upvoty is one tool you can use to collect user feedback easily and fast.It allows you to create different public boards for users and private boards for team members based on multiple types of feedback you want to collect, such as “bug fixes” or “feature requests.”Also, you can personalize these boards with your brand identity and share them, both publicly and privately, on your custom domain or via widgets.Apart from that, users are invited to review different items on the product board and vote for the relevant ones. Moreover, it enables your team to work on user feedback. And that’s not all. If you want to discover a powerful user feedback platform, please, visit our website.
Incentivize the feedback
coffee feedback
Usually, people will leave reviews if there’s something in it for them. In exchange for Capterra or G2 reviews, customers may get Starbucks or Amazon discount coupons. So why not apply the same strategy to user feedback?You can’t incentivize every single piece of feedback. If you do that, you’ll run the risk of getting too much feedback and spending too much money on gifts. But you can incentivize the first feedback you get from a new user or the feedback that will end up on the product roadmap and sent to development. You can even run a contest. As for the incentives, instead of discount coupons, you can offer people the option to upgrade to a higher tier for 30 days or use your premium features for free for a month.
Communicate the updates you’ve made
Changelog communicate updates
Another thing that will make people understand how much you care about their feedback is sharing the product changes you’ve already made. In other words, don’t just update your product using the feedback of your customers—make an extra effort to communicate those updates to your users.This can happen via a monthly article or newsletter. Plus, you can give credit to those users whose feedback helped you improve the product, fix a bug, or add a new feature. People will appreciate it greatly, and it will encourage others to leave their suggestions and feedback. Another way to communicate your product update is to publish a changelog.Upvoty will help you build a beautiful feed of all the launches your product has deployed lately, enabling your users to be always informed about the new updates.
Make your roadmap public and share it with your new users
public product roadmap
Finally, it’s crucial to make your users understand that your product is a work in progress, and it will only get better. For that, we’d advise you to share your roadmap publicly so that your customers could see what your future product development plans are.That’s also something you can do by using Upvoty (image above). You can easily tie all your feedback and feature requests together into a product roadmap and share it to inform users what’s new and what to expect. This step will make your users feel part of the process and motivate them to leave their feedback.
Recap
There are countless reasons why people may not leave their feedback. And most of your users will stay silent until they simply stop using your product. To keep this from happening, you’ll want to be proactive in your efforts of encouraging users to leave their feedback.
Create an email campaign that informs your users about the possibility of leaving their suggestions about the product and how to do it.
Make sure that leaving the feedback is a hassle-free process. To do that, you’ll want to partner up with a reliable and friendly user feedback platform, such as Upvoty.
Next, you can incentivize the feedback. The only thing to remember is that you’ll want to put a limit on the number of gifts. You can incentivize the first piece of feedback of a new user, for example.
Also, you’ll need to communicate all of the updates you’ve made to show your users that you’re taking their feedback seriously.
Finally, make your roadmap public and let your users know that your platform is a work in progress, and they can help improve it.