Episode Summary
In this episode of Seven Figures and Beyond, host Greg Shuey explains how small to mid-sized eCommerce brands can perform meaningful customer research without the massive budgets of enterprise players. He emphasizes that understanding the why behind customer purchases is far more powerful than relying on analytics alone, which only show what and where. Greg outlines five low-cost ways to uncover customer insights, surveys, post-purchase and abandoned cart emails, live chat and support tickets, product reviews, and social listening and explains how each can reveal real buyer motivations, friction points, and emotional triggers that drive conversion. He demonstrates how brands can use simple tools like Google Forms, Typeform, Gorgias, and ChatGPT to collect, tag, and analyze data, and how these insights can directly improve ad copy, product pages, FAQs, and overall marketing performance. His key message is that effective customer research doesn’t require a $50K report—just consistent curiosity, smart questioning, and using available tools to turn customer feedback into business growth.
Key Takeaways
- Small brands can do real customer research cheaply. With free or low-cost tools like Google Forms, Klaviyo, or Gorgias, you can gather meaningful insights without a large budget.
- Analytics show behavior, not motivation. Knowing why customers buy, hesitate, or choose competitors is what truly drives better messaging and product decisions.
- Open-ended questions uncover emotion and intent. Avoid yes/no surveys; instead ask questions like “What problem were you hoping this product would solve?” to get actionable responses.
- AI is a game-changer for analysis. Tools like ChatGPT can organize responses, surface key themes, and reveal top pain points, saving hours of manual sorting.
- Customer research should be a habit, not a one-off. Revisit insights quarterly to adapt to shifts in buyer behavior, economic conditions, and emotional triggers.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Are we truly listening to our customers beyond analytics, or are we guessing what they want?
- Which of the five low-cost methods could we start implementing this week to gather insights?
- What open-ended questions could we add to our post-purchase or abandoned cart emails today?
- How can we use AI tools like ChatGPT to summarize and act on the customer feedback we already have?
- How will we ensure customer research becomes a recurring, measurable part of our marketing process?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
KnoCommerce: https://knocommerce.com/
Gorgias: https://www.gorgias.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.496)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Schuey. I created this podcast to help direct to consumer businesses, owners and marketers who are stuck and who are trying to find a way to grow their businesses. So most eCommerce brands that I talk with, they think of customer research as something that only the big brands can afford.
the big players in the space. Think Nike, Apple, Lululemon, Viori, the big, big brands who can write a check for 50 grand and give that to a market research firm or an insights firm, and then wait five or six months for a report. But the truth is, if your brand is generating any kind of revenue,
Not like one Z2Z orders that will be difficult, but if you’re generating a few thousand dollars to 10, $15,000 a month, you can get actionable insights for almost nothing. Just a little bit of time, some tool subscription fees, and you can generate quite a bit of information and research about your customers that you can then use to do better marketing. So in today’s episode, we’re going to walk through exactly how
how to do that. And I know we’ve talked about customer research a few different times on this podcast, but guess what? Every six to 12 months, new tools come out, new strategies come out. We do things different inside of the agency. So I like to share some of those new things that we’re doing today. We’re going to cover why most small brands skip customer research and why that is a huge mistake. We are going to go through five low cost ways to understand your customers better than your
competitors. We are going to go through what to ask in surveys and interviews to uncover the real reasons that people buy from you. We’re going to go through a few simple tools and automations to help you gather and organize all of this data. And then finally, how to take all of those insights and all of those nuggets that you are able to get from this research and then turn them into better marketing.
Greg Shuey (02:20.008)
them into better messaging and then use them to generate more conversions for your website and for your business. So here’s the thing before we jump in, remember you do not need a massive market research budget. You just need to be intentional about asking the right questions and digging in and listening in the right places. All right, so let’s jump in.
Let’s talk about why most brands skip customer research. Most small brands either skip customer research entirely, or they only do it once every couple of years.
Or maybe they’re just doing a quick post purchase survey or a few. did you hear about us questions in the checkout or in the very first email that they send out to their customers? Why? Well, when I asked them that question, I talked to a lot of prospects every single month and I asked them, you know, when was the last time you did some customer research? When is some last time you did some market research here? The top three reasons that come up again and again, one, we already know our customers. I hate this answer.
more than anything in the world. They think that they are the customer, right? This is by far the biggest reason that I hear and it drives me absolutely crazy because 99 % of the time they don’t. And we prove that by doing this customer research to they don’t have the money or they don’t have the time to do it. And then three, their answer is we’ll just figure it out from our analytics. Like, well, that’s not how that works. Honestly, at the end of the day,
The problem is that all three of these are dangerous assumptions. They’re dangerous things to lean to because it’s just so easy to get this data and start to make sense of it, right? Your sales data, your analytics data, it only tells you where they came from and what they purchased. It doesn’t tell you the why behind why they buy, which is by far the most important part of this whole thing that we’re trying to accomplish is the why.
