Finding the Right Message

by Jennifer Havice

  Pop-up survey tools

  More and more companies are coming out with online software that can be integrated into your website to perform pop-up surveys. Depending on your needs and traffic, you can go low budget or spend a small fortune each month. Here’s a list of a few that are worth checking out:

  Qualaroo: By far the most expensive of the tools, Qualaroo is one of the best for on-site surveys. A nice feature it offers that other tools don’t is conditional logic when asking questions. This means if you want to ask a yes/no question that leads to an open-ended question based on the response, you can do that.

  WebEngage: This solution has a free plan. You have to search for the link on the pricing page, but it’s worth it. You can create surveys and feedback pop-ups, along with notifications.

  Hotjar: This tool includes not only on-site polls and surveys but also heat mapping and conversion funnel tracking. Plus, there’s a free version.

  Phone or Skype interviews

  Having a real live conversation with your prospects and customers can give you insights that just aren’t possible from asking survey questions. When you talk with someone, you’re able to ask follow-up questions and encourage the person to give you more details.

  As with your surveys, you’ll want to target existing customers who have worked with you or bought from you within the last six months and your prospects who have yet to purchase from you. The most effective way to do that is by reaching out to those people who have previously shown interest in talking to you. Those will be the people who have sent you e-mails in the past thanking you for answering their questions, telling you how great your product is, or even wanting to hire you again.

  Also consider analyzing your e-mail list. Providers like MailChimp show you who on your list opens your e-mails and with what kind of frequency. Pull out the top ten or twenty people who are the most engaged with your e-mails as candidates to reach out to.

  Tip: Start creating e-mail swipe files. Every time you receive an e-mail from a customer or prospect with praise or feedback, place it in an e-mail folder. Give each folder a name that corresponds to the type of content inside (e.g., Customer Thank-You Notes, Customer Questions). Over time, you’ll accumulate a list of highly motivated people to contact when you need feedback and a nice little storehouse of words to mine for later research.

  Getting the interview

  Send an e-mail similar to the one asking for a response to your survey. The same rules apply. Keep it short, sweet, and conversational in tone. Let the person know why you’re interested in talking to him or her, how long you expect the conversation to last, and where you’d like the conversation to take place (e.g., on the phone or via Skype).

  Tip: Link to an online scheduler in your e-mail. These are third-party applications that allow people to choose from open times on your calendar. Less back and forth over e-mail attempting to find a mutually convenient time for both of you means you are more likely to get that interview booked.

  Fifteen to twenty minutes is barely enough time to create a rapport with someone so you can get meaty answers to your questions. In an ideal world, you’d want to set aside at least forty-five minutes for an interview. The problem is most people aren’t willing to commit that much time to an interview. You run the risk of getting hardly any yes responses. That’s why I suggest asking for no more than thirty minutes and making the most of it.

  Questions to ask

  Think of your interviews as less of a Q&A and more of a conversation. Your goal is to find out as much as you can about their feelings, motivations, and concerns. This means asking those open-ended questions, listening, then following up to see if you can get the person to elaborate further.

  After asking a few basic questions about the person’s background or business, you’ll want to ask questions like these:

  How has using my product/hiring me improved your business/life?

  What kind of experience have you had using the product/working with me?

  What were the problems you were facing in your business/life that led you to my product/solution?

  What are the kinds of things you don’t like about products/solutions like mine?

  Listen to their responses and, whenever possible, move the conversation forward by asking them either to tell you how their experience made them feel or to tell you more about it. The closer you can get to their core feelings about your product, solution, or business, the more insights you’ll have when it comes time to determining your ideal customer’s drivers and barriers to purchase.

  Do I really need to interview people?

  Interviewing people can be intimidating and time consuming. Not everyone wants to do it. You can get a wealth of information from all the other sources I outline in this book without ever doing an interview. However, I suggest setting aside time to talk to at least five of your prospects or customers. If you manage to book only two interviews, take what you can get. Think of this as your opportunity to connect with those people most interested in what you have to offer. If nothing else, you might find answers to questions you didn’t even know you had.

  A last word on interviews

  The best way to keep track of what’s being said in an interview is to record it. Taking notes can work, but remember that the goal here is to get the words verbatim that your prospects or customers are saying. It can be difficult to stay focused on the person you’re talking to while writing everything down. Consider using screen-recording software for Skype calls or call-recording software if talking on the phone. Both will allow you to make a recording of the conversation, which you can then have made into a transcript. Always tell the person you’re interviewing that they’re being recorded and get their permission.

  E-mail script: Get people to respond to your interview request

  Here is another e-mail template that you can use and customize. Once again, I’ve included two subject lines for those of you who enjoy doing a bit of split testing with your e-mails.

