Strategy
Overview
Reverse Engineering
Your Customer
Your Customer
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rad! more of this stuff please
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not useful or interesting
6 minute read
Note: This blog is a table of contents, introducing our three part series on reverse-engineering your customer. Most of what you’re about to read are foundational components of Core – our hands off subscription service for sales funnels. Learn more about Zulu Core.
Introduction
An un-optimized eCommerce funnel leaks between 20% and 40% of revenue through the cracks. The problems are simple: your customers aren't finding what they’re looking for, your customers don’t feel comfortable converting, or your customers aren’t qualified.
We solve these problems in our discovery phase with three guiding questions. The answers tell us exactly what your shoppers need to hear before converting:
- Who is (and isn't) your ideal customer. Demographic.
- Why is (and isn’t) the customer converting. Psychographic.
- How does (and doesn't) the customer convert? Behavioral.
To build a high-converting funnel, each touchpoint must be designed around the needs of your customer, not the ideas and opinions of the team upstairs. You must know why shoppers buy, why they don’t buy, how they buy, and under what circumstances they buy. The more you know each buyer, the more aligned you’ll be when building creative, messaging, and strategy. Once you understand the whys and hows of customer conversion, it’s easy to reverse engineer as many of those conversions as you want. We call this the silver bullet moment.
The Silver Bullet Moment
At Core, we believe a high-converting funnel is possible only when you understand the customer through two buckets:
- Knowing shoppers: who they are
- Understanding shoppers: why they buy
The who is straightforward – and you probably have this part nailed already. If not, click here for our buyer persona exercise, which will help your team narrow down the top three personas.
The why is a bit more complex, since thousands of outside factors influence each purchase decision. The customer will likely be the same person today vs next month, but they may choose to buy for different reasons. To make matters more complex, the same persona will shop under different circumstances, with different needs as a result. This is where most brands and agencies run aground, attempting to track and analyze hundreds of funnel KPIs just to make sense of it all. The result? Confusion and bloat. The solution, truly understanding your customer.
Rather than examine your current funnel performance, we start by examining your customer: learning who they are, what they want, and why they’ll buy it from you. In a nutshell, we need to understand what drives their decision making process.
Once you have your customer personas, use these three exercises to unlock why the customer converts (psychographics), how they convert (behavioral) and their situation (circumstantial).
1
Shopper Decision Questions
SDQs
Shopper Decision Questions
SDQs
Discover the most pressing questions a buyer asks, and must have answered before converting.
2
Sales Intention Styles
SITs
Sales Intention Styles
SITs
Evaluate the situation your shopper is in at the time of purchase, and how it guides their decision making.
3
Cart Abandon Rational
CARs
Cart Abandon Rational
CARs
Define the 6 reasons your shopper abandons their cart, and ideate solutions for each of them.
Note: the above process will deliver all the intelligence you need to design a high-converting eCommerce funnel. But remember, these are only insights. Your team’s ability to convert insights into action – design, strategy, and messaging – will determine the revenue impact. If this feels like a lot, we can help you out.
Only after we know your shopper and understand their needs, do we engineer solutions and test them in the funnel. If you’re working with Core, the intelligence gathered in this process becomes the groundwork for a myriad of interventions across your customer journey.
SDQs will influence new messaging and creative at discovery and consideration phase, while CARs will remove friction in the cart and increase Conversion Rate (CVR). SIT’s provide context at a high top level, helping you make strategic decisions around what to keep and what to remove in the UX.
Of course, intelligence only becomes valuable when connected to outcomes – in your case, that’s revenue. The above processes will enable your team with a new perspective on the customer, but turning those perspectives into action is cumbersome.
Zulu Core was created to do exactly that. In the Core program, your team builds the high-impact campaigns of today, while we engineer the self-evolving sales funnel of tomorrow.
Background
The customer funnel is probably the most misunderstood component of your marketing ecosystem. It’s typically viewed as a passive process not an active process. In other words, the funnel is a process where customers become aware, consider, and ultimately buy your product. That process is filled with active marketing tools and short term campaigns. But the funnel isn’t usually weaponized as a sales tool in-and-of-itself.
As a result, funnels don’t evolve – they are created in a vacuum and modified only when new software is introduced. Sometimes, they are re-developed when another agency takes over – but remain relatively unchanged in the meantime. Brands may tweak here and there, but even then it’s micro-level interventions.
If marketers spent as much time optimizing the sales funnel around their buyers, as they do sending organic emails, building landing pages, and launching social messaging – the efficacy of all these campaigns would be infinitely higher. Instead, brands overwhelm their pipeline with high-lift, short-term campaigns, but spend little time actually evaluating the framework that supports them.
This approach would be like if Eluid Kipchoge (fastest man) chose to run the Berlin Marathon in a pair of Vans. Even Kipchoge is only as strong as his weakest point.
Zulu Core
We believe the funnel is an active process – in fact, it’s the single most important tool in your entire marketing stack. While campaigns drive revenue, it's the funnel that determines the efficacy of all those campaigns.
But like any connected system, your marketing program will perform only as strong as its weakest link. And the weakest link is usually the funnel itself. Optimize the funnel, and you’re adding unlimited upside to your campaigns.
The problem is that most execution exists to support campaigns, and it’s been that way since before the funnel existed. This kind of momentary messaging is high-lift and high-return, but carries a low shelf life – typically a quarter at most. Brands have few stakeholders who can look holistically at the entire funnel, and the ones that could are tied down managing other executors. All the while, more and more campaigns are added to the pipeline. Funnel optimization becomes an afterthought – pushed down the line quarter after quarter, or getting tackled in piecemeal chunks when there’s time. Remember, eCommerce is still in its infancy, and structurally there are some big problems.
That’s why we created the Zulu Core Program – a hands off subscription service that optimizes your sales funnel and unlocks lost revenue while you sleep. A self-evolving funnel like Core recaptures up to 40% of lost revenue opportunities. Best of all, it’s hands free.
The key to our process is intelligence – about your brand, business operations, and most importantly, your customer. Brand leadership often gives direction based on their personal experience, and dare-we-say-it opinions ☠️. But when it comes to digital commerce, opinions are the number one bottleneck. Core is built to cut through the opinions, follow the data, and adapt your funnel around the needs of actual buyers.
Shopper Decision Questions are the essential questions buyers need answered before they'll convert. This guide explains how identifying and addressing these questions can significantly improve conversion rates. Learn to tailor SDQs to different customer personas, ensuring your messaging resonates with their specific needs. Discover practical strategies for testing and implementing SDQs across your marketing initiatives to create a seamless customer journey.