Greg Shuey (04:43.438)
The why is actually what you need to pull out of any kind of data, whether it’s market research data, whether it’s post purchase survey data, whether it’s analytics data, it’s the why, right? This doesn’t tell you the problem that they’re trying to solve as a consumer, what alternatives they considered and what almost stopped them from hitting add to cart and then actually starting their checkout. When you don’t understand these things, what happens is you end up guessing that’s a dangerous place to be.
You guess in your ad copy, you guess in your product descriptions, you guess in your creative, you guess in your email campaigns, you guess at everything. Absolutely dangerous because the truth is that brands that make decisions based on actual buyer language outperform brands that rely on instinct or gut feel. Like that is 100 % the truth.
And we see it time and time again when we help our customers start to do this research and then layer in that research into their marketing strategy. Performance significantly improves every single time. So the smartest thing you can do right now, especially since we’re coming up on the busiest time of year, you know, we’re just starting Q4. It’s go time. Black Friday, Cyber Monday is next month.
The most important and smartest thing you can do is spend a few hours gathering customer insights that will help you write more persuasive copy, build better products. We’re a little late in the game for that, but potentially build better products next year, reduce friction in the buying process and increase customer lifetime value, right? If you guys crush this quarter, it’s gonna carry you into Q1 and throughout the rest of next year. So this is absolutely important.
And it’s also important to note that if you did research earlier earlier in the year, maybe you listened to one of my other podcasts when we talked about customer research, buyer patterns, buyer preferences, customer journeys, they change. And I’ve touched on that before. They change. And especially with this weird world that we live in right now with inflation, turmoil, weird things going on in the government. Right. People’s
Greg Shuey (06:59.022)
preferences in the way that they shop and how they’re spending their money right now have have drastically changed in the last three months. And so now is the perfect time to do that. This week is the perfect time to do that. So let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s kind of get into this and and build a plan for you. So to jump in to the how right? We don’t need fancy software. We don’t need focus groups. I think we’ve already touched on that.
You can learn a ton from your buyers from five free or low cost tools that you either have access to or can quickly get access to starting today. So first customer surveys, they are the easiest way for you to capture the voice of your customer, literally their own words, which you will then take and feed directly into your marketing. So a couple of tools that we use, like if we’re like low budget to no budget,
You can use Google Forms. You can use Typeform. If you’re on Shopify and have a little bit of money, you can use NoCommerce, which we’ve talked about before. Faring is another tool on the definitely on the higher end in terms of expense. They are great for post purchase surveys, but if you’re on low to no budget, we can do almost the same thing with Google Form, Typeforms. It just may not have as great of a response or completion rate.
So just make note of that as you get into this. So in terms of surveys, make sure to keep them short. Three to five questions max. We want to ask good open-ended questions. Some of my favorites are, where did you first hear about us? Because we want to know first touch attribution. Did they see you on a billboard? Did they walk by your storefront in the mall? Did they see a digital ad? Did they do a Google search? Did they find you on Reddit? Second, what almost stopped you from buying today?
Right? That is a friction question. We want to know, is there anything in your sales process that almost stopped you from buying today? Was it shipping costs? Was it you’re shipping across borders and so now you have extra expense coming into the United States because of, of tariffs, right? What problems were you hoping this product would solve? Another fantastic open ended question. What other brands were you considering before purchasing? We want to know that.
Greg Shuey (09:24.216)
And then we want to research that. All right. You will be absolutely shocked at how many golden nuggets you are able to pull from those four questions alone. Okay. A few tips. So this first one may or may not work. I’ve seen a lot of businesses not have to use this, but incentivizing with a small discount on their next order or a giveaway to increase response rate.
