Written by Olga Procevska, the co-founder of Writitude

Whether I am writing product descriptions, email campaigns, or landing pages, I know that there’s one crucial element that can transform my copy from good to great: feedback from customers (and not just them).

Incorporating feedback from your customers and brand managers into your copywriting process is essential.

It ensures that your message resonates with your audience, enhances your brand’s voice, and achieves the desired results.

In this post, I’ll explore the importance of feedback in brand copywriting, providing practical examples from well-known brands.

And share research-backed insights on how to integrate feedback into your content development process.

Why Feedback From Customers is Essential for Effective Brand Copy

Copywriting is both an art and a science. While creativity and storytelling are critical, writing without data or feedback to guide you is like shooting in the dark.

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Incorporating feedback from customers helps to:

  • Ensure clarity in your messaging.
  • Improve engagement and conversion rates.
  • Align your copy with your target audience’s preferences and expectations.
  • Identify areas for improvement or missed opportunities.
  • Stay consistent with your brand voice.

Writing without feedback is risky because you miss the opportunity to adjust your message based on real audience reactions.

Without feedback, your copy might be clever but not effective, or clear but not engaging.

Feedback from customers helps you course — correct, refine your tone, and better connect with your audience.

When Airbnb revamped their website in 2017, they relied heavily on feedback from users, hosts, and the internal team to redesign their messaging.

Feedback from customers helped them shift the focus from “listings” to a more personalized travel experience. This change resonated more deeply with their core audience and contributed to the company’s growth.

Types of Feedback to Consider

When talking about feedback, we don’t just mean asking people if they "like" your copy. Effective feedback goes much deeper and can come in different forms:

1. Feedback on Tone of Voice from Brand Managers

Feedback on a brand’s tone of voice is one of the most important types of feedback copywriters can receive from brand managers.

The tone of voice represents the brand’s personality and shapes how customers perceive and connect with it. Getting the tone right ensures consistency, builds trust, and keeps the brand recognizable across all touchpoints.

Brand managers are responsible for overseeing how a brand is portrayed, and their feedback is key in helping copywriters stay true to the brand’s identity.

Writitude automates this type of feedback. First, a brand manager creates a brand tone of voice guide.

Then shares it with a copywriter. Copywriter then writes a text inside Writitude app or pastes it from a document and gets real-time feedback on text’s compliance with the desired tone of voice.

Writitude’s feedback is structured and pointed, which makes it easier for the copywriter to bring their text closer to the desired tone of voice.

2. Feedback From Customers

Your audience's thoughts and feelings are invaluable. Customer feedback allows you to gauge how well your copy resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.

According to this Forbes article, customer feedback is one of the most powerful tools brands can use to enhance their marketing strategies.

For example, Netflix uses customer feedback to fine-tune their copy, ensuring that descriptions of shows, personalized recommendations, and promotional emails are on point.

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Customer feedback can take the form of:

  • Surveys and polls.
  • Social media comments or direct messages.
  • Reviews and ratings on e-commerce platforms.
  • Interviews and focus groups.

A great example of customer feedback shaping brand copy comes from Amazon.

Their product descriptions, especially for AmazonBasics products, evolved based on customer reviews.

Over time, Amazon started including more detailed descriptions, FAQs, and answers to common customer pain points, which not only improved the customer experience but also boosted sales.

3. Internal Team Feedback

Feedback from colleagues and team members can be incredibly valuable, particularly if they interact directly with customers.

Sales teams, customer service reps, and even product developers can offer insights into what messaging resonates or falls flat.

Additionally, team feedback helps maintain consistency in your brand voice across all platforms.

Take Slack, for example. As one of the fastest-growing business tools, their internal teams, especially customer support, contributed to shaping their brand voice.

Their copy is consistently friendly, clear, and to the point — qualities that users have grown to love.

4. A/B Testing and Data-Driven Feedback

Data-driven feedback, such as A/B testing, allows you to evaluate which versions of your copy perform best.

By showing different versions of a headline, call to action, or email subject line to segments of your audience, you can determine which one gets better results in terms of clicks, conversions, or engagement.

For instance, HubSpot often uses A/B testing in their email campaigns and landing pages to optimize copy for better conversion rates.

In one case, they found that a simple change in a call-to-action button text from “Download Now” to “Get the Free Guide” led to a 20% increase in conversions.

