As marketers we spend a lot of time looking at our customers:
- who are they
- what are their behaviours
- how can we engage them more
- how can we move them from customer to advocate
- how can we encourage them to purchase more and more often?
All of this is powerful and useful work – it feeds back into business strategy, into marketing and product planning and provides us with valuable insight.
It is also a lot of work to keep this data current and the interpretation and insights flowing.
How often do we look at why our non-customers aren’t buying though?
Not the guys who have never heard of you, but those who engaged but didn’t convert.
Those who our data sets (!) tell us match existing customer modelling, but don’t convert.
Often spending time in this space is incredibly valuable – if you can remove even one barrier to purchase what additional revenue can you bring in?
You can find out information on their journey from the following sources:
Email statistics – sends, open rates and clicks, what worked, what didn’t?
So often we are tempted to accept email send results that conform to our norm – ‘this is inline with our average open rates and click-through rates so we are ok’.
Why? Why is your average this? Why is it not 2 points higher? Why are only that % of people clicking through? What is stopping them? What do we know about our customers to inform the content in the newsletters?
The customer journey through your website – what were their entrance and exit pages?
You should already have cart abandonment (or similar) strategies in place, but what about those people who visited but didn’t engage at that level – there was something that made them click and there was a reason they didn’t convert. Look for commonalities in behaviour. Install tracking on your key conversion pages so that you can understand the actual UX (not just the one you planned).
Contact us submissions
What are people asking here? It means they either can’t find it or it doesn’t exist on your website. And if one person is asking you can guarantee that even more people aren’t bothering to ask for the answer, they are navigating to a competitor’s website.
Asking them
If you have their information you can ask them – continuous improvement should be your focus. You don’t need to send them a 10 question survey, it just needs to be enough to analyse barriers and objections.
Asking your customer service team
What are they hearing when they talk to people on the phone or at the counter? What is their solution to the queries they get? How are they overcoming objections. Quite often you can tap the answers give verbally to overcome objections digitally.
There are myriad ways to find out what your customers are doing. Use these and some more to figure out what your non-customers are doing.
Take the opportunity to convert even an extra 1% of these for extra revenue.