But again, with no commerce, I’ve seen completion rates of upwards of 70 to 80%. It’s right on the product. Thank the order. Thank you, page. And it’s just natural. And it’s kind of in the buyer journey flow, the customer journey flow. And it’s easy to do, right? That’s why I say spend a little bit of money and put that on your website. But maybe maybe you can offer a small discount, a 10 % discount on their next order. If we’re going to have to use a Google form or a type form and put that in our.
order thank you email, okay? Send it post purchase and then also occasionally to your email list for broader feedback. And then as those responses come in, tag them by theme. Themes like price, trust, quality, convenience, so that you can start to segment your answers based on those buckets and then be able to go deeper into those responses knowing I’m getting into price right now. I’m getting into trust right now. I’m getting into quality and so forth.
And you may have some other themes that you want to tag by as well. You don’t have to use those four. One simple survey can give you enough insights to be able to guide your strategy and your messaging for month. I think that’s probably the most powerful takeaway right there is one simple survey can power this for months on end. All right.
Greg Shuey (11:15.628)
Alright, so let’s talk about post purchase and abandoned cart emails. So if we can’t put that survey on your your checkout page, not on your checkout page on your order confirmation page, the next thing that we can do is use post purchase and abandoned cart emails completely overlooked by most brands, right? After someone buys, ask a simple question like what made you choose us over other options or how was your shopping experience today?
In your abandoned cart flows, can ask, we noticed you left something behind. Was something missing or was something unclear or was there another reason you chose to not purchase today? Right? These are simple one question surveys and we can set these right up inside of Klaviyo OmniSend, MailChimp, Attentive, whatever you use. We can set those up right inside and start collecting those data.
The really cool thing about these is the timing. Okay. You’re catching people right at the point of making a decision. Their answers are honest. Their answers are fresh. They’re real. Sometimes they can be harsh and you will start to see these patterns emerge really, really fast. As you start to collect this data, you might learn some of the, some of the things you might learn are, you know, if you, if you sell clothing, they didn’t understand your sizing chart.
You know, you know, I wasn’t entirely sure what size to order, so I didn’t order. I went to a competitor because they made it easier for me, right? They hesitated because they weren’t sure about shipping times. Is this going to get to me in two business days or is this going to get to me in 14 business days? Both are really easy fixes. Things that can be addressed immediately that will also help you improve your conversion rates across the website. So we’ve always got to be listening. We’ve always got to be collecting this data. Okay.
The third one is using live chat, transcripts and support tickets. Okay. A lot of businesses don’t use live chat and that’s fine. But if you do, if you’re using a tool like gorgeous Zen desk intercom, they have live chat functionality, but they also have support ticket functionality. This will allow you to be able to collect this data in a central location and then have an absolute gold mine of customer.
Greg Shuey (13:41.847)
Insights. Okay, if you’re just using a email us at support at xyz.com and it’s going into a Gmail account that is much harder to be able to mine for these Golden nuggets than if it is going into a support system and those support systems aren’t overly expensive gorgeous is probably by far my favorite and and it’s it’s not expensive. I can’t remember how much it is a month, but
You should look into that if you’re not currently doing that, because it will give you the live chat functionality and will also give you the ticketing system. As you start to go through this data, what you’re going to want to look for are repeated questions. So do you ship internationally? How do returns work? How do exchanges work? Those types of things. You’re also going to want to look for objections before the purchase. So these come into play with live chat, right? I’m not sure that this is going to fit.
my car. I am not sure that this is going to work with my phone. So we can identify these objections and then we can address these objections right on product description pages so that they can gather their information. They can get their answers question. They can add to cart. They can start checkout and then they can purchase from you. And then frustrations after purchase. So the instructions weren’t clear. I can’t find my order confirmation. You ship me the wrong product. You ship me the wrong size.
those types of things, right? So once you have all of that data flowing through a platform, right, you can tag categorize these questions right inside. And then again, you can start to see themes and you can layer those into your FAQs. You can clarify them on your product descriptions pages. You can address them in your ad copy before customers even have to ask. So this kind of proactive messaging
does a couple of things, right? It increases your conversions, which we’ve touched on. But one of my favorites is, that it reduces customer service tickets, which saves you money. So when it comes to building and growing a business, you either make money or you can save money with how you approach different strategies, right? Both have a significant ROI on the business and you should be measuring both of those may cost you a little bit to get gorgeous, but
Greg Shuey (16:02.858)
It may save you several thousand dollars a month in reducing customer service tickets because you are predicting these things and you’re being proactive about addressing them. Okay. next thing, product reviews. So customer reviews, I’ve talked about this several times. They’re a gold mine, incredible way to understand how people perceive your product, both good and bad. And the super cool thing about these is they’re unfiltered as well as social listening, which we’re going to talk about in a minute. They’re unfiltered.
