5 Quick Wins from Starting With Voice of Customer Research when marketing your signature offer
This blog post is based off a series of IG Lives I did in January 2023 for the inaugural launch of Your Signature Promise, my messaging-focused mastermind for established online entrepreneurs. Click through here to catch the replay.
Hey reader, Katie here—
If you’re new around here, I'm a messaging strategist and email marketing expert, and I work with ambitious entrepreneurs who are scaling their business with a signature offer.
I help my clients identify and communicate the right messages at the right time throughout their program marketing, so that they STOP having to work so hard to sell their signature programs and START enjoying that space, time and ease that they built their programs to create.
What’s a signature offer?
So just for some background, when I talk about a signature offer, that can be, you know, a lot of different things to different people, whether that's a membership, a signature group coaching program, or a signature one on one service.
Most commonly I work with coaches who have one signature group coaching program. But a lot of the principles that I'm going to talk about apply, regardless of what that signature offer is. The idea primarily is that you have one offer that you're really all in on. And that's where you want the majority of your audience to work with you.
This is the first post in a 5 part series, the topics of which will align with the modules / themes of my new signature program, Your Signature Promise:
Your Signature Promise is a messaging-focused mastermind for online business owners who want easier launches and more consistent sales of their signature offer.
I've created this space specifically for business owners who already have a signature program, but who have the impression, they're not currently harnessing the full power of what that program could do.
Maybe that's because their messaging is not yet fully aligned,
Maybe they don't yet have email sequences up and running to help them really capture people who are interested,
Or maybe they just feel like when they started out, they had a sense of what the program could be, but now that’s shifted, and they want to update the messaging and the funnels they do have in place to really reflect how they know they're meant to be showing up now.
Inside Your Signature Promise, we're going to be focusing on aligning all of the messages in your marketing, from your opt in to your checkout page, so that your dream clients have a clear, straight path to working with you inside your signature offer.
Today, I'm talking specifically about Quick Wins That You'll Get From Voice Of Customer Research.
What is Voice of Customer Research?
Voice of Customer research is the source of all strong, compelling copy. When copywriters talk about doing voice of customer research, we’re talking about listening to/analyzing the EXACT words your audience (both prospects and buyers) are using to describe their pains, desires, objections and dream solutions in relation to your offer and the problem you solve or the outcome you help them acheive.
When I say Voice of Customer research, I'm talking about engaging with your audience, asking them questions and getting feedback from them in a way where you can you refer back to the exact words that they’re using.
This isn't about having conversations where you get a general idea of what they're saying—it's about having those words in front of you, when you're writing copy and when you're making strategic decisions. So that you know you're making database decisions, or writing copy that's based on the exact words your audience is using, that you are generating big ideas for your sales page based on the big desires or the big obstacles that your audience is facing.
If you know me, you know I talk about a lot about Voice of Customer research (I even have a whole workshop about how to automate the process of collecting it throughout your signature program). But I know people sometimes feel like it's a long game strategy.
That’s why today, I want to tell you about ways that it can benefit you really short term.
So, without further ado, here are 5 quick wins you can expect from starting with Voice of Customer research:
Win #1: Learning what your existing audience needs to hear to act
The first thing you're going to learn if you implement these Voice of Customer strategies that I teach is, what does your existing audience need to hear to act? So with that being said, when you implement these voice of customer research strategies, you learn what your existing audience needs to hear to act.
So for example, I was working with a client this past spring where we sent a survey to her existing email list. And what we found was that, a really huge percentage of her audience didn't even know about her signature offer. They had joined her list through one of her mini-offers or via the many collaborations that she had done. But they didn't even know that she had a really thriving membership.
So, the opportunity that this opened up for her, was to send a short sales sequence to those people highlighting the benefits of the membership.
Sending a copy-focused research survey to your list is a great way to open up your eyes to the opportunities that are there for you. And really make easy sales without having to put a lot of effort in.
Win #2: Pre-Launch Events that Draw Perfect People In
The 2nd big win that you can get from doing Voice of Customer research is learning about what people are struggling with right before they work with you.
If you're planning to launch in the next three months, one of the best things that you can do is get a really clear idea of what people in your audience need support with BEFORE they're going to want to work with you to inform the content of your launch event.
And through the research and interviews that I did for one of my past clients who's in the research grant editing space, we learned that her audience basically needed to be approached a step before we had been speaking to them in her previous launch campaigns.
So by tweaking and kind of dialling in the topic of her launch event, which was by application only, we ended up getting 111 applications in a really specific niche—just because people were so keen to learn more about this training topic, which spoke to her ideal client
Once you send this kind of survey, or once you're interviewing people in your audience, you can really get a sense of what specific support do they need right before they work with you.
And then using that insight to determine the topic and content of your pre-launch event can get you way more interest than throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Win #3: Understanding why people choose you.
This is one of my favourite benefits of Voice of Customer research because it really informs how you talk about yourself, your offers, your “secret sauce”, so to speak.
By surveying your audience and interviewing your best past clients, you're going to get specific language about why people chose you.
You can also find this kind of insight in your testimonial collection forums.
