Do You Know Who Your Customers Are?
I mean, do you really know them? Not just demographically, but what is driving them, what emotions did they have that led them to you and to use your products or services?
Getting To Know Your Customer
A business cannot rely on just the best practices to be successful anymore. Consumers have many choices and the key to a successful business is to be their first choice. No brainer – but how does a business make sure they are their consumer’s first choice?
To do this, we must understand the customer, and to do that we must empathize with them. We need to know, what are their drivers for making decisions. For your website, it is not only looking at what the user has done on your site but why did they go there in first place. These are not always the same things. We can make these discoveries with user research.
How To Conduct User Research
User research is what helps your business mitigate risk and works to create a roadmap on what to prioritize for optimization.
User research is done in two parts:
Qualitative Research
The why and the how, which will lead to empathy and understanding the customer’s drivers and pain points. This data is subjective, cannot be generalized and consists of words.
Quantitative Research
The what and the how many, which is where we understand things such as bounce rate or funnel drop off for consumer conversions. This data is objective, can be generalized and consists of numbers.
There are a few ways of conducting qualitative research such as customer surveys, interviews, and in-person moderating testing. In-person moderating should be a one on one.
In-Person Moderator Testing
If you choose to do one on one in-person moderator testing, it is important that you get the right users. The users should not be students (unless your demo truly is students) or work colleagues. You need to write a good scenario which sets tasks and does not ask questions. The greatest strength and/or weakness to a one on one is the moderator. Your moderator must make the user be at ease and feel that they have the freedom to answer and do as they feel. They need to be able to point things out without making the participant uncomfortable and they need to take notes on everything. Having another person taking notes from outside of the room or from a video is also very beneficial for learnings. Lastly, the moderator needs to be neutral, even if only on the outside. Their biases should not show to the user for any reason. In a great one on one, 99% of all talking should be done by the participant.
Some other ways of conducting qualitative research are by using heatmaps, sessions recordings or 5-second tests. These are just a few of the ways to conduct qualitative research, there are more. It is important to find the one that works best for you and your business.
Gathering Quantitative Research Data
Using tools such as Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, you can conduct your quantitative research. These tools if set up right, contain a lot of data insights as to what is working on your website and what isn’t.
Connecting the Dots
Combining the data from your quantitative research with the learnings you gathered from your qualitative research will connect the dots between the consumer’s reasons for coming to your website and where they left when they could not fulfill this request. It can be daunting to scrub through all of this data and decipher what it all means. But from this data, you can start to build your roadmap as to where the customer’s pain points are on your site, strategize to optimize and work at winning more customers!
Need Help With That?
At Top Draw our focus is on helping your business succeed. Interested in learning how your website could be better serving your customers or want to develop strong digital marketing? Reach Out To Us, we would love to have the chance to help your business grow.