So you’re going to get actual words. You’re going to get the actual language, the way that people describe your products. You’re to get all of that. So you want to focus on the language when they say, finally, a shirt that fits or the zippers on this bag feel cheap, or this is the perfect size for camping trips. Right. Those are words and phrases you can directly put into your ad copy, put into your PDP bullet points.
or start to use in your SEO content on PDPs as well as in blog posts, right? And all of this can be collected with tools like Yotpo, Klaviyo has one, reviews.io. There’s also some Shopify apps that you can just install on your website and start collecting that information. And don’t stop with just your own reviews. Go and look at all of your competitors’ reviews too. Pay an admin or pay a virtual assistant to go through and
capture all of your competitors’ reviews in a spreadsheet, capture all of your reviews in a spreadsheet, pull that out of Yotpo, pull that out of Klaviyo. Look for pain points that their customers mentioned that your product solves. Look at pain points that they have about your product. And then the cool thing is you can take all of that and can shove it through ChatGPT and have it do sentiment analysis. You can have it…
Bucket those up by category. You do a lot of really cool things with AI once you’ve got the data. And this is truly how you identify gaps in the market, gaps in your strategy, gaps in your content, and then opportunities to position your brand as the clear winner. Okay? So the last thing is social listening. This is something that we’ve been doing a lot of lately for our clients and recommending a lot of prospects to start doing.
Greg Shuey (18:24.802)
Right, this is where you can learn what people are saying about your product to other people. So search Reddit, search TikTok, search Amazon Q &A if you’re selling on Amazon, search the forums, right? What you really want to pay attention to here is what are people asking before they buy your product? What are they asking their peers? What are they asking the general community? You want to look at how they compare options.
Like are they comparing these two brands side to side? Are they comparing these product features side to side? And then again, the exact phrases they use to describe problems as well as their desires. And again, this is unfiltered, right? This is raw, real information. And what’s going to come from this is that you’re quickly going to start seeing patterns like doubts. Will this last? Is this actually worth the price?
outcomes. just want something that doesn’t break after a month of using it or emotional triggers like I love that this makes my life easier every single day or I love that this shirt makes me look trim. It makes me look thinner. So take that use that exact language everywhere again, ads, product pages, blog posts, in your creative everything. Okay. So
Now that we’ve gone through those five, like when you’re actually doing your surveys, when you’re setting these up, when you’re building these or your customer interviews, the biggest mistake that people and brands are making is they’re asking questions that lead to yes or no answers. And that does not help anyone.
Greg Shuey (20:15.016)
So instead of asking, do you like our product? The question should be, what do you like most and what could be better? Can you see how that’s different? Instead of was our checkout easy? Ask. I already talked about this one. What almost stopped you from completing your purchase? So you are trying to uncover emotion, which is frustration, excitement, surprise. That’s what drives decision making.
Right? Emotions drive decision making. Some of my favorite open-ended questions are that I recommend the brand set up is what were you using before you found us? That is a great one. What problem does this solve for you? Because that one actually makes people think, right? Like, well, you know, I just needed a new shirt. My white shirt was, you know, going a little bit dingy and, and I needed a new white shirt, but what was the actual problem? Was it?
Was I trying to find something with a different material that was a little more stretchy? Those types of things, right? How would you describe this product to a friend? Whoa, that one’s crazy. Amazing, right? And then if you could change one thing about your experience in buying from us, what would it be? Those kind of questions give you depth. They give you, you know, information that numbers cannot give you alone. Okay.
That’s why we want open ended questions. So if your question leads to a yes or no, scrap it or rework it. Okay. So now that we’ve gotten through open ended questions, we’ve talked about the different data collection methods. Let’s talk just really quick about the tools that will help you automate and organize. Obviously chat GPT is going to be the big one. We’ll just touch on that briefly in just a moment.
but there’s really no reason to manually collect and organize all of this information all by yourself. I’ve already talked about Klaviyo. We’ve talked about type form. We’ve talked about no commerce for automating your surveys, in terms of onsite polls, heat mapping, click tracking, which is something that I’ve talked about in other episodes, like that you should be going through mining information there. You should be using my favorites, Microsoft clarity because it’s free. You can use hot jar.
