eCom Unity #19 - Understanding Your Customers as an eCom Brand

Deep-Dive | The Post-Purchase-Survey Playbook

The goal of any company is simple.

Solving a problem of your customers for a price they are willing to pay for it.

If you accomplish that, you have a strong foundation of your business that you can accelerate.

And the center of this statement is the customer.

What I have realised though from speaking with well over 1.000 brands over the last years, is that most of them don’t understand their customers as well as they should.

Their customer understanding is either limited or biased where they think that every customer is similar to themselves.

Therefore, having a strong process that consistently delivers up-to-date customer insights is crucial.

These should be qualitative, quantitative as well as unbiased and actionable to deliver maximum value.

In newsletter #14, I talked about the concept of having a customer champion in your team.

A person who spends several hours every week speaking with your customers and deriving the right strategy from what they really care about.

And when done right, this might be one of the best investments you can make.

What does done right look like?

I think for customer research to impact your business, it needs to fall into one of two categories:

#1 Post Purchase Surveys. They deliver standardized & actionable insights.

#2 Phone Calls. They are extremely qualitative.

The Playbook

To give you extensive guidance on how to make this work and implement your actionable Post-Purchase-Survey strategy, I created this playbook that covers:

• How easy it is to generate an ongoing stream of customer insights for (almost) free.

• How the best brands use post-purchase surveys to maximize insights.

• How post-purchase surveys should impact your marketing attribution.

Plus, the 37 best questions you should ask your customers if you want to create better creatives, identify new target groups and maximize customer lifetime value.

Take a look and derive how you can improve your customer understanding here:

Deep-Dive | The 37 Fundamental Questions of Your eCom Brand

I give explanations, sorting and potential modification advice on each question in the resource linked above. 👆️ 

But here’s the plain list of those 37 questions to ask in your PPS to better understand your customers.

1. How long did you first hear about us?

2. How long did you know about us before buying?

3. What was the last channel/message you saw before buying?

4. What elements did you consider when deciding to purchase?

5. Have you purchased other products from this category in the past?

6. How satisfied were you with the purchasing experience?

7. What nearly stopped you from buying today?

8. Was there any part of our store that was difficult to use?

9. Did you own a product from {brand name} before?

10. What other brands did you look at?

11. Why did you choose us instead of a competitor?

12. Why did you also consider buying from a competitor brand?

13. Are you switching from a competitor brand?

14. Did you look for our product on Amazon?

15. Did you research our product on other sites?

16. How did {campaign name} impact your buying decision?

17. What was the most important aspect of your buying decision?

18. What initially drove you to start looking for a product/solution?

19. Which problem are you trying to solve with the product?

20. What was holding you back from making a purchase?

21. What was the main reason you bought again from us?

22. What changed for you after starting to use our product?

23. Tell us something about yourself and why this product matters to you

24. What would make you more likely to continue purchasing from us?

25. Why did you stop buying from us?

26. When do you want to use the product?

27. How/When are you using our product?

28. How frequently do you usually use our product?

29. How do you think your need for our product will change in the future?

30. How can we improve our product?

31. What other products would you like to buy from us?

32. How would you rate the quality of our product?

33. How well does the product meet your needs?

34. Have you experienced any issues with the product?

35. What’s your gender/age?

36. Who is the purchase for?

37. How would you describe yourself in one sentence?

They are framed quite generically. Feel free to adjust the wording to suit your brand, product and customers.

Upcoming Events | eCom Unity Unplugged Pt. 3

If you're a founder or exec at an eCom brand doing $25M+ in revenue, mark your calendar for March 27th. This will be the most high-profile eCommerce event of the year.

eCom Unity Unplugged is designed to offer 40 high-level execs pre-arranged one-on-one sessions to exchange knowledge and insights.

And we have a lot of high-profile participants already confirmed, including C-levels from TEVEO, Chronext, or Kapten & Son.

🗓️ March 27, 2025
📍Berlin, Germany

Apply for one of the last seats here: Sign up.

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses. If you missed any past issues, you can catch up on all of them here.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past and with Klar, I work with over 700 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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