  Subject line #1: Quick question for you, [person’s name]

  Subject line #2: I’d love to chat with you

  Hello [person’s name],

  I’m doing some research on [insert whatever types of products you design, services you want to sell, or even content you’d like to write] and am asking a few of my [recent clients, customers] if they’re willing to jump on a 15-minute call with me.

  There’s no sales pitch, just looking for your thoughts on [insert what you want to talk about].

  If you’re game, click here to pick a time that works best for you.

  Thanks,

  [Your name]

  Other ways to learn what your customers have to say

  There are several other places you can find answers to your questions without creating a survey, sending an e-mail, or picking up the phone.

  Testimonials

  If you’ve been in business for some time, you more than likely have a number of testimonials from past clients. Hopefully, these will already be sitting on your website for prospective customers to see. Or, you’ll have them in e-mails sent to you. Either way, they can be a terrific resource for words and phrases that tap into why people love what you do.

  Live chat or e-mail customer support logs

  If you’re a business that uses either a live chat on your website or customer support by e-mail, then you should have logs that document your correspondence with customers. These are phenomenal resources for discovering what questions and concerns are cropping up for your existing customers. They can be extremely helpful for understanding bugs in your system or problems with your product, too.

  Blog comments

  Sometimes your blog posts will create even more questions than answers for your visitors. Don’t look at that as a negative. Every question that crops up is an opportunity to understand what your customers are looking for from you or your solution. The comments section can also be a gold mine for people expanding on how they feel about a topic. Remember in Chapter 1
how I said that digging into feelings gets you closer to the true motivations behind why people want to purchase? Depending on how active your readers are in the comments section and how much they enjoy interacting with you there, you may hit pay dirt when you go to message mine.

  Social media comments

  Take a look at your various social media channels for comments by fans or customers. Often, you can find powerful mini testimonials in the form of tweets or Facebook comments. These short snippets can give you an idea not only of what your fans rave about but also the words they use to do so.

  Final thoughts on pulling together your own customer research

  Conducting customer research, whether it’s for product development or website optimization, takes work. It’s easy to get bogged down. You may find yourself falling down one too many rabbit holes thinking you need more and more information to get the job done when, in fact, you don’t. Consider what your goals are for your copy and your website. Getting ten interviews and hounding your e-mail list for months to answer survey questions may not be worth your time or your e-mail subscribers’ patience.

  Before you start creating surveys and lining up interviews, take a look at the customer research you do have that has been hiding in plain sight: existing survey responses, testimonials, tweets from raving fans. Set them aside, and we’ll get back to them in the Chapter 4 when we talk about pulling out key messages to use in your copy.

  What to do next

  Start by coming up with a game plan for what customer research you’ll need to do. In order to do that, take inventory of any voice of customer data you already have. This data can exist in the following forms:

  Testimonials

  Past survey responses

  Customer service chat logs

  Relevant blog post comments

  E-mails from prospects and customers

  Once you’ve done that, determine a goal for the surveys or interviews you’ll be doing. Pick your survey tools, draft your questions, and send e-mails to your list. Consider reaching out to a handful of your customers and prospects to gauge interest in phone or Skype interviews.

  Part II

  Analyzing the Research

  Chapter 3

  How to Do Customer Research without the Customers

  What happens when you’re just starting out or don’t have loads of customers who are eager to respond to your survey questions?

  You can still do customer research to help your website copy. You just have to be a little more creative with how you go about it. This is where I let you in on the best trick of the trade, one that I keep in my back pocket at all times. It’s called review mining, and I learned it straight from the queen of conversion copywriting herself, Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers.

  What is review mining?

  Review mining is the process of pulling out the most compelling snippets of copy you can find from reviews of products or services similar to your own (we’ll get into exactly how you do it in the next chapter). You start by spending some quality time on places like Amazon, Yelp, or Etsy trolling through the review sections. Your goal is to learn as much as possible about the wants, needs, and motivations of real live customers so you can plug that right into your copy.

  I’ve gone through this process for many clients, from software companies to stationery designers. And it all starts out the same way. I brainstorm the best places to look for commentary by consumers.

  Where you go mining depends entirely on what you’re selling. For instance, let’s say you have developed a line of nontoxic cleaning products with all-natural ingredients. By typing the words eco friendly cleaning products into the Amazon search bar, you’ll get over 15,000 entries to peruse. Most have multiple reviews with people openly discussing what their likes and dislikes are in black and white.

