Understanding your prospect is key conversion rate optimization, after all how could you successfully sell to them without knowing what they want, what their fears or concerns are or how they will truly benefit from buying your product? Not benefit in the way you say or think they will but benefit in the way they think and hope they will.
To do this you need to start with gathering qualitative intelligence directly from your customers or prospects in their own words.
The two big ideas here are:
- Listening
- Dialog
To truly listen, you need to suspend your own beliefs about your product, your website, your business strategy and everything else. There’s an old saying the CEO at a previous company I worked for used to say. You have two ears but only one mouth, so you need to listen twice as much as you talk.
Dialog happens only after you have truly listened. If you have a dialog before you have truly listened then it will degrade quickly into a one way conversation or be so biased by your own beliefs that you might as well not bothered because you probably did not hear anything before you started the dialog. Always start dialogs by listening first.
Online there are four top sources to begin listening and foster dialogs to get closer to truly understanding and converting. Here they are in no particular order.
- Customer emails
- Customer service
- Online feedback tools
- Usability testing
Customer emails are perhaps the best place to start. Think about it, these are customers motivated and concerned enough to actually send an email. Plus this is the perfect place to sift from listening to dialog by reaching out to their initial hand raise and learn even more.
Your customer service department is a gold mine of information. They are on the front lines and hear the concerns of customers on a daily basis. The problem is usually time to really extract the data with your call center. This is usually done best one on one with a few key reps, and following the listen first then dialog to further clarify model.
Online Feed Back Tools like (Survey Monkey, Q4, Survey Gizmo, Kampyle) fill the gaps of customer emails and your customer service department. These are daily opportunities to learn what your prospects and customers are saying in their own words.
Usability Testing is where you really start to uncover what can not be expressed in words. The goal here is to round out what the other three tools can not give you.
The key to using these qualitative sources of data is to distill it down and extract the information into friction and anxiety points that are actionable to increase your conversion rates, but at least you’ve got your work cut out for you, so what are you waiting for?
Get to work.
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