I want to tell you a true story about a discount store from the 1970s called D.B. Sales.
Now, before you start yelling…
“Join me in the 21st century, Grandpa! We have the Internet, Snuggie blankets and millions of cat videos to watch.”
…give me a chance to explain. I promise to make it worth your while.
D.B. Sales was run by Morris and Tessie Benatar -- friendly, hard-working folks who were trying help their small business succeed. The problem is, in the mid-70s, their business wasn’t doing too well. Sales were down, money was tight, and tensions between Morris and Tessie were rising.
Sure, they look nice, but you wouldn't want to get Tessie angry. She had a mean right hook.
Like any good businessperson, Morris doggedly tried everything he could think of to increase sales. He changed the window displays, ran promotions, offered free delivery, and placed ads in local newspapers. But, nothing worked.
Then, one day, everything changed.
Morris finally had a promotion that worked. In fact, the promotion worked so well that he ran it year after year for the next 10 years:
You don't actually have to go out of business to have one of these sales, do you?
Now, why did I tell you this story? Because I think it contains a valuable lesson about how to increase the conversion rate of your website.
Morris spent a lot of his time testing out different ideas until he finally (and luckily) came across something that worked. As online marketers, we do the exact same thing.
We test different button colors, call to actions, headlines, images, and everything else we can think of. Occasionally, on our good days, we come across something that works and we feel good about ourselves.
However, we should learn from Morris. He could’ve saved himself a lot of money, stress, and dirty looks from Tessie, if he would’ve talked to his customers. They could’ve helped him answer one of the most important questions:
Why aren't people buying from me?
This was an easy question for Morris to ask because customers would walk right into his store. But, as people who manage websites, how do we find out why people aren’t buying from us?
In my mind, this is what a website visitor looks like. It makes life more exciting.
That’s why I want to share with you my patent-pending approach* to finding out what your website visitors are thinking.
*Okay, you got me, it’s not patent pending. Does that make it “patent pretending”? <Insert Drumroll>
Five ways to find out why your customers aren't buying from you
1) Chat transcripts
If you have a chat feature on your website then you can get really helpful feedback RIGHT NOW by simply reading through your chat logs. Whenever we’re going to revise a page at UserTesting.com we always start by searching for all of the chats that happened on that URL.
This is an easy way to learn about your customers’ main questions, concerns and objections.
If you don’t have chat on your site, but are considering adding it, then check out SnapEngage. They’re who we use and we’ve been very happy with them.
Chat logs make it easy to find out what questions your visitors ask on specific pages.
2) Surveys
If you have a question for your visitors, or want some feedback, then often times the best thing to do is ask. Use tools like Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey or 4QSurvey and ask open-ended survey questions like: “If you didn’t sign-up, can you tell us why not?”
Sometimes the easiest thing to do is ask.
3) Talk to your sales and customer support people
Your sales and customer support people spend all day communicating with your site's visitors. This means that 1) they’re amazing people and 2) they understand the objections of your web visitors better than anyone.
So go talk with your sales and support people and ask them how they overcome the common objections. You can then take this learning and apply it to your site.
4) Eat your own dog food
Spend time pretending to be your customer and use your website and product. At UserTesting.com we have one of our team members pretend to be a customer each and every month, write up their suggestions for improvement, and then email them directly to our CEO.
This isn’t quite as good as unbiased feedback from someone in your target market, but you’ll be surprised at the amount of good ideas your team will come up with.
5) "Think aloud" testing
Look, I’m biased, but this is definitely my favorite way to find out why customers aren’t buying. With “think aloud” testing you can watch people in your target market speak their thoughts out loud as they try to accomplish common tasks on your website or mobile device.
When you run this kind of test you can see with your own eyes where your users get stuck or have problems.
You just think you know your users.
Remember, the people visiting your website are actual human beings – they’re not “uniques” or “pageviews”. To understand how to make your website better, you need to learn from Morris Benatar: either pretend to always be going out of business, or talk to your customers.
Nice post Phil. Had to laugh at the never-ending "going out of business sale" which in fact is now illegal in many states (we'll call this Grey Hat Conversion Rate Optimization :)
Before computers, business people had to actually talk to customers to find out what they liked. This post is a good reminder to re-engage.
Thanks Cyrus! It's amazing how much we can learn when we take the time to talk to our customers. Last week (completely unrelated to this post) I talked to 15-20 customers and prospects of ours over the phone and learned A TON. I think it's something we all should consider doing on a regular basis.
