Know Why Customers are buying (and not buying)
First thing first. To grow your sales, you must first grow your understanding of how customers are perceiving your brand, website, and products. Stop guessing and just ask them.
But before you worry about what to ask, when and where, it’s important for you to know ‘who’ to ask? You should understand the distinction between data collected from visitors and paying customers. If you only have visitors coming to your website, who are visiting and leaving, you ask them. You don’t have an option. But if you have ‘paying customers’, you must first ask them.
The feedback collected from paid customers is far more valuable than random visitors and window shoppers.
Action item> Right after a customer places an order, ask “What almost stopped you from placing your order?” or a similar version of it on one or all of the following touchpoints:
- Thank you page
- Order confirmation email
- A dedicated automatic follow-up email sent right after the order confirmation email
- A manual email sent from the Founder’s email
- A phone call in which you thank the customer and ask this question verbally
Document and process the answers given by your customers.
Take the CEO’s call. Ignore what doesn’t make sense to your unique business situation and apply what does make sense. Be ready to discover some real gems and information worth gold, such as website usability issues, payment methods not supported, pricing, shipping, etc.
Doing this exercise regularly will also foster a deeper human relationship between your brand and your customers.
This is part of the Tweetstorm series by I Love Fashion Retail about “How to Grow Sales of an Online Fashion Brand into Multi-Million”. You can check other tweets and posts of this Tweetstorm series here.
