5 quick wins to find out what blocks your customers from buying with André Morys – eCommerce Growth Show Ep. 11

We said that the best is yet to come, right?

Yesterday’s eCommerce Growth Show was a truly eye-opening experience that was led by none other than André Morys, CEO & Founder at konversionsKRAFT and THE CRO authority from Germany. He brought us on a journey of the best 5 quick wins that will solve the biggest challenge of understanding why customers are blocked from buying from your products.

Starting from the changing mentalities of decision-makers that lay the foundation of the company itself and continuing with the pretend of being customer-centric, we learned so much from 5 simple questions you HAVE to ask your customers to be able to discover maybe the pot of gold you never knew you had.

Are you ready for this?

Who is André Morys?

André Morys is the co-founder of Global Optimization Group and konversionsKRAFT, author, university lecturer, speaker, entrepreneur, growth marketer, blogger, consultant, enabler. So many hats for one single man!

He has worked in the eCommerce optimization industry since 1996 when he founded Web Arts AG. Today, with nearly 85 consultants, designers and conversion experts, Web Arts is the leading conversion optimization agency in Germany.

Key takeaways from this episode: 5 questions to ask your customers

Question #1: What was the main reason you chose us?

Something that helped us a lot is something that’s really easy to implement and this is if somebody becomes a customer, ask one question because this is a very important moment that just happened: somebody made a decision for you and now it’s about finding out why this person made this decision.

Depending on your business, ask people “What was the main reason why you have chosen us?” Why did you become a customer? You will learn so much about it! People say you should focus on your strengths, right? And interesting is that most companies don’t know why their customers are their customers.

My tip number one is to implement it somewhere in your eCommerce tool or your business so that if an order comes in from a new client, directly send a mail saying, “Thanks for your purchase! We are really keen to understand why you’ve decided to buy from us.”

This can turn into a constant stream. And of course, it’s a qualitative question. It’s not data, it’s about qualitative insights or qualitative data – but I like qualitative insights more. So, you will get a constant feedback and it might be harder to analyze that compared to data where you can just draw a graph and see if things are okay or not.

But you wanted to learn why and what you have to change. Think that most people say, “I think you have the best customer service!” and you think, “Well, why the hell are people thinking that?” But then you can enforce that message because, you see, there’s some relevance: my clients want customer service, I focus on customer service. People say, “I think you have the best prices!” Focus on either you’re really big and can negotiate harder and you focus on prices – it might be expensive – but you could also focus on how to present prices (price psychology).

Question #2: What nearly blocked you from buying at us?

The second question that goes together with [the first] question – this is like Level 2 for the advanced people – of course, everybody who buys somewhere had alternatives in their mind. So this is also the ideal moment to ask a second question that is “what nearly blocked you from buying at us?”

The first [question] makes it possible for you to improve on your existing strengths. The second one may be unveiling some of your competitors, risks or problems that you might not be aware of.

We do this for our own as well, so we are also ask every new client that question. I’m always disappointed if a client says, “No, nothing. There was no barrier. We always plan to buy from you.” And I thought, “Damn it, I’d like to learn something!”

You can play around with that question. You can ask “If you wouldn’t have bought from us, where else would you have bought?” Or “What was your alternative?” Maybe you’re surprised that the alternative solutions from a client perspective are not that amazing as you think and maybe some answers also will surprise you.

Question #3: What do you think this is about? – The five-second test

This is a really old one but it’s one where I still see it is not executed properly or rally and it’s a good old five-second test. Thinking about your customers’ reality is a kind of out-of-the-box thinking. It’s so hard. If you work inside your company, you know too much,  you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. It’s so hard for people but they don’t make any effort to get out of that bottle.

I always think there’s one very easy exercise that everybody can do – no matter if you’re on a product team or wherever – print out your website prototype, landing page, homepage, whatever you’re working on, print it out on a classical sheet of paper. Go out and just ask random people that don’t know you and don’t know your business, “What do you think this is about?” Show the print for five seconds. Turn it away and say, “What was that all about?” And then let it come.

People will say, “Oh that was too fast. Show it again!” Say, “No, the first impression counts. What do you think this is all about?”

You will learn tons of misunderstandings on your website because you tried to give the best out of your perspective which is just from inside the bottle and now people are looking from outside the bottle and they completely get it wrong.

Question #4: What triggers customers from one level to the next? –  The “Jobs to Be Done” framework

I’m a big fan of the “Jobs to Be Done” framework. We understood as optimizers we have to focus on certain parts of the customer journey. We have to know where we’re starting, where we have the biggest growth potential, what our levers are.

I realized that most entrepreneurs – eCommerce people –  only focus on a small part of the customer journey and this part is the part where people already know that they want to buy something. That’s from the customer’s perspective to the very end. But the customer journey is so much longer! During that period before the customer journey is triggered with expectations and ideas and all this construction of motivations and fears, that come up in this area.

I’m also a big fan of this model called the “five stages of awareness” by a guy called [Eugene] Schwartz. He says in an early stage people are not even aware that they have a problem that needs to be solved. So guess where the biggest market potential sometimes is! And in the second stage maybe people know that they have a problem but they don’t know the solution. Then comes the stage where people now know that there is a solution to their problem, then they start researching what is there on the market. As soon as they know that, they have to choose and this is maybe where you now start thinking in terms of online marketing how to target the right people. Finally, comes the stage where they finally decide and buy.

It’s your job to find out what triggers customers from one level to the next because what would you see as a funnel is just a very low end. The funnel is much bigger and you have to understand that funnel. 

Question #5: How do I become a habit for my clients?

That’s actually maybe the most strategic question and it’s the only question you don’t ask your clients. So it can also be a quick win because it’s a question you should ask yourself. The question is “how do I become a habit for my clients?”

In Germany, many people look at Amazon and feel that it’s disruptive growth in every negative way. They are e-commerce people. I think Amazon in Germany is growing to 20 billion euro in revenue this year. And it’s such a dominating thing. And you know why? Because Amazon is a habit. If I ask in Germany people “How often do you buy there?”,  most people can’t tell you because there are hundreds of times, sometimes many times a day – three times a day. Why is it like this? Because Amazon understood, from a behavioral sciences point of view, how habits are formed.

If you want to create a habit, it’s like a loop. So, things that you want to do, have to be easy to be repeated. And every time you repeat something, you need a reward. To repeat something, you need a trigger. So it’s a very easy system from a psychological point of view.

I can recommend the book “Hooked” from Nir Eyal, a great speaker, a very intelligent guy who kind of deconstructed the principles of how to form a habit.

I ask that question many times and in workshops with my clients and without any psychological background, without reading the book, after understanding the principles, they were easily able to understand, “Damn, we forgot the trigger! Damn, we forgot the reward! Damn, it’s not easy!”

So, if you understand the principles of habits, I would say compared to the funnel that you have to learn, that you don’t know –  I said there are a  hundred times more people in your funnel than you’re aware of – it’s the same to focus on client retention and client loyalty and habit forming behavior.

Stay tuned for our next of eCommerce Growth Show where we will meet Wayne Richard, COO at Bean Ninjas, sharing his thoughts on something fascinating: eCommerce Recession Impact Study: COVID-19 Revenue Trends.

You won’t want to miss this session! See you on July 9 at 3 PM UK / 10 AM EDT.