Shopify Summit: Know Your Customers

How Much Do You Know About Your Customers?

What could you tell me about your customers if I asked you these few simple questions:

• Where do most of them find out about you?
• Who else do they consider buying from?
• What product are they looking for next?

If you’re not the brand that knows the most about your customers, then some other brand is — and that’s a huge advantage.

In this 5 minute blog post, I’m going to share why I think post-purchase surveys are an amazing tool for growing your business, and why understanding your customers’ experience is essential to creating better products.

The Best Way to Get Valuable Insight

Right now, Shopify is investing in learning more about their Shopify Plus customers (like me).

They flew me out to their headquarters to speak to their team of 80 customer service reps, so I could help them better understand the experience of the merchants they’re serving.

They wanted to know what challenges we’re going through and what our lives look like. And no matter what you’re selling, you can get a lot of value from doing the same thing in your business.

Except unlike Shopify, you don’t need to fly out your best customers to get this information.

At Smart Marketer we gather this information by sending post-purchase surveys to all our buyers, and the insight we get from their answers is incredible.

The Post-purchase Survey I Use in My Business

Check out the survey questions we use in BOOM! by Cindy Joseph, my 8-figure cosmetics brand on Shopify:

1. What can you tell us about yourself?
2. Why did you decide to buy today from BOOM! by Cindy Joseph?
3. What doubts or hesitations did you have before completing your purchase?
4. How can we make your shopping experience better? (website, emails etc.)
5. Which other brands did you consider before deciding on BOOM! by Cindy Joseph?
6. What new BOOM! products would you like us to add?
7. Anything else you’d like to tell us?

We’ve received 21,257 responses to this survey so far which is way more than we have time to analyze, but customers’ answers to these questions have influenced everything from product development to website optimization.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this post-purchase survey has helped my business generate millions of dollars in sales.

Post-Purchase Survey Best Practices

Here’s a great piece of advice: Make your survey questions open-ended.

That way the answers are in your customers’ own words, and they’re a goldmine as a copywriting resource. And if you avoid limiting customers to multiple choice answers, you’ll get valuable answers that you couldn’t have predicted.

And when your customers buy from you a second or third time, send them a new survey. They are what we call hyper-consumers, and learning what they like can unlock huge opportunities for your business.

Like inspiring your next big idea.

You can really never invest too much energy in learning about your customers, because the more you invest the better your products will be, the better you can serve your market, and the more sales you will make.

And now that you’ve finished reading this blog post, I highly recommend you go and create a post-purchase survey today.

We use Survey Monkey, and they make it super easy.

P.S. I’ve included these questions as an easy way to add value to your business, so for your customers’ sake please, please copy them.