Greg Shuey (22:32.846)
Lucky Orange, there’s a ton of them, right? In terms of customer service tickets, we talked about Gorgias, we talked about Zendesk, and then used tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, any of those AI platforms to summarize responses into themes and to surface insights faster. There’s no reason for you to go through all of that data piece by piece. That is what AI is for. AI is not there to help us scale our blog content. It’s not there to help us
do our SEO. It’s there to help us take data, make sense of data, and then layer that data into our strategy so that we can move faster, be smarter, right? And that’s going to be the key here for all of this information. So even if you get 50, even if you get 100 responses, an AI model can easily help you identify the top three recurring problems or motivations that people mentioned. And then that should become your focus for optimization.
I mean, even if you get 20, right? Any data that you get, those models can help you come up with your three bullet points that you need to start working against, all right? So once you have these insights, let’s talk about actually doing something with them. And we’ve kind of touched on this throughout the episode. First, categorize feedback into buckets, price, trust, quality, shipping, those types of things.
you’re going to want to make sure that you’re counting frequency because if someone mentions price twice, but they mentioned quality 50 times, you can clearly see there that there is an issue with quality, maybe not so much price. So how many times does each of these come up and chat GPT can help you with that as well. Once the data comes out from your analysis and chat GPT, you can send it right back in and say, okay, how many times does each of these come up?
Next thing, pull verbatim quotes into a swipe file for copywriting. If you are a marketing lead or a business owner, hoarding this information or keeping this information to yourself on your Google Drive or on your desktop or your laptop helps no one unless that is shared throughout the organization. So throw it in a Google Doc, throw it on a swipe file, send it to your copywriter, send it to your designer, send it to your SEO people, send it to your paid social people and your paid search people.
Greg Shuey (24:52.758)
get it out there in the wild so they can start using it. And then the last thing is to prioritize the top three or four insights that can have the biggest business impact. And I say business impact because that is what we are trying to do here. We’re not necessarily trying to just have, you know, better marketing, but we want that to trickle down to top line revenue. And then we want that to trickle down all the way to the bottom line, right? We want it to have business impacts that are real, that are going to help you grow and scale over time.
Then, you know, we want to apply them. Like I mentioned before, product pages, FAQ pages, quotes from customers and ad copy, email subject lines, using writing blog content around these recurring questions, testing new messaging and ads based on what customers actually say and what they actually say that matters most. So if you will actually make this customer research and you can see, right, we’ve now spent 25 minutes talking about this.
It doesn’t take a lot. It doesn’t take 40 hours. It doesn’t take $15,000. If you can take this and make this habit of yours every quarter, just you know, looking at the questions that you’re answering, asking, looking at the answers, reviewing customer feedback and making one or two changes, you’re going to see massive. Massive improvements in your conversion rates. You’re going to see massive improvements in your app performance.
You’re going to see massive improvements in your customer retention, which is going to grow your lifetime value, which is going to help you scale your business. Right. We don’t only want to focus on new customer acquisition. We want to focus on retention as well. And these insights will drive retention as well. Okay. So let’s bring this home. Episodes getting kind of long. Let’s start to wrap this up. Customer research doesn’t have to be expensive.
It doesn’t have to be complicated and I hope that that has been the main message that you’ve been able to take away today. You don’t need a market research firm. You don’t need a five or six figure budget for this. You might only need a couple hundred dollars. You just need to make sure that you’re asking your customers the right questions, that you are listening carefully to what they say and that you are using the insights to guide your marketing and to guide
Greg Shuey (27:19.106)
your business strategy. Okay, so my challenge to you, pick one method this week. That’s it. Take 15 to 30 minutes right now after listening to this episode. Add a single question to your post purchase survey or add a single question to a survey that you send right after someone orders from you or review your last 25 product reviews. It doesn’t matter.
Again, 15 to 30 minutes right now. These insights you uncover might change everything in how you position your brand going into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And because the brands that understand their customers the best, they are the ones that win, especially when they are scrappy, when they are using the tools at their fingertips, and when they are just taking a little bit of time to gather that data. Okay? All right.
That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for sticking with me just a little bit longer than we have the last few episodes. We’re going to talk a little bit more about customer research in the next few episodes because I want to get a little bit deeper. But if you found today’s episode helpful, please take a minute to share it with a fellow brand owner or marketer posted on LinkedIn, shoot it out on Twitter. And, you know, again, if you have any other friends in the space, share it with them and you think this could be valuable, share it with them.
I would appreciate that so very much and I hope you tune in again next time. Take care.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.