9 Easy Customer Research Methods for Those Who Can't Figure Out Their Ad and Landing Page Messaging

Do you ever find yourself struggling to decide how to craft your messaging for ads and landing pages? In most cases, the root cause is insufficient customer understanding.

Customer research may sound like it requires a lot of effort and cost, but there are simple methods that keep both to a minimum. In this article, we'll introduce easy ways to conduct customer research.

Even simple methods can significantly sharpen the accuracy of your ad and LP messaging if you do even a little customer research — and there are unique advantages to simpler approaches, so please use this as a reference.

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Interviews

First, and most straightforwardly, it's effective to directly interview people who have purchased or are considering purchasing your products or similar ones. Offering something like an Amazon gift card will encourage many people to participate.

In interviews, dig deep into what led the person to make a purchase. The reasons someone likes a product and the trigger that led them to buy are often different, so it's important to carefully trace their decision-making process throughout the interview.

Surveys

With Shopify, you can easily collect surveys on your website using survey apps.

Surveys on the thank-you page (post-purchase confirmation page) in particular are highly credible and effective. Ask customers why they decided to buy.

Multiple-choice surveys tend to have higher response rates, but free-text formats yield deeper insights. When you're in the process of exploring messaging, I personally recommend free-text format.

The well-known app for running surveys on the thank-you page is Reconvert, but if you just want to collect surveys, 39Editor and PersonalizeHero are also cost-effective options.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are another source of valuable insights for your ad and LP messaging.

Shopify has a variety of review apps such as Judge.me, Yotpo, and Loox, many of which support review exports. Export your reviews and analyze them by product to understand what customers like and dislike.

When your own store hasn't accumulated enough reviews yet, reviews of similar products from competitors can also be helpful. Simply researching reviews on other stores or marketplaces like Amazon can give you a clear picture of what customers care about.

Customer Inquiries

Daily customer inquiries via chat and email are also full of valuable hints.

Since customers are making the effort to reach out through chat or email, you should treat these inquiries as important decision-making factors that matter to them when considering a purchase.

Services like Gorgias and Zendesk integrate with Shopify to help manage customer support, so merchants with a high volume of inquiries should consider looking into these.

Order Data

Analyzing Shopify order data is also an effective form of customer research.

From Shopify's order data, you can easily see not only which products are selling or declining, but also when, from which channels and regions, and what is being purchased. If you've applied product tags, you can uncover even more granular trends.

If you've also been running customer surveys, you can gain even deeper insights — such as which types of customers are buying which products. Once you have a sufficient number of orders, combining customer data with order data alone can give you a highly detailed understanding of your customers.

Competitor Ads and Landing Pages

You can also reference the ads and landing pages of competitors selling similar products.

Ads that are being actively served are likely to have good cost-effectiveness. There is often a lot you can learn and apply to your own store.

For Google Ads, tools like Ahrefs and SEMRUSH let you review competitors' ads in one place. For Facebook ads, you can search for competitors' ads in the Facebook Ad Library.

Search Keywords

You can also learn about your customers through Google search keywords. Google's search results display various pages, related keywords, universal search results, and more — all of which reflect actual search intent.

This allows you to infer what information, products, and related content customers searching for certain keywords are looking for. Using Google Keyword Planner or Google Trends, you can also track how search volumes change over time.

With Ahrefs, you can not only find related keywords but also aggregate frequently used words from top-ranking sites, making it easier to understand search intent.

Curated Media

Media sites that curate and introduce a variety of products can also be a great reference.

Searching within curated media will surface articles introducing products from many different angles. Some media platforms display the number of saves or favorites on articles, which can help you understand what themes related to a product resonate most with customers — a useful reference when brainstorming ad hooks.

Analyzing the target articles with Ahrefs lets you estimate their inbound keywords, enabling you to gain insights even more efficiently.

Social Media

Posts on Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms can also deepen your understanding of customers. Since people often share their post-purchase impressions, you can gain similar customer insights as with product reviews.

Instagram and Twitter hashtags and popular posts can be efficiently aggregated using tools like Hashtagify and Hypeauditor (please note that these are paid tools).

Incorporating Customer Research into Your Workflow

We've introduced a variety of customer research methods, but conducting research on a regular basis improves the accuracy of not only your ads and LPs, but all kinds of growth initiatives.

For example, imagine making it a routine for your team to review Shopify order data, reviews, and survey results once a week, then apply any insights to advertising, CRM, and Shopify store improvements. It's easy to imagine that, over the long term, this would make a significant difference in sales compared to not doing it at all.

Large-scale customer research that requires significant effort and cost can't be done frequently — but the methods introduced here are simple enough to do once a week. Rather than conducting one major customer research project per year, doing small, easy research every week is much more effective for continuously improving your day-to-day initiatives.

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Using the StoreHero growth platform, we help merchants achieve continuous growth through fine-tuned operations that are difficult to achieve manually and by executing a large volume of initiatives across advertising, store management, CRM, and inventory management.

We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with Shopify and growth initiatives in general, please feel free to contact us. Learn more about our free store diagnosis here

Summary

In this article, we introduced easy methods for customer research. The weakness of simplified research is that it may not be statistically rigorous. However, for the many small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses where staying close to the customers in front of you tends to have a more direct impact on daily sales than macro economic trends, I believe the simple research methods introduced here are more practical and effective. We hope you find this helpful.