In a hyper connected health consumer world there is pressure from both outside and inside your organization to make things better. The forces on the inside are constantly pushing to improve. Your customers on the outside are implicitly demanding and expecting that things just work better for them when buying from you and post purchase experience.
Whether it be personalization or just simply not having to give your name, address and account number to three different phone reps when calling support for a problem. Consumers just want a better experience. In either case the push from both sides is toward the same direction or outcome, that is to understand the needs of your customer and serve them better based on their individual desires.
The byproduct of a deep understanding of your health customer includes improved processes, a better user experience and more revenue for the business. The best way to accomplished this is by understanding the customer even better than they understand themselves.
Most companies just scratch the surface when it comes to this level of understanding. They start and stop with demographic information that at best is supported with standard survey data that sounds something like this…
On a scale of 1 to 10 please rank the following.
This type of data will not get your business past the superficial knowledge of who your customer is. This is not much more than demographic data.
To truly go deep, and create a better user experience and more revenue for the business, you need to understand what your customers are actually doing and thinking. And for that, you need to understand what motivates them on an emotional level.
This type of deep understanding can only be gained by getting closer to your customer and understanding their inner beliefs and at the same time tap into their trust.
The best ways to get this new found knowledge of belief is first through open ended surveys.
The Secret Hidden Value Of Open Ended Surveys
(And The Hard Work To Get To The Gold Nuggets)
In much the same way that you only get to truly know someone by talking to them, you have to talk with your customers and non-customers. One of the ways that such a dialog begins is by asking questions and then truly listening to the answers.
The key is listening in a way that puts your ego aside. So that you don’t take offense to any disagreement or attack on your product, your website or your company.
Dan and Chip Heath wrote about the curse of knowledge in “Made to Stick” where knowing too much about something puts you in a position of bias. You’re quite literally cursed because of the knowledge you have about your product and your company. It is that same curse of knowledge that keeps most people from really listening because their ego or knowledge gets in the way. As soon as they hear a problem they immediately go into the defense or into the frame of mind from which the situation was created. i.e. We made the website that way because of xyz, or the backend architecture forces us to do it that way, or even… That’s the way it is here, because that’s the way so and so said it needs to be.
Without suspending your knowledge you can’t begin to listen and if you aren’t listening you can’t hear the value. Your customers and visitors are telling you the problems, you just have to have the ability to truly hear them and do something about it.
This is one reason why an impartial third party is better at this type of data gathering and insight, because they are not as close to the solution and product as someone within the organization.
Open ended surveys start that conversation. They give your visitors room to breathe, to express themselves beyond a series of checkboxes. And in a hyper connected world where everyone is pushing messages at them, the person who stops and takes the time to truly listen will stand out and win.
The Art Of Open Ended Surveys
How you begin this dialog is just as important as having it. Unlike an offline real world dialog, in the online world, you can short cut the small talk and go right for the questions. Which is where the real value is. But first you need to understand who to talk to…
There are two groups of people that hold the key to this valuable data. The buyers, that is the people who have just bought your product. These people are the easiest to reach since they have self selected themselves from all your traffic as a consequence of buying. The best way to reach them is either by presenting them with a short open ended survey on the thank you or confirmation page or by simply including a link to the survey in the transactional email they get from their purchase. We recommend both methods when we take on a health client.
The other group of people are the non-buyers. It is just as important to understand why people do not buy as well as why people buy. Once you understand this on a holistic level you can then begin to remove the elements that are keeping people from buying and support or add the elements that are causing people to buy. But without knowing both sides you’ll never understand the full picture.
What’s Even Better Than An Open Ended Survey?
Open ended surveys are great and can short circuit a lot of the hard work to finding the answer but, surveys will only tell you what people said, and decision making happens mostly unconsciously. Therefore to ask that your visitor consciously express that which is unconscious will only scratch the surface.
To get deeper to un-coding true meaning we need one on one conversations where we can interact and probe further into the unconscious decision process.
There is no substitute for a conversation to clarify meaning and validate our findings from our surveys.
The approach we use is to contact your most recent buyers and schedule a phone interview with each of them individually, usually you can start to get value out of as little as 20 – 50 interviews.
Conducting these interviews is an art in itself. At first it may feel awkward button you break the ice and build some trust, you’ll be able to get to the heart of the question.
Why they bought.
Which can really be broken down into “What’s important to them?” and “What problem is this purchase solving for them?”
However, the interviewee will not be able to express why they bought with any more depth than your findings in the survey, at least at first. The key is to keep digging for the gold. With more open ended questions like, “Is there anything else” and “tell me more”
Combining The Soft Data With The Hard Data
The combination of these two soft data sets, one from open ended surveys and the other from actual conversations that probe deeper combine in a synergistic way with greater insight. Gives you insight that you could never have gotten with one method alone. This combination unlocks the keys into the buying mind of your customer in a relatively short period of time.
