How to know your users and give them exactly what they want
My story:
In my previous startup which was an edTech targeting personal and career growth, one of the things we did really well was establish some sort of intimacy with our users. It was important that we knew them (mostly by name), we knew all their engagements with us, the courses they bought, the ebooks they'd downloaded, the program they were in (for our live classes), the merch they bought from us and most times, what career or life goals they had.
This meant that, even when we were planning a new class or program, we already knew who had attended one adjacent one before that could benefit from this one. This was based on casual conversations we'd had with them, the surveys they filled saying what goals they were working on, etc. Sometimes, we could fill up the class 10-42% from within our current community of users and majority of the rest were referrals. This drastically reduced our cost of customer acquisition and churn rate.
Everyone likes feeling special; seen. And as a PM, your ability to talk to your users and get them to tell you who they are is a goddamn magical ability. In this article, I'll show you the key ways you can leverage this strategy, and the tools that will power it for you.
The 4 step-by-step process of leveraging segments to increase your conversion rates:
Okay, so let's dive into those details:
1. Getting your users to self-identify
For segmenting to work as a targeting strategy, you've got to know your users. It's the only way you're able to put them in the specific buckets that you can reach out to whenever you want. The easiest way to pull this off? Get your users to tell you who they are, and in some ways, what they are interested in. There are four key ways (and tools) that can help you do this:
a. Sign up forms
I am a strong advocate of keeping sign-ups straight to the point and not asking anything you can find elsewhere (like with the help of an analytics tool), especially if your users are signing up for an account on a mobile app. Depending on how seamless you make it, you can start by knowing the most important thing; their name and how to contact them. You can also get away with a single checkbox/multichoice or drop down that can get you critical information without it being mentally engaging.
Perhaps, you can ask them to select a quality that defines them that would be a strategic piece of insight. If you were an app or website for mums this could be asking them to choose how many kids they have from a drop down. If it's a website for new parents, you could ask them to choose "I'm a mum" or "I'm a dad".
How you'd target those two groups of people would be quite different, and your users are more likely to be engaged if you acknowledge this difference.
A tool like Omnisend has the magic of doing both; getting your users to sign-up, and then giving you some information about who your users are. You can check out the full service it could offer you.
But, we'll talk about Analytics later in this article.
b. Resource Downloads
One of the few almost-guaranteed things in the world of product growth and digital marketing is that, if a potential user is willing to share their information with you, they are pretty much interested in the thing. They may not be ready to buy, but at the very least they are a warm lead that could be turned hot and converted.
So, how do you leverage this?
Imagine your product is a personal finance or budgeting app. You went ahead and created two robust, delicious ebooks called 'Budgeting Secrets for Singles' and another for 'Budgeting Secrets for couples'. You put them both in either the same landing page or different pages (if perhaps you were split-testing) and directed web traffic to both. It's more likely than not, the person interested in the singles one is single, and the one interested in the couples one, is a couple. There could be a few cases where someone gets it for a friend, but it's likely not more than 10-20%.
So essentially what you've done, is to get a potential client/user to tell you a bit of who they are, so that you can then keep giving them more of what they came for. For you to pull this off as the pro you are, you need to make sure the tool you used to capture their information can put those two folks in different buckets. Nothing worse that being called 'Annette' when your name is 'Andrew'; that's what happens when you put different segments with different interests in the same bucket.
The magic tool here is Convertkit. It helps you create different forms, that you can embed in different pages, and will automatically send out the digital download, and 'tag' who downloaded the 'singles' resource, and who got the 'couples' one. This is what will help you send personalised emails to each.
Convertkit has a free version that you could play around with.
c. Popup forms/surveys
These are the text boxes that show up when someone is viewing a webpage or an app. You know what they are, you've seen them before. Popups essentially try to get a visitor to do something while you still have their attention. Surveys help you get information regarding what your visitor thinks of your product or service.
Depending on how you design it, these can get you a massive ROI just like sign-ups do. Users/potentials tell you a bit of who they are and what they like/want, and you use that information to give them exactly that. Win-Win.
So, again, you have to keep it classy and delightful to respond to. The more you make your pop ups look spammy and overwhelming, the more they worry about a virus attack. Let's not do that.
An even better strategy would be a form or survey that changes what question to show next based on what they user is responding to. So that, incase a user selects 'I am male', there's no question about menstruation or childbirth that comes up for them.
The big daddy (or mamma) of this is Jotform with their Conditional Logic on their Smart Forms. This feature segments not just the users, but the questions too.
