Are you sold on the idea that it’s beneficial to understand your customer personas?
Hope so. If not, it’s guesswork. When you know who your customers are, where they are, what they love, and what they hate, you can market to them much more effectively.
“How do we get our customers to do what we want them to do?”
Digital marketers get asked this question all the time. But it’s the wrong question.
How you design a survey will affect the answers you get. This includes the language you use, the order of the survey questions, and, of course, the survey scale: the default values and ranges you use.
Customer journey mapping is a widely used and impactful technique that can help you improve your product, marketing, UX, and merchandising decisions.
However, like other UX research techniques (including user personas), there’s some vagueness and obscurity around how to actually create user journey maps.
Customer personas represent each specific segment within your target audience. Fueled by data-driven research, they map the “who” behind the buying decisions of your products or services.
When marketers think of using data to come up with test hypotheses, they often turn to their digital analytics.
Yet often times, qualitative research can offer more insight than anything else working to come up with winning test hypotheses.
Where quantitative stuff tells you what, where, and how much, qualitative tells you ‘why.’ The goal of qualitative research is to gather an in-depth understanding of user behavior and why they took those specific actions.
There are few things in marketing we know for certain.
Show a landing page to a panel of experts and ask what’s wrong—and everyone having an answer is one of them.
While there is often no shortage of opinions on how to improve a landing page, the question remains how valuable is most of the feedback?
As an optimizer, you might be thinking that user interviews fall outside your role. Or, perhaps, that they are a “nice to have” on the qualitative conversion research checklist. Worse, you might not be asking good survey questions because you’re rolling with an “I’ll just wing it” mindset.
User interviews are more complex and important than most optimizers realize.
You spend most days analyzing and interpreting numbers, right? You’re constantly sifting through Google Analytics dashboards, form analytics reports, Mixpanel data – the list is endless.
When you spend so much time focusing on the numbers, it’s easy to forget about the people generating those numbers.
That’s where qualitative research comes into play. Qualitative research sample size requirements are also significantly less than quant research, making it doable for most companies.
Qualitative research or quantitative research? Doesn’t matter if you’re doing it wrong.