Voice of Customer research tells you what sets you apart
Knowing both the specific reasons that people choose you and the Big Picture reasons that people choose you not only gives you specific language to use in your copy, like the other two points that I've mentioned, but also helps you understand how to position yourself in a crowded marketplace.
For example, I'm a copywriter, and there are millions and millions of copywriters out there. But, I know specifically that my people are interested in email marketing strategy from me. Through listening to my audience, I've realized that email marketing strategy is a huge part of what you're looking for. And that's why I've built Your Signature Promise to feature a lot of trainings and emphasis on making email marketing work for you.
So through the six months of the program, we focus on Voice of Customer research as the foundation of everything else, next we focus on your sales page, and then from that point on, we focus on the emails for your launch campaigns, the emails in your welcome sequence, and other specific to you strategic sequences that I spot a need for throughout our work together.
I listened to my own audience about what kind of support they were looking for—and I have built that focus on email marketing strategy into Your Signature Promise in response.
All right, the 4th quick win you get from Voice of Customer research is…
Win #4: Insight into your audience’s objections
So I think I recently heard Jereshia Hawk say, “Every question about your offer is an objection”. And I think that this is a great way to think about the conversations that you're having before, during and after your launch.
Because your prospects need to be clear on what your offer is and confident it will work for them in order to buy, you want them to have they’re questions answered well in advance of your cart open period:
Before your launch, if you're having conversations with people, you can take the questions that you're hearing and put those into the Frequently Asked Questions section on your sales page. << This is Voice of Customer research in the sense that you are taking the exact questions you hear and using them to inform your copy/launch messaging.
During your launch, you want to be really responsive. If you hear people, you know, if you hear a question coming up, like head over to Instagram and answer it immediately. << This is really all about LISTENING closely to what your people are saying. This is also one reason I recommend live launching an offer before you put it on evergreen, so that you hear these objections come up live before you build your evergreen funnel.
And after your launch, sending a post-launch survey is a great way to understand why people on your list didn't buy and to either make them a different offer or simply to adjust your messaging for your next launch based on what you learn. << I share my Post-Launch Survey Templates inside Find Your Money Making Messages and, of course, inside Your Signature Promise, where you also get access to my Post-Launch Funnel Math Spreadsheet prior to our 1:1 Launch Debrief.
So real conversations before you launch, real conversations during your launch, and sending out a post-launch survey after your launch are 3 different techniques you can use to collect that Voice of Customer research that will help you inform how you're speaking to objections about whatever offer you're selling.
Win #5: Getting fresh testimonials that sell your offer for you
The 5th quick win that I want to share with you today is that asking your audience for input gets you fresh testimonials.
We all know the power of social proof, but this fact always impresses me: this study by the Spiegel Research Centre found that…
Reviews have a greater impact on purchase likelihood for higher-priced items than cheaper ones. Our research found that when reviews were displayed for a lower-priced product, the conversion rate increased 190%. However, for a higher-priced product, the conversion rate increased 380%.
Testimonials are a super compelling way to share your clients’ experiences that potential clients might relate to better than you know, your own experiences that you share on a regular basis. When you reach out to past clients for an interview, or to ask them to complete your copy research survey, you’ll get end up gathering general Voice of Customer research that will help you write sticky, compelling copy, but odds are you’ll also be able to whip up a fresh and exciting new testimonial from that fresh feedback they’ve given you.
On top of giving you fresh insight into what your clients value most about your work together, another positive side effect of reaching out to past clients for Voice of Customer research is that it's a great way to get back in touch with past clients.
My last business coach, Becky Keen, actually gave me a great question to ask at the end of my feedback form, which is, “How would you like to work with me going forward?” Or, “What kind of support would you be interested in having from me moving forward"?”
You can take the intel you get from this question and make a one-off offer to that respondent, if it’s aligned with your goals, or to create an ongoing offer for your past program participants, which is actually one of the Golden Opportunities we talk about in Month 5 of Your Signature Promise.
I love this question as an opportunity to reopen up the sales conversation with people you've worked with before, and to get a sense ofwhat kind of support is a priority for your past clients, who are, after all, the easiest people for you to work with going forward.
OK, let’s recap—The 5 quick wins you can expect from starting with Voice of Customer research are:
You learn what your existing audience needs to hear to act,
You learn what people are struggling with before they work with you, which is really useful to inform your pre-launch content.
You learn why people choose you, which can help you in terms of the actual copy, you write with it and in your big picture positioning.
You can borrow the objections you hear coming up, speak to those in your sales page copy and address them specifically on social media. and
You also get fresh testimonials, plus the opportunity to cross sell or ask for referrals.
Each of these wins are aligned with my ultimate goal for you—the ability to make more money without hustling any harder.
If you’re interested in working with me inside Your Signature Promise, you can check out all the details and apply right here.
I’m really excited to be working with a group of ambitious women entrepreneurs over the next six months to help them harness the full power of their signature programs and bring more ease, space and profit into their businesses.
If you have any questions that aren’t answered on this page, come find me in the Instagram DMs. I’m happy to voice note back and forth (or hop on a call) to answer any questions you might have about this program.
Talk soon,
Katie