And guess what, Jotform provides survey pop-ups too! So, look at that.
d. Quizes
Nothing beats a fun quiz, innit? It's the reason you've probably answered one of those 'what kind of pizza am I' quizzes on Facebook that can get you spammed and hacked. Still, quizzes with fun questions can tell you so much about your potential users based on the answers they give. The key here it to use quizzes, and quizzing tools that look good, have engaging questions and are relevant to your product. Choose a topic that is fun and will teach people about themselves. Then make it easy to share. A company that leveraged quizzes really well is Primally Pure Skincare with their deodorant quiz (Yes, deodorant!). Their quiz page is sleek and excellently implemented. This quiz does much more than simply provide a product recommendation in their results. The quiz gives personality results to show how their product recommendation matches the personality and on why natural deodorant is better. And, of course, there are the Shop Now buttons that take quiz-takers directly to their store to buy the deodorant.
Interact is the only quizzing tool you'd probably need to start you off on your quizzing journey. And you can start with their free quizzing course here.
2. Leverage your analytics tools
As a PM, the only superpower you'll ever need is knowing your numbers. Knowing how they relate to each other, understanding what it means with each movement either way, and most importantly, telling when you should question those numbers.
For product growth and segmenting there are two main sets of numbers that will give you the insights to make decisions regarding the way forward. You need to be keeping your eyes on these:
a. Personal data:
This set of data focuses on WHO is using or interested in your product. This includes identifiers of what your core audience looks like. This could be age, gender, marital status, location, etc... anything that can share insight into who exactly is putting money in your pocket. Having this info will help you adjust your strategies accordingly; from the tone of your ads, to the words you decide to use, to the products you should push to this segments. You will also be able to know whether your key target demographic is changing. Is there a potential emerging market you could start dipping your toe in because they are showing you so love? Or are you losing your core audience and you need to move things FAST. Knowing YOUR numbers and YOUR people is what you need to do. Obviously the GDPR rules has made it challenging to know your users this well, but, if you leverage the popup tools, the quizzes and the email marketing tools above, you will likely get your users to share with your their personal info. Social Media Analytics engines such as Meta for business can also get this Information for you.
b. Usage data
For this, the numbers you need to be looking at is the HOW your product is being used. Knowing this is so closely tied with the above. For this set of numbers, you want to see how often your product is used, what product or feature is the most popular, which devices are used most to access your platform or app, and how different seasons or times of day affect usage across different user types.
You will need this data to inform how you set up your segments, how you targeted your nudges or push notifications, etc.
Tools such as Mixpanel and Hotjar are robust and could very much assist you with this information.
3. Store them in 'segments'
Using the right tools when collecting user information (such as sign-up forms, popups, quizzes etc) will help you automatically segment your users at the point of collection. I can personally vouch for any of the tools I mentioned above.
If you combine this segmenting with data from your analytics tool, it's off to the moon for you. Why? For instance, if you were the Tinder PM and you notice that most users who say they're between 25-35 and listed their jobs (so likely professionals) swipe in the morning (from 6-7.30am) and use the messaging feature in the afternoon, say from 3pm; you would use this information to map out when to send out nudges for specific engagement invitations. You wouldn't want to send a professional at work a nudge in the middle of a busy work-day; would you? That's unless you saw them swiping at 12 noon and can safely make an assumption that they're taking a day off. Maybe. Still, this is why segmenting is such an important skill and tool to leverage.
Your segmenting tools allow you to export your data and you can save them in folders, Google Sheets, or keep them within the tool itself. Convertkit, Omnisend, Interact and Jotform should be your best friends, depending on what you need to do.
4. Set up your targeted messaging
All the info mentioned above is what will determine how targeted your target messaging is. The more you know about your users and their habits, (short of coming across as being very creepy), the more attractive you are to them. They feel special. Like "I know you already. Why would I leave you?"
Four ways to send targeted contact:
Email: Send to one segment, several segments at once or your whole list. Just make it relevant. Do NOT Spam
SMS: Great for sending out promotional stuff, to call back 'lost' users. Tends to be really pricey at large scale broadcasting. Also, Do NOT Spam.
Push Notifications. You can do this while a user is browsing your website/app or the nth time in the day and you want them to just order already. Great for 'forgotten cart's, discounted offers with time limits, etc.
Omnisend gets you all the above with a free starter and then you pay as you grow. Check it out.
If you'd like to learn more about growing your skills from product newbie to product pro, you might like this.