Hey I’m Shane, welcome to another issue of The CRO Weekly where each week I explore how to build a high converting Ecommerce store. If you like this issue, I’d really appreciate if you would share this post with a friend:
Sure, attribution is important. But it’s not what drives your whole marketing machine forward.
Ideas do. New, creative ideas are everything. Ideas are what drive new ads, new products, and new website features.
And yes this is a newsletter about CRO but at the end of the day good marketing == higher quality traffic == higher conversion rate.
And how do we get new ideas? The worst place to source ideas is from your own head. Every day you and I fall victim to one of a hundred+ cognitive biases. And even worse - we tend to think we know a lot more about our customers than we really do.
Instead, the best ideas come from your customers. Talking to them gets you out of your own head and focuses on getting ideas directly from people actually buying and using your product instead of trying to come up with them yourself.
That’s why I want to convince you today to turn off your post purchase attribution survey (at least for a few days at a time) and start using it to gather fresh new ideas.
Let’s look at an example
Andrew Farris is the CEO of 4x400 - a holding company that owns and operates multiple DTC brands.
One of those brands is Slick Products which sells cleaning products to dirt bike riders.
Well, at least they thought they were selling to dirt-bike riders.
In an episode of the E-commerce Playbook with Andrew and Taylor Holiday, they told the following story:
One of the things we did for Slick is, we added Enquire post-purchase surveys to our site. It allows you to ask your customer any question you want, multiple choice. So for Slick what we asked was, ‘what vehicle are you washing?’.. Slick was founded by a dirt-bike riding family, we created an equity deal with the greatest dirt-bike rider of all time Ricky Charmichael, an owner of the company and from the early days we had been really dirt-bike heavy. Do you remember what the percentage of our customers that ride a dirt-bike was? It was like 15% or less. Do you remember what the number 1 was? ATV/UTV to the tune of 50%. We have at least 3x as many ATV/UTV people, which is a different customer from a dirt-bike person. Now we have this bit of information that a huge portion of our customers are riding ATVs/UTVs.
That’s right, they had 3x as many customers riding ATVs/UTVs than dirt-bikes! Meanwhile, all of their marketing was geared towards dirt-bikes.
The rest of the episode Andrew and Taylor talk about how they use this bit of information to build new marketing campaigns. You should give it a listen.
What do you ask instead?
Okay so you’re willing to give it a shot and take down your attribution survey for a few days. So what do you ask?
The two options you have are open-ended questions and multiple choice.
The good thing about using a multiple choice question is that you will get a 40-50% response rate. The bad thing is you close off learning anything new.
For example, if you ask “Why did you buy our product?” and list 4 options then instead of learning something new, you’re asking customers to confirm one of the reasons you presented to them.
With an open-ended question, you may get a response that is completely different than what you could have expected.
Both can be valuable but I prefer to use a simple rule:
Use multiple choice when you already know the full range of options. Otherwise use open-ended.
For example, “Did you buy this as a gift?” only has two options and you know them.
Whereas “Why did you buy this?” doesn’t have obvious options.
What questions to ask is going to be very brand-specific. But generally speaking, here are a few questions to get you started:
Great Open-Ended Questions to Ask
Why did you buy our product?
Was there anything that almost stopped you from buying?
Did you have any hesitations about buying our product?
what new colorway/style/size would you like to see next?
Great Multiple-choice questions to ask
Are you buying as a gift?
Have you ever told someone about X brand?
Who are you buying this for? (yourself, family, etc)
if we made an X widget would you be interested?
That’s all for today’s issue. Today’s issue was ~700 words when last weeks was about 2400. Do you like the long or short form better?
As always, if you enjoyed this issue please let me know on Twitter: