Try Asking Your Customers These Questions To Come Up With New Growth Hacks

YesInsightsWilson Peng@wilsonpeng8@yesinsights

One of the biggest struggle with marketers is coming up with new growth hacks that work. Marketers and entrepreneurs spend

their entire workday coming up with new ideas to test. Unfortunately, most of these test just don’t provide the results that the

companies want to see. You read about a growth hack that works for another company, but the truth is that the same growth

hack might not work for your business.

So instead of wasting time and resources coming up with new growth hacks and testing them, why not talk to your customers

to figure out the next marketing strategy that you can try? The truth is that too many entrepreneurs and marketers are stuck in

their own world and spend too much time analyzing data. Data is awesome and it can give you a powerful insights on what

your customers are doing, but data…well..it’s data. It’s almost like we’ve focused so much on being data-driven that we’ve

forgotten about being customer-driven and the importance of actually talking to our customers.

In order to really understand what your customers want, you need to actually hear their pain, see their frustrations, their

challenges, and use their voice/feedback as a data to come up with your next growth hacks.

Knowtify’s Example

In our previous blog post, “4 Scalable Ways to Get Feedback From New Users With Examples“, we showed an example of

how Knowtify was building features and coming up with marketing strategies for that new feature that customers didn’t really

want. The team thought that was what the customer wanted, so they wasted a lot of time and resources building out a new

feature just to realize that all their marketing spent was going to the wrong place!

To resolve this, Knowtify decided to talk to their customers and create a survey to breakdown the true reasons the customers

was using the platform for. They choose to do this by creating a simple survey that ask the following questions:

What is your job role?

Are you interested in using Knowtify for transactional emails?

Are you interested in behavioral emails?

Are you interested in Daily digest?

Are you interested in Knowtify’s announcements?

Their survey looked like this:

And the results that they would get in their email inbox looked like this:

This was tremendously helpful — it not only allowed Knowtify to know which use-cases

new sign ups were excited about, but also their role in their company. Using this feedback

they were able to:

1. Figure out what new users hoped to do with our product

2. Who we should market or sell our solution to

3. Provide better support to new sign ups

Parsehub Example

Parsehub is another perfect example that talked their early customers to find out new marketing strategy and to perfect their product. In their post, “How we got our first 10 paying SaaS customers”, they mentioned that they spent over 50 hours talking to their customers and running user test to find discover new growth hacks.

These were the questions that they asked:

“What web scraping techniques and tools did you try?”“What did you like/dislike about the things you’ve tried?”“What kind of websites do you want to get data from?”“What do you need the data for?”“Is this data essential to your business?”“We focused only on solving the customer’s problem. For example, if they had difficulty extracting data from a website with a popup, we made sure that ParseHub could take care of that.” – Parsehub

Interviewing and talking to their customers allowed them to come up with new growth hacks and provide a solution that their potential customers actually wanted.

Questions to ask to come up with new growth hacks

Okay, by now you should understand the importance of talking to your customers and listening to their feedbacks. Now you might think, the questions shown in the examples above works for their business, but what are some general questions that you could ask your customers that works for most startups and businesses. No worries, I’ll be covering a few of them here.

Where did you hear about us?We A/B test our onboarding email survey questions a lot, but this is one of the questions that we always ask in our onboarding emails. Our welcome/onboarding email looks like this:

This is a super powerful question to ask all your customers. This question will help you find out what your most effective marketing channel is.

You can see your customer’s referral path with any analytic tool, but that only tells you the LAST site they visited prior to yours. By asking this question instead, you may discover that your customer heard about your product from a podcast they listened to last month, or that a speaker at a popular conference mentioned you.We created this survey through our own product YesInsights and embedded it within our Intercom support platform for drip and welcoming emails. With YesInsights, we’re able to navigate to our analytic dashboard and view all the results in one place.Let’s say we see that most users clicked on the “Heard about it from a friend” response. We now know that we can find more growth hacks related to viral marketing. People finding us through a friend makes us ask ourselves the question: “How do we get more people to share our content with their friends.” Should we create a referral/affiliate program? What are some influencer marketing hubs that we can leverage to get more shares? Should we start asking our customers to share our educational content? With that in mind, we can focus on more sustainable growth hacks that we can test.

What are you hoping to accomplish with us?This question is used to discover your customer’s use-case as well as find out how they perceive your value. This is

highly helpful to guide product on which features to prioritize, improve your marketing message, or help you sell to

your customer by understanding their intentions.

One of the biggest problems that we come across is that anyone can use our platform. By that I mean that marketers,

product managers, founders, customer success and anybody else like a regular blogger can benefit from a customer

feedback survey tool. This might sound like a good problem to have, but in reality it’s extremely difficult for us to

come up with the correct marketing strategy to push out.

By asking this question, we’re able to narrow down what people are actually using our product for. For instance, we

might be able to find out that most of our users use us for our NPS survey. Now we know that NPS is a market we

should go after and that we might want to create a mini-course on NPS or write more blog post related to Net

Promoter Score.

What is your job title?As I mentioned above, our product works for everyone. To narrow our ideal customer profile down some more, we need to know who is signing up for our product. This questions allows us to figure out if we have been able to attract the right people in our target audience? Or are we attracting a bunch of people that don’t match our goals.

If we find out that most people that are using our product are product managers, we can search up more resources on product management and create lead magnets or content that product managers are willing to share and read.

What is your single biggest challenge you are struggling with?The goal here is to segment your leads into a few different buckets based on their use-case or features they’ll find most valuable. With this information, you can then personalize your marketing.

People are notoriously bad at imagining what they want until they see it. They are, however, good at telling you want they DON’T want. Because of this, you’ll get much more informative responses by asking about their biggest challenge — which basically is the thing they DON’T want to do. You can then interpret their response into features they’ll use.

This is the part where you want to really get into your customer’s head and feel their passion for your product. With this question you are aiming to find out people’s pain points. This will help us come up with ideas for blog posts, help steer our product roadmap and better understand the motivations of our target audience.

What communities are you a part of?I like to think of this question as the jackpot question for discovering new growth hacks or targeting a new growth channel. They always say that quality content is the first step to success in content marketing, but what most people don’t talk about is where and how to promote your content. Everyone does the typical Reddit, Hackernews, Growth Hacker, Twitter etc. , but what about those smaller communities where your audience might be.

With this question, you should be able to find out where the majority of your users are hanging out. Once you know where most of them are located, now you can head over there yourself and promote your valuable content over there. Those are the type of people that are most likely going to be signing up and paying for your product.

What content are you most interested in reading?A big part of marketing in both the B2B and B2C space is creating awesome and compelling content. The thing that most content marketers struggle with is knowing what to write as well as the type of content that you need to put out. By asking this question, you should be able to find out what topics your audience wants to read. I did a quick Q&A with Hiten Shah on using customer feedback to improve your content marketing here.

With this question, you not only want to narrow down the topic of the content, but you also want to narrow down the type of content that your audience enjoys the most. For example, your audience might love checklist or they might love e-books. Instead of guessing, you can survey them to figure out which content you should be pushing out next.

ConclusionThe above questions should be enough for you to get started with surveying your customers. You should get creative with the questions you are asking and you should adjust the questions based on your product and your product’s needs. One of the biggest reasons why surveys receive a low response rate is because you’re not asking the correct questions. Opening up with solid open ended questions and providing the responses for your users will allow you to receive a much higher response and engagement rate. Make sure you’re always talking to your customers and getting their feedback. A good practice is incorporating surveys within your funnel to actively engage with your customers.

Another great way to come up with survey questions is by brainstorming it with your marketing team. I like to keep track of everything with Trello, but that’s fully up to you.

If you’re ready to start creating surveys and supercharge your growth process, sign up for our free trial at YesInsights. We make it dead simple and quick for you to create surveys seamlessly that gets 80%+ response rates

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