The purpose of this book is to help you create a strategy and provide you with tactics to sell more efficiently and effectively online. And as we’ve emphasized before, in order to sell more, you’ve got to know your customers a whole lot better. You should be ready at this point to start creating personas for the different markets you are targeting. But creating personas starts with having the right customer information. The more data you have about your customers, the stronger and more effective your personas will be.
Here are some of the techniques you can use to collect general information about your clients:
Asking your current customers to answer well-crafted surveys will provide you with a wealth of information about your current market and how your products and services are fulfilling their needs. You can also use surveys to collect and track demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic information about your customers.
You can do several things to increase the likelihood of customers filling out your surveys. First, offer a reward to customers who agree to fill out the survey. A $10 coupon can do wonders. Second, keep the surveys short. We like to keep surveys at around 15 questions max. We have properly designed surveys with response rates of close to 30%. We also recommend using online survey tools to create, collect, and track the survey. Of course, the tricky part of making the survey is coming up with the right questions to ask, and there are many books on creating and analyzing surveys. Remember that you are looking for patterns in the responses. Finally, most of the questions in our surveys ask customers to choose one of several answers that best describes their situation. But we also like to give customers a chance to provide input in an open format.
An ecommerce site or physical retail store has easy access to its customers’ zip codes, which is another area where you can find a lot more information about your customers. You can gain considerable insights into your buyers by analyzing specific geographical location trends in terms of race, income, and socioeconomic levels. This will also help you identify top performing areas for your products, as well as underserved areas. Software packages are also available that will provide you with data breakdowns based on customer zip codes. If you are working with a tight budget, you might consider conducting the research yourself, although the process is tedious and requires good knowledge of statistical and trend analysis.
Many customers will not hesitate to let you know what they think of the overall site experience and product or service, especially if you ask. This information is valuable to collect and analyze so that you can continue to provide them with an excellent experience. There are several opportunities to ask for feedback—for example, when a customer decides to “exit” the site without purchasing, or after the customer places an order. Several applications track customer feedback.
Customers who have been with you for years are the best source of information regarding your website, products, and services. We usually ask our clients to give us a list of their top 10 loyal customers. A loyal customer is a client who has been active for more than a year, places multiple orders with the site, generates a certain revenue amount, or prefers you over any other vendors. On the other hand, repeat customers are those who may place multiple orders but are only loyal to the “best offers” available to them. Most loyal customers are willing to take the time to talk on the phone when approached to give feedback about a company.
You can learn more about website visitors by testing different design elements and measuring how visitors respond to them. For example, we might display an image of a female to one group of website visitors, an image of a family to another group, and no image at all to a third group. By examining how different groups react to the images (or lack thereof), you can learn a great deal about your market. Chapter 9 will provide a more detailed discussion of this topic.
Evaluating top competitors is an often overlooked tool for gaining market insight. By focusing on your competitors, their approaches to marketing, how they position themselves, and how they reach their target market, you can discover new ways to reach your market and improve your offerings.