If you want to make more sales, make more money,
and get more customers in your handmade business.
Keep watching because in this video I'm going to share with you five questions
you should be asking your ideal customer to understand them at a deeper level
that will give you the secret keys and answers to growing your business.
Hey, my name is Mei and I help makers, artists,
and designers create a consistent income selling their handmade products online.
In this video,
I'm going to share with you five questions you should be asking your ideal
customer. Any chance you get,
you could ask these questions in an email after someone has bought from you.
You might be surprised at how many people would actually respond to your
questions because they really do want to help,
and if you time your email to about 24 hours after they've bought,
they're even more likely to respond because they're still thinking about the
purchase they just need from you.
Make the email sound like it's coming from you personally.
So if you decide to automate this,
I recommend not adding in any graphics or newsletter templates and just use
plain text.
And that's why 24 hours after the purchase is important because it makes it seem
less likely to be an automated email and they're more more likely to respond
that way.
So the first question is how did you hear about my shop?
You have probably seen a lot of other businesses ask this and we do this so you
can keep track of how people are finding you, right? Why is this important?
If you've been in business for a little bit,
or even if you're starting completely from scratch,
you probably know about all the different ways you could promote your business,
right? Through social media, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest,
take top and there's even more platforms coming out.
Every year there's blogging, there's email marketing, there's YouTube, you know,
doing videos, doing craft shows, selling on Etsy, pitching your products,
influencer outreach. Oh my God, there is a lot you could be doing these days.
It is really difficult to pinpoint how people found you back in the day.
It's not uncommon for a customer to find you through Facebook and then make a
purchase right away. These days.
The buying process is a lot longer and it takes so many more touch points
between your shop and the customer before they actually decide to buy from you.
This means they might have seen your product on a blog and saw you on Facebook,
then joined your email list, then watched your YouTube video.
So even if you have Google analytics installed,
there's no real accurate way to know what those different touch points were.
And there's really no such thing as having more data.
So the goal here isn't to ask the customer all of those different touch points
that they went through before they bought,
but to just get a sense for what is the first one. So to me,
the first touch point is uniquely important because this was how someone first
came to know about you.
The last touch point is right before they made the purchase,
tells you which of your marketing platforms gotten them to convert into a sale.
So the first touch point is about growing your audience of ideal customers.
And growing awareness for your shop, right?
Versus the last touch point is about conversions.
Now you can't have conversions without first having an audience, right?
So that's my argument for why I believe the first touch point is the more
important question to ask.
So when you ask your customer after they've bought something from you,
how did you hear about us? Some people aren't going to remember,
but some are and some people also aren't going to remember correctly. But again,
remember I said the data is never 100% accurate,
but data is better than no data.
The golden ticket here with this question is once you know how people are
finding your shop,
you then know what's working well for you at bringing new people to your shop.
And once you know that you can focus your efforts on doing more of that thing to
grow your business, to make more sales and to get more traffic.
One thing to just be careful about is to collect enough data that you can feel
confident about. For example,
if you ask just one person this question and they told you,
I found you on Instagram, well great,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that you should drop everything and focus on
Instagram right now. One person telling you anything is just not enough data,
but if say five out of 10 people would tell you it was Instagram,
then the data starts to become more clear that you need to focus on Instagram.
The second question to ask is who are you buying this product for?
What this question tells you is the purpose someone bought your product and
knowing this information can really help you with a few things. For example,
when I started my jewelry business, tiny hands,
I thought that the people who would buy my jewelry are other people like me,
adults who loved cute things and miniatures like dollhouse miniatures,
but I was totally wrong because over the years I learned that my customers were
actually buying my jewelry for little girls in their lives, like their nieces,
their daughters or their granddaughters or their daughter's best friend for a
birthday party. This is really powerful information to have,
but as a side note,
this is actually a perfect example of how what you think you know about your
shop could be totally different than what other people think about your shop.
And let's just get this straight. Who are your customers, right?
Are you your customer or are other people, your customer,
other people, right? So if you want to make sales,
you have to position your shop to appeal to other people.
Going back to this example, this helps inform me that Hey,
this is my target audience and that means I can write my product descriptions to
talk about how my jewelry makes great gifts for kids.
I can take photos on models who are younger, like the recipient of my jewelry.
If you go to my website,
you'll actually see that all my model product photos are of older teenage or
young adult women.
And the reason I did this was because it was a long time ago and I really,
really implanted more adults to be buying the jewelry for themselves because my
jewelry is kind of expensive.
And the biggest objection I usually get from people is that it's too expensive
to be bought for little girls.
Now I haven't had any new photos done in years,
so maybe the next photo shoot I do, I'll have younger models instead,
so in my example it made it clear to me that my jewelry is often bought as gifts
for other people and less so for the actual buyers themselves.
Another insight this question gives you is why they bought your products.
Was there a special occasion that prompted this purchase?
If you make handbags,
this question might tell you that more men are buying your bags for their wives
instead of the actual wives buying it for themselves.
This may not seem like a big difference to you at first,
but the way you write your product descriptions is very different for both
cases.