  Sounds pretty easy, right? And it is…most of the time. When you can find a tangible product that’s comparable to yours in every way, you may be able to make Amazon your one-stop shop for voice of customer mining. Some products have hundreds of reviews, keeping you busy for hours.

  But what if you’re trying to find out what people think about a service that doesn’t lend itself to online reviews? Or if you’re selling a product that’s relatively new to the marketplace? Suddenly, knowing what to search for isn’t so straightforward.

  What to do when you don’t know where to look

  Instead of merely focusing on what you’re selling, shift your thinking to the outcomes your prospects want to achieve. Even if you don’t have your own customer feedback to draw on, you probably have a pretty good idea what people want from you. Your product or service solves a particular problem. Your first step is to identify that problem and stick a pin in it.

  Once you’ve pinned down what you believe to be your prospect’s biggest problem, ask yourself this question:

  If I was trying to solve [insert your prospect’s problem], where would I look online to find the answers?

  When you think in terms of where your ideal customers might search for solutions, you’ll have an easier time finding the places where they may be hanging out talking about it.

  A real-world example from the research trenches

  A couple of years ago, a digital design agency came to me asking for help with their messaging. The guys at the agency had decided it was about time they put together a solid value proposition for their home page and had someone rewrite their signature marketing piece. They had a handful of testimonials for me to look at but no surveys or interviews.

  How tough could this be? I thought. There’s a ridiculous amount of people talking about website design and development. No problem.

  Once I started digging in, I found it was a problem. Why? Finding the words spoken by clients about their concerns, needs, and wants when it came to hiring a design agency proved far more difficult than I’d anticipated. Going on forums to see what designers and developers had to say about their jobs and reading book reviews on Amazon about web design wasn’t going to cut it.

  After spending far too much time coming up with a big fat zero through my research, I took a deep breath and asked myself this: If I needed to hire a digital design firm and wanted to know the advantages and how to avoid the pitfalls, what would I search for?

  Suddenly, my mind-set shifted. Instead of the question revolving around where, it became what. This meant no longer going to my usual hunting grounds like Amazon or Quora first but starting with a good old Google search.

  I put in long-tail keyword searches like digital agency client questions, hiring mobile app developers, and UX designer skills. I found articles in online business magazines that discussed what motivated businesses (similar to the ones attracted to my client) to hire agencies, written by the people doing the hiring. Even better, an article cropped up about what digital agency clients say in private, filled with quotes tapping into clients’ biggest objections

  Even though I didn’t have the words of my client’s customers, I had the next best thing—words from other people’s customers. And that was enough to help fill the gaps.

  Looking beyond reviews

  The previous example illustrates that you can find people talking about comparable products and services in places other than reviews. When you are forced to think outside the box and mine alternative sources, start by asking yourself what problem your customers need to solve, then think about where they would go online to look for the answer. Look to blog comments and forums in particular when you want to find the words people use to define what they struggle with most. Here are several other places to search for gold:

  Community forums: Try searching for the problem your product or service solves, and include the word forum in your search.

  Reddit: This site contains forums called “subreddits” on just about every subject you can possibly think of.

  Quora: Go here to find answers to just about any question. Do a search on a product or subject and you’ll find people writing about it.

/>   Competitor blog posts and testimonials: Look at the comment section of blog posts and at the testimonials on competitor sites. These can give you clues about what questions and praise people have for your competitors.

  Keeping track of your online sources

  As soon as you start searching online for places to mine, make sure you have a system in place so you can easily refer back to your sources. This will be important once you start digging into the various review sites, blogs, and forums.

  There are multiple ways to go about doing this. You can go the spreadsheet or Word/Google document route, copying and pasting the URLs onto a page. While that’s a far better alternative to keeping bookmarks saved in your browser, consider using a bookmarking application instead.

  My two favorite tools are Evernote and Airstory. Think of them as your online filing systems. In Evernote, you can create notebooks and then individual notes to stick in them. Those individual notes can include links to web pages, along with tags to make searching for the content easier. Airstory allows you to save links and catalog them as well, but what makes it special is its outlining feature. You can create notecards, group them into individual projects, and then easily move them around so you can see how every idea relates to the other.

  No matter which tool you choose to use, set aside a few minutes to put a bookmarking system in place before you start Internet-surfing. I suggest creating either a separate document or an Evernote notebook devoted solely to your message-mining project. From there, categorize or tag each link source. The point is to make your resources easy to find so you don’t waste valuable time hunting for a link you’ve already looked at.

  What to do next

  Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Think about where they might search online for the solution to their problem. From there, make a list of sites and potential keywords. Consider using an online tool such as Evernote or Airstory to keep track of all your links and to jot down any notes about them for future reference.