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"It's Tesla for customer feedback"
Automating ideas from customers
Fil from Bedford
June 26, 2025 • Reading time: 8 minutes
Yo! Paperboy here 🗞️
Customer feedback is very valuable. No one will argue that.
But most brands suck at collecting it.
Usually it’s an annual survey that goes out to a cohort of recent purchasers. Not great.
I’ve found the bigger the company, the more disconnected it gets from real feedback. This is why massive focus group agencies exist.
I’m going to dive into a few cool ways you can collect feedback at different stages of your customer’s purchase journey (and drum up sales along the way) in a mostly automated way.
Methods of collecting survey data
Abandon Checkouts
In your abandon checkout, if 3 emails have passed and they haven’t purchased consider the following.
Send them an email asking “hey, what gives?”. Tell them they can reply to the email directly. 99% of people will not answer. 1% will tell you why they didn’t purchase.
Set up an internal alert in your flows. You can set this up directly in your Klaviyo flow so that if ~5 days pass after your abandon flow is done and they haven’t purchased, it will notify you via email (or Slack if you wanted) to call or email this customer directly. You can set up the alert to tell you what product they abandoned, what their name is, what their phone & email is, etc.
It’s up to you which of the two you choose. I’m a big proponent of calling customers. Most operators are too shy to call people. Just do it
“Book a Consultation” Callouts
If you have a moderately complex product or catalog, consider adding a “contact us for a free consultation” in all of your campaigns and flows. Have it link to a Calendly.
This works great for sub-40 year old crowds. If your demo skews older, you should have a phone number for customer support called out on all emails and your website. If you don’t you’re probably leaving a ton of $$$ on the table.
These calls will be part sales part feedback. And you’ll be shocked by how many people ask you to enter their credit card info and checkout on their behalf.
You could do this for apparel brands (virtual personal shopper), supplement brands (virtual nutritionist), for a home brand (virtual interior designer), etc.
Post-Purchase Surveys
No this isn’t an Aftersell sponsor plug.
You should be asking customers questions post-purchase right after checkout.
Yes you can email them, but the % of people who will reply will be ~2-3%, whereas with a proper post purchase survey app like Userloop it should average around 30-40%. Userloop is not a sponsor - I just like the app.
You can ask great questions like:
How did you hear about us
Was anything on our site broken
Demographic q’s
Userloop uses AI to summarize the answers for you so you don’t have to work with any google sheets.
I have some brands where I ask 7-8 questions. We learn a lot through these.
Customer Reviews
I won’t dive deep here. Most have reviews set up.
The only advice I have is to make it personal.
Most brands set up reviews using the templated “Tell us what you think” email.
By just injecting a short passage about your brand story, how much reviews mean to you, or some other personal touch, you should expect review opt-in to double. Most brands sit around 1-2%, and with a strong email they jump to 2-3%.
It doesn’t have to be fancy. The simpler the more authentic for reviews.
If you’re lazy, take your reviews monthly and ask ChatGPT to summarize key takeaways, watchouts, and ideas for ads or emails from it.
VIP Reach Outs
Every 3 months you should pull a list of your top 20 customers and try to call & email them. 2 or 3 might answer, the rest will ignore you. It’s weird, but totally normal.
Reward them with special gifts, give them VIP offers, make them feel special.
You’ll learn a lot from your best customers and they’ll find it cool that a brand talks to them.
Facebook Groups (or other communities)
This strategy is reserved for bigger brands with audiences that lend well to community.
You can automate post-purchase emails to funnel your customers to a VIP Facebook group where they can share their experience with your product.
Facebook lets you automate weekly posts, but the best communities have great moderators and very active members.
Groups like this are a gold mine for customer feedback and product releases. They are also a lot of work.
What to ask customers
This is super subjective and brand-based.
Starter questions I like:
How did you hear about us
What made you want to buy our product (or not)
Is there anything you wish we carried
Was there any issues on our website
Customer demographic info
Do you like our emails / ads / website
What do you think about this idea we’re working on
I always prefer to get on the phone over email. IMO a 15-minute call is worth 1,000 survey responses and 100 email responses.
I know founders who go out of their way to talk to 3-4 customers weekly using the approaches I just shared with you. It keeps them sharp and close to what customers are thinking.
They can ask them about anything. The most recent email, their new drop, new trends, etc. The closer your relationship to your customer, the more info they’ll give you. A huge competitive edge.
Hire someone to handle this
Not enough brands build a process around feedback. You can have a VA in charge of gathering feedback and setting up weekly calls for you. This will cost you ~$200-500 per month if done using overseas talent.
If you set up a proper system for gathering the feedback, then a regular monthly 30-minute review session, and a 1-hour weekly block for customer calls, you’ll have a well-oiled feedback machine.
As your business scales, you should delegate this job to an employee and have them report quotables & general customer feedback to you weekly.
Use this feedback for emails
Your customer feedback should inform things like:
How often can I email
What are the key pain points to call out in flows
What types of campaigns do people like
How often should I run promos
etc.
Start somewhere, but not everywhere
When I give people this feedback usually 2 things happen:
They build a super complex review collection process that no one has time to review
They are too shy to call customers or email people and never setup up anything
Think through what is right for you. What can your team truly handle?
Don’t go off and do everything I just said at once. Try implementing one piece every month.
The easy stuff (post purchase survey & abandon checkout email replies) can be setup easily. Phone consults & VIP reach outs are much harder.
And please, don’t by afraid to call customers. Seriously. I know it seems scary and awkward and weird and a whole bunch of things. But I promise once you get that one customer who gives you a golden insight, you will be mad at yourself for not doing this sooner.
Now go do the thing!
Meme of the Week
That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞
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