These are great tips. I'm going to see if we can try some of these soon. I'll add in one other thing (although it may be a nuance one of yours above. My company (a nationwide franchise) has been doing a survey afterwards called Net Promoter score - the % of people that would recommend you to a friend less the % of detractors. They ask just 2 q's - how likely are you to recommend us to a friend (score of 1-10) and then why did you choose that rating.
There was great learning there, but they didn't stop w/ just past customers...they then started to survey non customers (the ones that said no) as well as the ones that we never even met with. Some great learning for us.
I want to give you a huge high five because this is great insight! All of us here at UserTesting.com are big fans of Net Promoter Score. We even have it built into every test run on our site so that it's easy to see your rating compared to others :).
Good article although I would firstly say it's probably not a great idea to take the lead from D.B Sales and put up false information as the internet is far more closely monitored and people will notice that you haven't closed down.
Aside from that point 4 of asking your team to put themselves in their shoes will often fail. It's far better to try and ask nicely with tea and biscuits, a tenner or a discount to your product to get in the real deal. I've found previously that Mums with young children in particular have a completely different mindset and trying to understand how they think and use your site when you aren't in that mindset means you will continue to develop the site for the wrong audience. Even if it costs money you are going to do this research once a year min. so invest talking to the people you care about - your audience.
Strongly agree with your fist paragraph. DB sales were probably not the first, or the last to use that shady marketing tactic.
I especially agree with point 4 (eat your own dog food) because each and every one of us is a customer. It doesn't matter whether we are business owners, rich, poor...whatever, we still have to buy food, consumables etc and we still look out for the same type of things i.e. credit card information, delivery terms, return policy, whether product will be big enough etc.
So going through the site with an unbiased viewpoint should give an indication of possible problems that may crop up. Why did I say unbiased? Because as soon as you start thinking about the business then you already know the policies and exactly where the links are, but does the customer know? In fact, what is that customer doing? Are they in a rush or glancing at your site in the 10 minute window on their break at work? Does your site communicate needed information with those questions in mind?
Just things to think about when looking at your site for possible conversion pot holes!
These are definitely great things to think about it. As marketers, we know every nook and cranny of our site so it can be really hard to see it with fresh eyes. That's why it's so important for us to learn to look at our sites critically from the viewpoint of the customer and also get feedback from people in our target market.
Eat your own dog food!
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and experience the website as they would! If the site has usability or navigation issues, fix them. If you experience slow load times, fix it. Customers won't stay and buy if they have a difficult time on your website!
Thanks for sharing Phil!
Yes absolutely! Usability, personalization, enticing content or offer and a very good customer care all play major role in conversions. Conversion rate optimization is not a rocket science but it requires lot of AB testing and improvisation to meet the user expectations or needs.
Great, great reminder post that you do need to step out of your company to be the customer...tend to forget this at times. I love the comment eating your own dog food because it is something that 'sticks' well in minds..thanks for sharing.
Eat your own dog food has got to be one of the most important aspects when looking at the service you provide.
I used to work with a digital agency that had no concept of how the customer felt about their services (frankly they didn't really care). I found it hard to understand why they couldn't see they customers (angry) point of view.
As an SEO, the thing I think that pees of my customers is jargon. I try really hard not to talk in jargon, but I am guilty of thoughtlessly expecting people to know what I'm talking about when I mention conversions, backlinks etc. I kick myself up the ass for it regularly and trying to train myself out of it.
I totally agree... I only like "eat your own dog food", as this totally goes with our industry of online marketing, the rest are like hit n trial for me.
Thanks for this post. I wonder how well the "going out of business liquidation sale" approach would work for e-commerce. Probably not good for subscription-based websites like SEOmoz. :-) But seriously, a sense of urgency can be a great way to catch interest, and I like your other suggestions as well.
Last year Rand did a Mozinar on conversion rate optimization called "Big Picture CRO" but it seems SEOmoz didn't post the video afterward due to recording issues. The slides can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/randfish/big-picture-cro A lot of the takeaways were the same - ask people why they purchased from you, or why they didn't buy. Getting to know customers and lost potential customers will open your eyes and drive a plan of action. That will help more than any A/B split testing or technical CRO activities.
The first question I ask myself while on my website is...Would I buy from me? or would I buy from my bigger competitor?Once I can answer yes to this question..... now how do I set myself apart?
Its sometimes difficult to get to a point where I can say yes in a competitive industry against a giant. This is exactly why I enjoy my job. I love the competition and I have the confidence in myself to know I can take our business to the next level.
These are great suggestions towards taking these next steps and setting myself apart from the competition. I am currently working on implementing some of these features. Thanks for the article!
