Customer Marketing Research Kit

Approach your planning like a scientist and be purposeful in how you design your research project.

There are three steps to the planning process:

1. Define your research objective
2. Decide on what data you’re collecting
3. Define who you’re interviewing

1. Define your research objective
The first step to planning out research is to develop a clear, realistic objective. The rest of your planning will be built around how to best help you accomplish this objective.

To define your research objective, you need to think through what you’re hoping to accomplish. What would a successful research project look like to you?

Are you hoping to:

• Get the right line of copy to drive more ad conversions?
• Figure out which industry influencers your audience actually listens to?
• Shorten your sales cycle by addressing the right concerns at the right stage?
• Learn more generally about your customers and understand their day-to-day tasks?
• Gain feedback on a specific aspect of your product, such as a new feature design?
• Gauge customer satisfaction of a specific group of customers?

Keep your expectations realistic when thinking about successful outcomes:

• It’s more common to get muddled data than clear cut answers on which direction to go, especially early in the process
• The more important a question is, the more work you’ll want to put in to ensure accuracy, which means more interviews and data collection
• You’re not always going to walk away with significant new information from interviews

Types of research to consider:

• Exploratory
  

  • You're at the early stages of research
  • You don't have a good idea of what you want to research
  • You can look for a deep understanding of a topic or a more shallow, broader understanding

• Descriptive
  

  • You have a good idea of what you want to research
  • You want to dive into the “what” of a phenomenon instead of the “why” it happens

• Explanatory
  

  • You have a good idea of what you want to research
  • You want to explain why a phenomenon happens

When setting an objective for customer research, keep it:

• Clear
  

  • Others at your company, not just on your team, should be able to understand the objective
  • Keep it clear even if your research is exploratory

• Simple
  

  • The more complex a research objective, the higher chance something will go wrong
  • The more complex your research, the longer it will take to collect and analyze data

• Focused
  

  • The more expansive the issue, the more work you’ll have to put into the research
  • You tend to have a lot less time per interview for questions than you expect

• Tied to a real business priority
  

  • Make sure a research project will not only help with a business need, but that need is a top priority of the business
  • Research takes time and money, so you’ll want to be efficient with it

General areas to ask your customers about:

• Satisfaction with your company
• Satisfaction with your product
• Perception of competitors
• How they currently solve their problems
• Their company’s buying process
• Why they’ll buy a product
• Why they won’t buy a product
• Where they go for industry information
• Who they listen to for industry information
• What kind of content they want to see
• Why they’re churning
• Why they’re not converting from trials

2. Decide on what data you’re collecting
‍Your objective will determine the data points you want to collect. With one in place, you can start listing out the data points you need to collect to achieve it.

Data points can be facts about your customers, their opinions, actions they take or don’t take, or their buying motivations and blockers.

Data points aren’t the questions themselves. Questions can be asked in different ways to get the same data point.
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Instead, your questions will come from the data points you want to collect.

3. Define who you’re interviewing
‍In a few cases, like when you’re small without a lot of customers, it makes sense to include all of your customers in your research.

For most research objectives though, you’ll want to focus on one or more segments of your customers.

There are lots of ways to segment them.

You can break your customers into groups by different stages of the funnel, product usage, or support requests.

You can research trial users, paid users, users who haven’t signed up yet, users who did a trial and didn’t convert or other groups.

You need at least five people per customer category or persona. After five or six interviews, you’ll start to see trends and themes emerging in the responses that you can explore more deeply in future interviews.

Different ways you can segment your audience:

• Different stages of the funnel
  

  • Haven’t signed up
  • On a free plan
  • In a trial
  • On a paid plan
  • On the free plan and haven’t converted
  • Did a trial and didn’t convert
  • Churned from a paid plan
  • Months retained

• Financial
  

  • Payment plan
  • Deal size
  • Have upgraded
  • Have downgraded
  • Lifetime value as a customer
  • Did a trial and didn’t convert
  • Churned from a paid plan
  • Months retained

• Product usage
  

  • Frequently login
  • Infrequently login
  • Frequently perform specific actions
  • Infrequently perform specific actions

• Support
  

  • Have a lot of issues
  • Have a lot of basic issues
  • Support interactions require a lot of time from support