Insight Is What Your Going After
Knowing the barriers and motivations of buying for your specific target market allows you to see the buying process from their eyes.
Suddenly you’ll be able to spot the speed bumps and roadblocks that are unknowingly in front of your visitors that are on your webpage. For the first time you’ll be able to develop questions and hypothesis to test that come from a place of knowledge based on both your specific buyers and non-buyers, rather than guesses.
Getting Insights From Raw Data
The output of the data compiled from open ended surveys and phone interviews can be daunting. You’ll have a lot to read through and review. And your first pass through of the data should be to read through it all, after that your head should be spinning and you may need a break but it’s good to dive through first without making any judgements or assumptions, just take it all in.
Then go back and start to make connections and re organize the data into what’s common. What specific phrases or words keep coming up from multiple people.
This is the language that your market is using to describe their pain and is exactly what you should be using in your headlines, copy and calls to action. Reverberating these back to your prospects will connect with them in their language. Next you’ll need to expand on the common threads and intimate understanding
What To Do Next
Once you have a data set that leads to a fundamental understanding of the psychology of your visitors purchase decision, your next step is to go back to the sales page in which you are looking to optimize and overlay your new found insight on top of what’s already happening on the page.
To see what’s happening on on the page, you can simply install Hot Jar or Visual Website Optimizer and review the screen recordings of actual behavior to specifically look at the behavior the current visitors are taking on the page.
- Where are they scrolling?
- Where are they pausing?
- Where are they clicking?
- What’s the pattern to their session? (are they scrolling fast, all the way to the bottom and reading the page from the bottom up? or are they consuming the page slowly?)
- What can you infer from the intent of their mouse movement?
This is what I mean by overlaying your new found insight from your open ended surveys on top of what’s already happening on the page. The survey insight gives you the context in which to infer the behavior.
The next step is to develop several testable hypothesis that you can A/B test to not only move the needle based on data but also validate that your hypothesis was correct or at least in the ball park. This is where true insight into your visitors come from and where the really big impact can be made on the sales page and across the organization by applying that insight into other areas of your health business.
Understanding Your Health Visitors Is The Answer To Massive Revenue Growth
A deep understanding of both your customers (buyers) and lost-customers (non-buyers) is vital to A/B testing and increasing revenue for an online health business. In fact, without that understanding you’re just going to be guessing. And the problem with guessing is that we usually guess based on our own preferences.
Which is the cognitive distortion bias, which cause you to perceive reality inaccurately. Because the way a person feels intervenes with how they think, these distorted thoughts can feed our own individual emotions on the world. The smart marketer however, knows that his customers don’t always think and do what he does. and therefore you have to understand the visitors belief system in order to optimize your business.
Most successful businesses know this and do make an effort to uncover beliefs and truly understand their buyers but almost all of them miss the other side of the coin. The visitors that are not buying. The friction and anxiety in the mind of those non-buyers is jut as vital to know as the reasons why someone did buy from you.
A deep understanding of both the buyers and the non-buyers removes cognitive distortion bias and allows the health marketer to truly uncover the reasons why behind the purchase decisions that go into choosing to buy.
Only once these reasons are clear from both sides can the marketer truly go to work on diagnosing and prescribing the problem of optimizing the sale.
But even then, the prescribed solution needs to be validated. Once we understand the reasons why visitors are buying and not buying then we must develop testable hypothesis around those reasons of belief, trust, anxiety and friction and split-test them to hone in on how to properly express those solutions in the voice of your target avatars.
Because it is possible to get the hypothesis right, that is the reason why, but also get the execution of the treatment wrong. Essentially mis the mark when it comes to how to best express the solution. This is why A/B testing is vital to the framework of optimization. Without A/B testing you’re still just guessing at what you think might work, leaving cognitive distortion bias to creep back in.
A/B Testing eliminates all guessing and bias to leave only the behavior of your visitors to decide for you. But without that deep understanding of your visitors supported by A/B tests it’s very difficult to get to the root cause of purchase decisions and therefore move the revenue needle in a meaningful way beyond just normal fluctuations of business.
There Are Three Funnels Every Health Supplement Business Needs To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire…
The problem is most dietary supplement companies only have one funnel. Through our work in the online health space, we’ve had the opportunity to observe hundreds of health businesses. What we’ve uncovered are the three critical funnels that each work together that make the difference between the average supplement company just selling on Amazon and a multi-million dollar health empire and compiled our findings in the book below. Click here to get the ebook delivered right to your email for FREE.
