How to Structure Your Amazon Feedback Funnel

Seller feedback is a numbers game.

The more you sell, the more opportunities to ask for feedback. The more times you ask (within reason), the more likely you are to get it.

However, if you ask at the wrong time or with the wrong message, you might actually do yourself a disservice.

In this post, we'll discuss best practices for structuring your funnel and building a predictable flow of feedback.

Automation's Impact on Your Funnel

For the sake of conversation, let's imagine that you're an enterprise seller. You average more than 1,000 orders per month on the Amazon marketplace, not to mention the countless orders you process through your own website and other marketplaces. Things are really cooking, which means your team is extremely busy.

With such a robust order volume, it's easy to take a wait-and-see approach, assuming that feedback will naturally follow. True, studies have shown that less than 5% of Amazon shoppers leave seller feedback. But what about the other 95% of customers who don't leave feedback? What does this mean for your seller reputation?

Assuming a generous 5% feedback conversion rate, the math for your store works out like this:

• 1,000 orders per month
• 50 feedbacks per month
• 600 feedbacks annually

Compare the wait-and-see model to a more strategic approach. Instead of hoping for ratings to appear, the strategic merchant solicits each customer for candid feedback. With such a robust order volume, however, manual solicitation is not possible. Rather, by leveraging a feedback management tool such as FeedbackFive, you can structure a logic-based solicitation funnel that requires little effort on your part. For example, you might set this up in FeedbackFive:

• Ask for feedback one day after delivery
• If no feedback is provided, ask again seven days later
• Once feedback is provided, stop soliciting

With campaign automation in place, it's obvious why many of our customers exceed the industry's standard feedback success rate. Through continuous campaign testing, let's assume you're able to increase your rate up to 10%. A nominal increase at first glance, but in the long-run this can pay huge dividends for your seller reputation.

• 1,000 orders per month
• 100 feedbacks per month
• 1,200 feedbacks annually

That's a net increase of 600 feedbacks in one year (as compared to a wait-and-see approach). More Buy Boxes anyone?

Crafting the Right Message

Automatic solicitation can only benefit your company if you communicate the right message. At a very basic level, an effective feedback solicitation should contain the following attributes:

• Focuses on customer satisfaction: Remember, feedback is ultimately a measure of the customer's happiness with a transaction. Before you ask the customer to leave a feedback rating, you should first confirm the buyer's satisfaction. If the customer is not happy, you should offer to make it right.
• Makes a direct ask: Don't be shy about directly asking for feedback. Amazon.com, Inc. actually encourages sellers to request it.
• Provides instructions for leaving feedback: Most customers have never left feedback on the Amazon marketplace. It's therefore important to provide a direct link to the appropriate URL along with clear instructions for doing so.

Spend time crafting your message. Be sure to do several rounds of proofing, particularly for grammar and style. (Of course, if you are a FeedbackFive customer, you have access to our prebuilt email templates.) Never stop tweaking your content and monitoring how the changes impact your feedback funnel.

Asking at the Right Time

Consider the lifestyle of your average customer. For example, if you sell in the United States, the vast majority of customers are awake and engaged between 7 am and 10 pm (local time). Many merchants target their solicitations to arrive in inboxes during this time frame.

Going another step further, FeedbackFive offers flexible automation rules, making it possible to solicit at times that make sense for your target market. For example, you can:

• Select a specific time of day to send solicitations
• Time emails to arrive a certain number of days after the order date
• Distribute solicitations based on delivery date
• Trigger certain emails when positive feedback is received

With advanced logic like this, the possibilities are endless. For optimal results, be sure to consider how your customers' consumption cycles impact their willingness to leave feedback. In time, you may find that certain products require unique campaign sequences. Luckily, FeedbackFive allows you to build unlimited campaigns to test your hypotheses.

Get a Better Feedback Funnel

It's time to get serious about building a more robust Amazon feedback funnel. FeedbackFive has been trusted by merchants worldwide to request millions of feedbacks.