Take advantage of every order to learn about your customers

Getting to know your customers when you have an ecommerce store can be difficult.

Your Shopify store can collect tons of data on them (or is it megabytes of data...) but much of that data is useless.

What you want, is to learn more about your customers so that you can optimize you store for them. Making your store compelling and encouraging more purchases directly impacts your bottom line, especially with repeat customers.

While there are tons of Shopify apps and services out there to collect data automatically (in fact, I created one), sometimes going low-tech is the best way.

An easy way to do this is to just email each customer and ask them questions.

Yes, questions.

The art of asking questions

This process is usually called outreach or in this case, customer outreach but it's not hard to do.

1. When a customer places an order, write them a personalized email asking them a question about some data you want to collect
2. Log their responses somewhere safe
3. Repeat

What questions can do for your customer data

There are three major advantages of this:

First, by contacting them with a personal email you're starting a conversation with them. Done correctly this will make them feel special, like a VIP. In the long run they'll trust you more and have a greater likelihood of coming back to your store.

Second, you can change the question you ask to be whatever you want. Instead of relying only on the data points a app can collect, you can ask anything that makes sense.

Say you sell rings: "Is this ring for you or a gift for a special occasion?"

Or if you sell supplements: "Are you taking this to reverse a condition or as a preventive measure?"

Third, by sending a personalized email you have the opportunely to not send it. Let me explain.

Many processes, systems, and automation works on the basis that everyone has the process applied to them (i.e. everyone gets sent an email). But by doing it manually, you can decide which of your customers you want to email. Maybe you only want to email repeat customers? Or maybe people who spent over a certain threshold?

Don't rely on just the customer data that you can collect automatically. Put this process in place for a month and you'll be surprised at what kinds of data you can collect.