Message Mining: How to Mine Messages from your Site Visitors and Customers (Part 1)
Imagine if you could get your customers to literarily tell you what they want to see on your landing page, and how to convince them to complete the product goal on your landing page; well, it’s a possibility, and I’m going to tell you how.
Now, if you read my last post, where I talked about Message Mining, you’d have a background on the basic approach to mining product messages from customers. Some of the big ways to extract/mine messages from customers are surveys, polls, one on one interviews, user tests; but unfortunately, most of these out there are not designed for high-response, messaging-focused, to extract messages from your site visitors and customers in a way where you actually know what you’re going to do with the responses that you get. Most people just send out feedback surveys constantly, and they get a bunch of data back they don’t do anything with it. There are some critical dos and don’ts of conducting messaging-focused voice-of-customer interviews because people seem to understand that they should do interviews and listen to their customers, but a lot of times they don’t really format them in a way that facilitates gathering good messaging insight, and good swipe-worthy content from the interview transcripts. So, let’s start s=with Surveys & Polls.
Surveys & Polls
What really makes a difference in a productive narrative, is the before and after story of interacting with your product. And you can use the answers you get from the strategic questions you ask in your surveys and polls to build your entire product narrative. To get the “before” picture, there’s a need to carry out surveys to your first-time site visitors, to know exactly what’s in their head, when did they start looking around for your product? What going on in their world that’s making them “want to try this?” And what exactly are they looking for? What’s the number one thing that they’re looking for? While, for the unique benefits of your product, desired outcomes, etc., you get those feedback from your paying customers.
Now, the difference between your page visitors and customers is simply their range of product awareness. That can range from being completely unaware, where they have no pain, they have no problems, there’s no reason why they would even look up your product because it just doesn’t even apply to them. And then it ranges all the way over to high awareness, which is people who are return customers of yours. They just love your product, they know everything about it. You don’t need to sell them, you don’t need to explain or rationalize anything to them, they already get it. They got it, they’re just there to get it.
So in essence, the people visiting your site, browsing through your landing page have a low customer awareness level while the paying customers have a higher awareness level of your product, and they know a lot more about your product. Hence, the surveys for these two groups should be different, fielding different types of questions with different expected outcomes. , visitor surveys are particularly great for revealing pain points, purchase prompts, and anxiety. They are great for really diving into and getting insights about the before experience that you’re going to be fleshing out in your sales pitch narrative. Customer surveys, on the other hand, are great for revealing unique benefits, ah-ha moments, desirable outcomes, those types of things that you could only know really once you actually have the product and you understand it, and you see what it did for you and how it improved your life. So, don’t just copy generic templates of customer surveys and send them off to customers, expecting better feedback/results.
There are three key components that you need to be thinking about when designing your surveys.
· Questions (to extract key messages): Here, you include strategic questions that’ll help you get to the bottom of what should be the product message on the page.
· Invitation (to actually engage with the survey): Here, you curate an invitation that is designed to get people to pay attention, open up and engage with you.
· Targeting: Here, you curate the particular set of people you want to reach out to with your survey, your plan is not to reach out to everyone, neither is it your plan to piss off your respondents while doing so.
Let’s take a look at the kind of questions that you could ask your site visitors:
The first question that a visitor sees when they open up the survey and it basically gives them an option to choose from different product awareness levels, should be “which of these describes you?” Now, the options given (as illustrated in the picture above) describes the user thought journey, as it exposes the page visitor’s level of awareness of the product. The second question helps you understand purchase prompt context, by understanding the visitor’s motivation. This happens by asking the question “what do you currently use to and then insert accomplish product-related task or goal?” The options provided will let you know what are the competing methods or products they’re currently using to fulfill that product need. The third question you should ask is, “Is there anything you dislike or want to change about how you complete task x or solve problem y?” This helps you get a sense of what do they want to change. Where is the pain that they’re experiencing ’cause once you understand that pain, you can use that pain messaging in your sales copy to make them understand, to agitate that pain, and make them understand the problems that they want to eliminate when they’re reading your copy? The fourth question is “what matters most to you when choosing a solution or product category x or y?” When people shop, they have deal-breakers, what makes or mars that purchase process for them. If you don’t hit those deal-breaker needs, if they have something in mind that they’re looking for when they’re shopping for a given product and you don’t hit that mark, they will just assume that you don’t have it and that your product doesn’t apply to them. So you need to be explicit. Finally, is there anything holding you back from trying, whatever your product is, right now? This kinda finally pushes the user to go ahead and make a purchase or not. Call it a purchase prompt or whatnot.
As part of my course requirement, I’ll keep sharing more thoughts on Growth Marketing going forward, and hopefully much after that. But in the meantime, these lessons have been made possible by the good people at CXL Institute. If you like what you’ve read so far and think you want to have more of such knowledge, do either wait for my next post (which is a continuation of this article) or visit the link provided.
