When looking to attract new clients to your landscape company, chances are many of them are dealing with similar challenges that your existing customers once had.
If you are good about seeking customer feedback, you can use their input to help drive your marketing and craft powerful messages that will resonate with your target leads.
Customer Feedback Sources
Seeking customer feedback is beneficial for knowing what you’re doing right, where you can improve and their overall preferences.
You can gain these insights by conducting online surveys during and post-project completion or after servicing a property. You can also conduct in-person questionnaires, but you need to take care the information is accurately captured.
Make sure your surveys are straightforward and ask relevant questions. It’s best to have a mix of questions where respondents can rate aspects on a scale of 1-10 and include additional comments.
Having a Net Promoter Score is another way to gauge customer satisfaction and is calculated by asking the question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”
The score is then calculated by the percentage of customers who answer with a six or lower (detractors) from the percentage of those who answer with a 9 or 10 (promoters). Those who answer with 7 or 8 are considered passives and are not included in the NPS calculation. For more context, you can prompt those who score from 1 to 8 on what your company can do better. Those who answer 9 to 10 can be asked what it is that you do well.
Encouraging clients to leave online reviews is another way to garner honest feedback. If you promote leaving reviews, it’s a good practice to respond to both the positive and negative ones left on Google, Yelp or social media platforms.
Another way to find customer feedback is social media listening. This calls for monitoring your company’s mentions and tags. While it’s common for a disgruntled customer to mention a company they felt performed poorly on social media, others may choose to give you a shoutout for a job well done without leaving a formal review.
Marketing Channels
All of the positive messaging you receive from these different feedback channels should be collected and reviewed for commonalities. Depending on the type of praise will determine where it would be best used in your marketing efforts.
For example, if a number of clients mention how responsive your landscape company is, you might want to include this on your website. If a potential lead is on your contact page and you have reviews mentioning how timely you are responding or marketing copy that stresses you pick up the phone on the first ring, they’ll be more inclined to contact you.
Another good option is using customer feedback to develop your email marketing messages to leads. For instance, if your NPS promoters all talk about your attention to detail, this is something you want to highlight to prospects. You could use a subject line like ‘Tired of things slipping through the cracks on your property?’ to catch their attention and then go into all the ways your landscape company goes above and beyond when servicing sites in the email.
This input can similarly be used in your marketing collateral. Perhaps your crew’s friendliness stands out to your customer base — you can mention that you visit every property with a smile on your door hangers or direct mailers.
If customers tag you in pictures of the finished project you did for them and compliment your team’s professionalism, sharing this post on your own social media can capture the authenticity of their satisfaction.
Best Practices
One major key to utilizing your clients’ feedback is ensuring you have their permission. Making generalizations based on the bulk of responses, like saying you’re ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘dependable,’ is one thing, but if you use a client’s wording verbatim, it’s best to get their approval first.
If you do decide to use a customer’s quote, avoid editing or embellishing what they had to say to maintain authenticity.
Also, don’t forget to update reviews on your company website so they feel timely. Even if the reviews aren’t dated, having the same three quotes year after year on your page can make some believe you haven’t received other positive reviews since then.