Knowing this information also informs you of how to strategize your marketing.
For example, with my jewelry, since I know people are buying my stuff for kids,
I would see more success pitching my jewelry to magazines for gift guides for
kids rather than gift guides for moms. If you're enjoying this video,
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The third question is why did you choose my shop over the other person's shops
or the, you know, your competitors.
This wasn't a question that I specifically asked my ideal customers,
but sometimes they've voluntarily told me. For example,
when people buy my A Sale a Day Business System program,
I ask about how they found me, but while they're answering,
you're also voluntarily including why they picked me over other coaches and it's
really helpful information to have to give you clarity.
So something that I have been particularly interested about in the last few
years is the power of perception. You might have heard this before,
perception is reality.
So how I maybe maybe different than how people perceive me to be.
A great example of this is I've talked about how I deal with anxiety and had
problems with low self esteem, right? I still have those problems.
But to outsiders like to you, you know, you're watching me doing YouTube,
making videos.
I've been in commercials for big brands like Allbirds and Samsung and Google.
I go to auditions, I'm pursuing an acting career for goodness sake.
You might think
I've had people say to me that I speak so confidently that they would never have
imagined that I had confidence problems.
So your perception might be that I'm a confident person and that is the reality
despite me not feeling like I'm confident.
So going back to the A Sale a Day,
I've been coaching creatives since 2014 and it was always really vague to me
what my unique selling proposition was like what made me different than other
coaches. And if you have branding experience,
you might be able to consciously define your difference from the get go.
But most of us are way too close to our own businesses to know what makes us
different. This was the case for me as well,
and it was really eye opening to hear that people tell me that the reason they
chose me as their coach was because I'm practical. I'm a good teacher.
The way I explain things is very easy to understand and I give people
step-by-step explanations for how to do things.
I didn't know this about myself when I first started coaching,
but knowing this now I can actively position and market myself as being the
coach that's easy to understand.
I can create ads and emails and blog posts talking about how this makes me
unique and attract more of my ideal customers to my business and I'm actually
really curious now that I'm talking about this,
since you've been watching my videos,
why do you watch my videos if you've been watched them?
What attracts my content versus other people's content?
I would love to know what you think makes me different anyway, for tiny hands,
I have had so much competition pop up over the years and my customers,
the ones that have spent a lot of money with me,
have told me that they don't mind paying a higher price for my products because
they think my designs are better than other people's designs.
When you know what your competitive edge is,
you can lean into that and use it in your marketing so you can attract more
customers and sales.
The fourth question you should ask your ideal customers is,
what's your favorite part about the product they bought?
Now what this does is give insight into your products design and it could even
help you save costs and increase your profit margins,
which means more money for you in your pocket for every sale you make.
So this question tells you what features of your product people love and what's
equally as important for you to pay attention to is what they don't say they
love. So for example,
my jewelry customers are always telling me how much they love my gift boxes.
We put each necklace in a gift box with a paper doily on top and tie a cute
little ribbon around it so that it's ready for gift giving. Right?
So I know my customers loved is because they keep telling me that they love it,
so I'm going to keep doing it.
But what they didn't say was the inserts I used to include in their orders.
I used to include postcards and even candy with my orders and people who ever
said anything about those things.
So eventually I phase those out and stopped including them and people never said
they missed it either. They didn't care about them to begin with.
And the best part is I no longer have to print postcards and buy candy.
So it saves me money and time. These are all really important questions to ask,
but this one is especially so in the sense,
because I know that as a creative person,
you're inclined to want to spend a lot of time making your products,
adding lots of cool features and glitter and sequence and everything and even
the kitchen sink to it.
And there is a tendency right amongst us creatives to think that the more you do
and the more you put into your product,
the more people will like them or the more people will pay for them.
But that's not true at all. More often than not,
less is more and simple ideas sell the best.
And if you're not sure the best way to figure out what parts of your products
are valued and what's not is to ask your customer.
The fifth question to ask your ideal customer is what are your other favorite
brands to buy from?
This doesn't have to be brands that sell exactly the same product as you,
but let's say you sell jewelry. Then you want to know what furniture,
art, clothing, or cosmetic brands they enjoy buying from as well.
Why is this important? Well,
if you've watched my video on how to find your ideal customers,
you'll hear me talk about my coattail technique and one of the first steps to
this technique is to figure out what other brands your customer buys from.
Once you know this,
you'll never have to worry or wonder about how or where to find more of your
ideal customers because other brands have already brought together those people
and you can easily get in front of them by interacting with them on social media
or by appearing in magazines or blogs that also feature those same brands.
Your coat tailing off these other brands,
which is why the name the coattail technique.
Some people who are learning how to do this technique might struggle with this
at first with not knowing what other brands are like you.
And the key is that you don't have to sell the exact same product.
It just has to kind of be the same style. So if you have trouble too,
the easiest way to get out of that is by asking your own customers.
And that way you're not just guessing what you think are similar brands to you,
but you're getting it directly from your ideal customer.