Last Updated on Mar 13, 2020 by James W
When you’ve got a business that sells products, it’s crucial that you develop goods people want to buy! After all; if you sell stuff that everyone hates, you won’t have a business to run for much longer.
The trouble with selling products is that businesses seemingly take a gamble on whether they’ll be a hit or a big flop. One of the most common ways to determine how good your products are is to ask people.
There are plenty of ways to garner feedback on what you sell. The only trouble is; how do you know which methods are the best? Today’s blog post aims to give you a roundup of ways you can find out if people love or hate the products you sell!
Perhaps one of the most common methods for gathering customer feedback is email. When a customer buys a product from you, use that as an opportunity to ask them what they think about it.
Make your email personal by asking them to reply back to you directly. It might surprise you to learn that most people will do just that! It shows your buyers that you care about what they think. And it gives you a chance to find out if there’s anything else you sell that they need.
Online surveys
Another method is to give people the chance to fill in an online survey. Put simply, you direct your customers to a particular URL that then loads up an interactive form. You can then report on those results so that you can fine-tune your products for the future.
The great thing about online surveys is that they are easy to set up. And people can use them from their computers or mobile devices. Another positive point about online surveys is that customers can fill them in at their leisure.
Online focus groups
Sometimes you want to open a dialog with your customers. It often makes sense to ask them if they’d be willing to take part in online focus groups.
The way they work is simple. You invite them to a chat session at a particular time. To your customers, it looks as though you are just having a one-to-one chat about the product. In reality, you can talk to several customers at the same time.
Groups get moderated by someone at your company so that questions get answered correctly. Online focus groups are useful because you can gauge their reaction to each question in real-time. That’s right; it’s possible to have video sessions as well as text ones!
Usability tests
If you’re in the midst of developing a new product, chances are you want to find out what people think of it before you sell it. In those cases, what you can do is invite people to take part in usability tests.
Quite often, this involves sending your products out to those people for their opinions and feedback. For high-value items, you might ask them to return those goods or offer them a chance to buy them at a discounted rate.
Companies that sell food products, for instance, will send samples of new ranges to participants and ask them to fill out a survey afterwards. For such industries, it’s vital to gain pre-release feedback. Otherwise, they could end up making no sales!
