Since I’ve been looking at newsletters and customer engagement, its become apparent that I need to know more about my customers and potential customers.
I was just considering one of my projects however, it makes sense to consider other projects which might benefit.
About a year ago Blue convinced me that I should ask potential customers for their email addresses, I didn’t do this via my website, but I asked people at the start of my software.
Then as now, I don’t believe people would create an account on my website, just to download my software.
I was just about to say, I don’t see how to move forward and to build on and improve my website, without analysing customer trends etc. But of course thats what analytics is for, I can look at the features provided and make decisions from there.
This still leaves me with questions to answer, about what information will be useful. Unlike a lot of online businesses I have two marketing venues, my site and my software.
I guess I can leave my site to analytics, maybe get some help to understand whats actually going on from the stats.
For my software, I guess I need to collect the same information or at least try and figure out what will be useful and what I can engage the customer with to help conversion. But nonetheless the same type of information that analytics collects.
by JM
{ 4 } Comments
I hope you don’t end up in a horse and cart situation,
needing customers first in order to be able to engage
with them in order to find out what can be improved.
I think you’re on the right track with analytics. If you can
determine which are your best landing pages, it might
tell you what people think are the most interesting
aspects of your product. On my site I have about 4 main
landing pages, geared for different aspects of my
software. From my stats I can guess (can’t be certain
though) that a lot of people look for “free versions”, a lot
of people look for templates and so on.
If you don’t have enough customers to gain feedback,
look at competitors or similar offerings from other
vendors. Do these give you clues as to direction/
features? I wouldn’t worry too much about bugs – it’s
neat features that products need to make them sell or at
least to engage people enough to make them want to
give some sort of feedback – even if it’s “why doesn’t it
do X”.
Occasionally we do ask customers how they found us,
e.g. when someone makes a pre-sales query about a
possible new feature they’d like in the future. In an
unstructured email it’s very difficult to get info you can
use.
For example, in my experience, people can’t remember
where they download from – probably because they are
downloading lots of packages to try them out and
compare them. A typical response is “I think I found it on
Google and downloaded from your site”, or “looked on
google and there you were”. Without going back and
forth, and potentially annoying people, it’s difficult to pin
down things like: what were you looking for on Google?,
which site was it you downloaded from?, which page on
the site convinced you to download?, which feature made
the difference in making you decide to buy? A
newsletter/ questionnaire format could be a better, more
structured route to getting feedback of this sort.
You right to a point (don’t want to sound rude) I don’t have many customers to find out what I did right, but this isn’t game over.
I think is easier to find out what you did wrong. At the moment when someone subscribes at the start of my program, I send them a double opt-in message and in the confirmation that they will get a
newsletter. I need to work on this email.
Apparently, asking people at this stage what happened and that your working on it is a good thing to do.
I’ve had a couple of K program sales and someone bought 2 packs today, so I’m now thinking that the program might be OK.
That the marketing needs to be vamped up.
When you say, I found it on google etc… with my K program I get a lot of downloads and I think it might just be a matter to educating my potential customers and showing that they missed something.
Also, asking them where they downloaded the program is only so useful.
Good news about the sales. I’m not saying that “where
did you download” is the top question to ask, just using it
as an example to illustrate that getting useful feedback is
very difficult without entering into an extended
conversation. So a newsletter, questionnaire with
multiple choice answers might be a better route.
Yep that could work.
Also, having things to click on and follow is a good way too.
Apparently asking out right for information as long as you show why, like to get some useful information is quite common and accepted. But having a profile which people can access and change info is
important too.
I think I’m going to have a lot of fun planning several auto responder type emails etc.