I'm glad you found the post helpful Dane!
I really love your question: would I buy from me or would I buy from my competitor? That's a VERY tough question to ask and I think it gets right to the core of the issue.
Loved the "eat your own dog food" part. Surveys don't work for some of the clients I have worked with because they don't get enough or useful feedback. I personally think customers are getting lazier and that most of them aren't fond of surveys. I myself don't like them when they are 10 pages long or so. So it is really a challenge on how you will approach the customer and encourage him/her to take the survey (prizes, saying it will only take a few mins to answer, etc).
Great article Phil, keep posting!
I agree with you about keeping surveys short and sweet. We generally take our surveys through many different revisions until we're sure we're just asking the questions that we need to. In addition to surveys, I get a lot of value from talking to customers over the phone. It helps remind me that customers are actual people, and helps humanize our company for the customer.
Whenever we want to launch a new software or build in some more features into existing software, we conduct a survey through surveymonkey, drive traffic to that survey using FB ads targeting the appropriate demographics (tight targeting), and post development, we have the entire team conduct individual testing.
When the entire team uses a product simultaneously, we get some amazing feedback that we would have generally missed.
Last sentence that people visiting a website is not "uniques" or "pageviews" I use for many years. This advice useful to anyone a web site owne.
Hi Phil,
Nice tactics but you forgot one more... me personally sometimes I am watching my site and I am asking my self " I would buy something from this website?" If the answer is yes, then I start to review my delivery options etc.... Then I think if I am happy with the services offered (shipping cost,delivery time etc). If the answer is still positive, then I think that something is still wrong. The reason? Site is mine and thats why I like it. Then I ask friends if they will buy something from that website. If the answer is still positive, I improve it and I ask them again. If the answer is NO, I relaunch the site from scratch. This is the way to improve my sites.
My 2 cents
Well thanks phil, i am adding one more thing in your #2 survey point, that aweber.com is also one of the most working place for survey. You can use it for asking questions to your clients or users by the way of surveys. Thanks for all of that
amir
Sometimes in our haste to solve the problem we fail to realize we may be the issue! It always comes down to being an effective communicatior/listener and the better we are at both, the more effective we will be in meeting our client needs. Loved the white-out photo. HA!
I completely agree with you Anita!
It's especially important when running moderated tests with folks. We have to remember to be on our best behavior and be good listeners. It's so easy to jump in and explain what we were thinking rather than just listening and accepting the amazing feedback.
Hi Phil,
We found this post both humerus and insightful!. Like those who commented above, we believe the points made in #4 to be very true!
Not only is the self critiquing process productive, but it also allows you to focus your efforts on the areas that need them instead of building up negativity over a lack of conversions!
Thanks for a great post!
Thanks for the kind words!
With only so much time in the day, it's definitely important that we focus on the areas that are going to have the biggest impact on the bottom line.
Great post Phil!
It reminds me a bit of quote: "To see the future, you must look into the past"
We usually forget to do some good old things while trying to follow latest technology trends.
Agree with your points. I try to talk to people BEFORE they leave (this post and the How to Deal with Challenging Clients from the main blog fit very well together today.)
The hardest thing to do is get outside your own knowledge. Copyblogger's 30 Days to Building a Better Blog challenge includes "watch someone use your site." I highly recommend that. Don't just ask about your site - physically watch someone who doesn't know your site but is in your demographic use it. It really helps - even more than using mouse tracking software and such.
I love your strategy of going back through the comments before doing any improvements on a site. How can you fix something adequately if you don't know exactly how it is broken? Eating your own dogfood is certainly necessary, but I find more value in getting other's opinions as mine are almost always biased. Great article!
Great summary of some of the key features, I think basically it looks like think like a visitor and if you can't then ask your visitors. I think it's too easy to be scared of doing that.
We are going to implement vCita on our website to try to get more feedback from current website visitors ('real time' feedback!) which should be really helpful going forward.
A pop-up question simply asking why someone is leaving the site or why he/she doesn't buy the product would indeed be valuable. Personally as a user I don't think I'll find it intrusive at all. Will try that technique :) Thanks. Great post as always.
Integrating a chat section along with survey and quiz is a great way to actually analyze what is wrong with your business and how to take remedial measures to fix those concerns and objections.
The main idea should be to actually take concrete steps in order to fix the user experience.
Trying to act like a customer and finding the problems is the best way to move ahead in the business. There are various roadblocks one has in his/her path but try to be in the "Shoes of the customer" and you will be able to overcome those obstacles.
