Customer Research: Your Road Map to Effective Email Marketing

Customer Research is the foundation of effective marketing. When it comes to email marketing, it becomes all the more important to research and know the target audience so as to deliver a personalized experience with relevant content.

Most of the email marketers struggle with customer research and trying to gather information that would aid better performance and more email conversions. To make things easy for them, Uplers connected with Joel Klettke in order to understand how to go about customer research and do it right.

We are sure his insights will help you enhance your email marketing strategy.

Read on.

How to approach customer research in the right way?

The key to perfect customer research is to have structured conversations with your internal team as well as the customers. Go past the surface details and try to understand the customer persona and how they make decisions.

Principally, you should consider five things in customer research.

• Pain points

Consider the challenges that the person is experiencing and looking forward to solving, in the personal walk of life or their business.

• Desired outcomes

You should figure out the ideal outcome that your prospective customer desires to achieve when their problem is solved.

• Anxieties

Sometimes, the prospects might refrain buying from you even though they need your product. Anxieties come into play here.

• Priorities

As a marketer, it is imperative to learn about the mission critical concerns of your prospective customers and the things they care about, the most.

• Awareness level

By knowing about the prospect’s awareness level, you can give context to the entire email copy.

Let’s consider an example to delve deeper into it. Suppose you are at a restaurant and your friend has food stuck between the teeth. If you let him know that there’s something stuck in the teeth and he already knows about the usage of dental floss, he is regarded as a highly aware prospect. It would be easier to sell dental floss to such a person.

On the other hand, if someone has no clue about dental floss, it would be quite difficult to explain how it works. That’s the thing with awareness. If your prospect is not aware about the challenges or solutions, it becomes a task to make him or her understand about it.

Consequently, you must get a complete idea about the awareness level of your prospects before communicating with them. Whether it is through interviews, onsite polls, reviews or testimonial quotes, you should capture information in the customer’s own words, which will help you to reach out to your leads in their own words. A familiar language makes the prospects feel that you empathize with them and you know about their challenges and outcomes they are looking for.

Albeit, it is not enough to put together the rough skeleton of a persona. You should know who these people are and what motivates them. As an example, if you are setting up an email survey for the existing customers to know how they came to know about your solution and what their experience has been like, it is strongly recommended that you approach the brand-new customers at the outset. These customers are very familiar with their pain and why they chose you over other alternatives. They will have clear outcomes that they are hoping to achieve. You can even arrange a live interview with the customer to learn more details about their business and how your solution helped them.

How to get the customers to get on an interview with you?

It is obvious that not every customer will be willing to do a live interview with you or fill out a survey. However, that does not mean that you assume that no one is going to get on a call with you. Typically, when you are sending out a survey, even if you get a 10% response rate, it is pretty good. Treat it like snow bowling by starting to learn what’s available and then growing that data set over time.

To get the customers on an interview with you, you ought to have a good relationship with them. If you have a customer who has been with you for a long time and he is happy with you, you can simply make a considerate ask. Just make sure that you clarify with the customer that you are not going to make the information public and are going to use it only for internal research. (unless you have got permission to publish a case study.)

Let the customer know that you are going to listen to them and create a friendly, comfortable environment that encourages the customer to give an honest feedback.

What kind of questions should you ask to the customer?

Ask open-ended questions to your customers that would give you a detailed insight into how your product or service has solved the problem for them. Ask questions like “What results have you seen after the implementation of our service?”, “What has the result meant for your business, your employees, and your boss?”, and “What kind of pain points did you want to address with our solution?”.

How to gather the right customer information?

Whenever you place a survey on the website, make sure that the visitors can self-segment themselves so that you can have a clear picture of the buyer’s personas. Also, it is important to realize that website surveys might often come off as interruptive for the visitor. Therefore, you should try to keep these onsite surveys as short as possible. Ask questions such as “Did you find the information you are looking for?”. If the customer answers “No”, you might have to make some changes to the page. However, make sure you take into account the answers from genuine visitors.

Another method of collecting customer information would be through the testimonials. You might have received testimonials and reviews on Trustpilot or Clutch. You can manually create a Google Sheet and figure out the most commonly used phrases by running them through text analyzer. By doing so, you will clearly understand the pain points and challenges as perceived by the prospect. It will inform you about the trends, which you can incorporate in your email copy, landing page, and website content. It will let you set the right expectations and deliver what you have promised.

Wrapping Up

The customer’s thoughts, feelings, objectives, and priorities influence their behavior to a great extent. Customer research, therefore, plays a prominent role in developing new marketing opportunities through email.

Just implement these tips and see how it benefits your overall marketing strategy.

We would love to hear from you in the comments below.