These types of insights only come from constantly seeking feedback and using data to guide decisions.

The Impact of Ignoring Feedback

Brands that fail to incorporate feedback from customers and in-house experts into their copywriting often find themselves struggling to engage their audience.

Worse, ignoring feedback can lead to disconnects between what a company says and what its audience wants to hear. Take Pepsi’s 2017 Kendall Jenner ad as a case in point.

The brand faced significant backlash and was subsequently retracted for being tone-deaf to Black Lives Matter protests.

Had Pepsi engaged in deeper conversations with their audience and incorporated more feedback before launching the campaign, they might have avoided a costly PR disaster.

Best Practices for Collecting and Incorporating Feedback in Copywriting

To ensure you’re collecting the most useful feedback for your copy, it’s important to establish a feedback loop that allows for continuous improvement. Here are some best practices:

1. Regularly Solicit Feedback from Multiple Channels

Make it a habit to gather feedback from various channels — social media, email surveys, customer service interactions, etc.

This gives you a well-rounded understanding of how your audience perceives your copy.

2. Use a Feedback Framework

Implement a framework for evaluating feedback. Not all feedback will be relevant or actionable, so it’s important to assess which pieces of feedback align with your goals and brand strategy.

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For example, you could categorize feedback into three buckets:

  • Must-do changes: Critical feedback that aligns with the brand’s core goals.
  • Nice-to-have changes: Suggestions that improve but aren’t essential.
  • Outliers: Feedback that doesn’t fit with the broader goals or audience.

3. Act on Feedback, Don’t Just Collect It

The worst thing you can do is gather feedback but fail to act on it. Implementing changes based on feedback shows that you value your audience’s opinion, building stronger trust and loyalty.

Brands like Zappos are well-known for this. Zappos listens to customer feedback and incorporates it into everything from their product descriptions to customer support emails, which is why they are one of the most loved e-commerce brands in the world.

4. Leverage Data to Validate Feedback

While subjective feedback is valuable, it should be balanced with data-driven insights. Use tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Crazy Egg to track user behavior on your site.

Pair this data with qualitative feedback to ensure your copy is resonating with your audience on all levels.

Automate Feedback Where You Can

Incorporating feedback into your brand copywriting process is not just a nice-to-have — it’s a necessity.

Whether through a watchful eye of a brand manager, customer reviews, team insights, or A/B testing, feedback from customers offers you a data-driven approach to creating copy that resonates with your audience, drives engagement, and reflects your brand’s voice.

It makes sense to automate feedback that is repetitive. If your brand has a set tone of voice, and one of its characteristics, say, is the use of novel and vivid metaphors, every piece of copy that has no novel and vivid metaphors will get feedback that basically says, “rewrite to add some novel and vivid metaphors to this text”.

The feedback would not change, whether given by Writitude or a human.

The only difference is that while Writitude automates feedback on predictable and repetitive kinds of mistakes, brand managers can focus on deeper and more ephemeral stuff like core messages and creativity.

What to Do if Feedback Isn’t Available?

Writitude is also helpful in cases when other types of feedback, notably customer feedback, are not available.

There are many situations when gathering direct customer feedback is difficult or impossible.

For instance, if you’re a new company just starting out, you might not yet have a large customer base to provide insights.

In such cases, internal feedback and tools like Writitude that give you clear feedback on the tone of voice of your texts can be invaluable in shaping your brand character and ensuring your copy is aligned with your strategic goals.

Consider a situation where you're sending out cold emails to potential clients. You don’t yet have a relationship with these prospects, and they haven’t interacted with your brand before.

Without existing customer feedback, how can you ensure your messaging is on point? This is where Writitude comes in.

Writitude helps fine-tune your copy to make sure matches your brand character, even in the absence of direct feedback.

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In addition, some brands operate in sectors where direct customer feedback is hard to gather due to regulatory constraints, privacy concerns, or simply a lack of engagement channels.

For instance, in highly regulated industries like finance or healthcare, companies may struggle to gather detailed customer feedback. In such cases, internal feedback loops are essential.

Writitude helps streamline this feedback process, ensuring that copy meets the necessary guidelines to maintain the brand’s tone of voice.

In short, while customer feedback is a goldmine for refining your copy, there are many situations where it isn’t available.

Writitude fills that gap by providing pointed insights to help you perfect your copy.

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