These are a very few simple steps which one can take in order to help their business, website grow but most of the people forget the basics.
Great post Phil.
Still there are many business owners who wish to keep their websites with pages which are note useful for business conversion.
Hi Phil,
Thanks for the Qualaroo shout–out. One of the things that we've found to be really effective is starting with an open–ended question to identify confusion and pain points, then as the results start to crystallize switching to a click-to-choose question listing the top most common issues (you can always provide an Other field to catch outliers).
We've found that most people have the same or similar issues for a given website, so it makes it a bit easier on the analysis side to make a switch when you start to see some patterns emerge in the responses. That way you can track the response trend improvement over time as you roll out new changes and features to address pain points.
Morgan
Qualaroo
Live Chat seems answer to greet, interact and assist customer as the best way for maximum conversions
Great post, thanks for sharing!
To expand on the chat transcripts section -- we have chat on our website and have found it extremely useful to have new employees answer questions for the first few weeks of working here. I myself am doing it now (although I've been here for a while) and I'm learning things about our product that I didn't even know to ask about prior to answering chat questions. As someone in marketing, it provides a lot of insight into the way our messaging works and how customers understand our product.
Thanks again for the post!
Hi Phil,I thought a lot about this post today...It probably helped that our main Website is down all day, and continues to be down, so I couldn't get much done at work!
I think there's another marketing lesson embedded in your story. That lesson is, "Don't knock what works." I can't tell you the number of times I've seen a marketing team abandon an offer that was working extremely well, simply because the CEO was tired of it.
Morris was smart. If it's working, and continues to work, for God's sake, continue to do it. Forget about vanity, snootiness, marketing snobbery, etc. He didn't worry that people were thinking "Gee, that guy is still going out of business and it's been 10 years!" He wasn't thinking about that. He checked his vanity at the door and did what worked.
Humility makes for good marketing practice. Ego makes for good marketing content. Courage makes for good marketing tests and tenacity makes for good marketing plans.
Thanks for a great post.Dana
I have found A/B testing to be very valuable for our site. Just another tool to put in this bag of tricks.Great read!
Hi Phil, nice post with some good takeaways.
This is ever so slightly at a tangent (as I know this isn't the point of this post) but did anyone ever identify why Morris and Tessie's shop was not doing well? If they'd asked their customers why are you not buying from us they surely wouldn't have said, "because you're not going into liquidation" and I presume the prices weren't lowered at the same time (or were they and price was the problem?)
So was the only change the perception that people thought they were getting a bargain? If so, do you have any thoughts how we can replicate this in the online world (without breaking the law of course)?
Cheers.
Hi Libertine,
I'm a huge fan of tagents (just don't tell my boss) so I'm happy to tell you a bit more about what Morris and Tessie found out. D.B. Sales was a discount store located in a nice part of town so the guess is that most people didn't believe they were an actual discount store. People walking by the store likely thought, "A discount store in THIS neighborhood!? As if!" It wasn't until Morris and Tessie put up the Liquidation Sale sign that people actually believed they were getting a good deal at their store -- even though they didn't change their prices at all.
Unfortunately, Morris never asked people who weren't coming in why they weren't coming in. He just luckily -- after many years -- stumbled upon a solution.
So the moral of the story is that rather than guessing and trying out a bunch of different things, we can talk to customers and prospects to get a better idea of the changes we should make. It's always possible to stumble across a big win, but it's faster if we talk to people :)
Thanks for letting me go on this tangent!
Love the white out on the screen ;o)
your pal
Chenzo
Great post... basically this post says that look forward to the future but your past must be kept in your mind...and it is also spoken that build up your customers trust through deliver quality service or product to your valuable customers.
Why are you suggesting that the UserTesting.com tool to be used only internally within the organization and not for it's main published use to get some random users to review your site? Please provide more feedback about your opinion of this tool.
Hi Irving,
UserTesting.com is a GREAT tool for getting users in your target market to review your site. I didn't mention our tool specifically in the "think aloud testing" section of the post because I didn't want it to become a UserTesting.com commercial :). If you have specific questions about our tool then just shoot me an email and I'd be happy to help.
I don't totally agree with point 2 (because people use to lie in surveys), but I totally agree with point 4. It's good to see if you would be willing to pay for your product/service and to know what makes it different from the competition.
You literally never tell us what Morris would have learned had he spoken to his customers. Was it that they like it when he goes out of business?
The conclusion doesn't follow the thesis. There also isn't good evidence for the effectiveness of the services you plug in the post.
Really informative. Thanks for that