Turning Customer Feedback Into Creative Copy (And 3 Steps to Killer Surveys)

Defining Voice of Customer Research

Momoko Price: I mean, I feel like it’s pretty straightforward. Like, it’s getting feedback from. I mean, a lot of people will call it like, user feedback or whatever, but Voice of Customer, in my mind is when you get feedback from your. From your customers. Also I would say your prospects too, if. If that’s possible. But a lot of time it’s in my mind, it’s very open form feedback. Like, we’re not. You’re not. Like, a lot of times I find that especially in the marketing world, they’ll do a lot of research, they’ll do a lot of interviews, and then they’ll just, like. Because they need to get that, like, clear, like bullet points in a PowerPoint slide that they could show to their boss. They’ll just distill everything down into five points that kind of get across the main findings that we had. And for me, when I’m talking about voice of Customer research, I’m talking about the raw, messy stuff. Digging into that, not just coming up with, here’s the brief. Here’s three things that we learned from some interviews or from surveys or whatever. Now go write and add or go write sales page that hits these marks. But say whatever you want. Like, Voice of Customer research is like the raw spreadsheet, the raw transcript, all that stuff. And just like diving into that and using that to sort of shape your copy. And I think a lot of times people just kind of. They want to get. They want to get past that as soon as possible. They, like, collect it, and then they’re like, okay, make this pretty so I can, like, so that we can, like, handle it better. But then you miss all that vivid stuff.

Louis: That’s what I was about to say. Right. Like, it seems like your point of view is that if you try to summarize it too fast, then you miss the nuggets in there, the way people describe things in their own world. Right. So many times I’ve seen it. The words that some people use is just so powerful. You have to use it in a headline or you have to use it in the first paragraph. Just like you have to use it just so good on its own.

Momoko Price: Yeah. And I think that a lot of people, like, the tricky thing for me or the thing that I find a lot, and it’s something that I’m currently trying to figure out how to do, is when I do a lot of client projects and stuff, like, what ends up happening, and I think this happens at a lot of companies is that the Copy will be kind of sort of cobbled together or put together during like a big huge redesign. And then, and I’m talking, when I say copy, I’m not talking about content marketing, like, I’m not talking about blog posts and articles like sort of, I don’t want to say transient copy, but like I’m talking about like the website Evergreen stuff that’s at the top of the funnel, sort of like middle of the funnel. That’s like where people hit to like buy the product, your persuasive pages, right? Landing pages, all that stuff. And I find that with a lot of companies, like they kind of pull that stuff together, they make a decision on how they want to communicate and then they, they hire a copywriter to put it all together, they push it out and then it just sort of lies dormant and they don’t do any, they don’t sort of kind of update it in like a, in like a regular, like a continual optimization. It’s just kind of just like you do it once every six months, maybe once every two years, whatever. And then you come back to it. And then. So when I get hired to do something, a lot of times I’ll do like the discovery project part of the project and we’ll, we’ll, I’ll say like, okay, let’s gather your voice of customer research. Like what do you know? What have you gathered? What’s your feedback? Give me all the stuff, give me all the raw messy stuff and I’ll start digging into it.

Sources of Raw Customer Feedback

Louis: So what are the sources usually of this raw, messy stuff?

Momoko Price: So like support and chat logs, right? So from people especially if you’re like a SaaS product, but like people especially like the frustrating thing is so many of those apps like Intercom and stuff, it’s really hard to like export the conversations and like analyze those conversations. It’s such a headache, but still worth doing. So surveys to your, to your like people who are visiting the site but haven’t bought, surveys to your customers. So people who already bought one on one interviews with like your hardcore like champion evangelist, people like the people who love you. Those are great for just getting, filling in the, like oh man. So I’ll use the surveys to get a kind of like a quantified understanding of what messaging themes are most prevalent. And then if I really want to get those vivid details of like the individual experience of before, during, after the product or getting the product, interviews are great for that because you have that sort of long form and like you get people really thinking about how it felt and you get that sort of rich feedback. So interviews are another good one. One that is really overlooked is paper response surveys which I use a lot for like early stage startups because they don’t have customers and they can be like it’s touch and go. Right. Like I use that a lot for like direction in terms of what points, like what messaging points you should hit. Sometimes the voice of customer like at the actual open form comments you get back are like straight up rude. Like, like they’re just impatient, like they want to answer, they’re answering these surveys and they’re kind of like eh. But it’s a good way to test your market and test the value propositions and messages that you think you should go forward with and see like how is my target customer responding to this? Yeah, there’s just, there’s so much but like there’s so many different ways to get it now. And there’s also of course user testing if you want to just get a litmus test on like what people are like the first impression of your current website to get a sense of like what’s actually broken in terms of what you’re saying. So that’s not, that’s actually really overlooked a lot. Like a lot of people will use user testing to like figure out as a way to sort of gauge well what do people want. And I don’t really use that at all like that at all. Like I’ll use that because it’s, it’s such a, an anonymous one off person that’s just like commenting on your website. I generally just use it for like what do people, what are people not getting about what I’m saying? You know what I mean? Like what are like gap analysis.

Louis: Yeah, you use that for copy and stuff. So to summarize chat logs like conversations like Online like forums, surveys 1 to ones 1 on ones and then paper based as you said like paper response surveys depending on the business. Right. I mean if you’re a SaaS business that only sell online, it’s unlikely that you’ll have paper that like feedback. But I suspect it’s more like retail maybe retail companies. No, no, no, maybe I’m not. Okay, go ahead.

Momoko Price: Sorry. Not like, not like, not like I

Louis: thought you were talking about literally piece of paper.

Momoko Price: No, no, no, no. Like no, like it’s like a grocery store with like comment box and you’re just like taking like little, I don’t

Louis: know, maybe that’s, that’s way so overlooked, you know.

Momoko Price: No, I mean, I mean like, like you pay, they Have a paper? Yeah, you pay for the response for the panel.

Louis: The paid panels where you pay for an answer. Wow. All right. That’s why in French, you see, I don’t get everything yet.

Momoko Price: We’re back on the same now.

Louis: We’re back on the same thing. Okay, so we’ll talk about that more because I’ve experienced with that and it can kind of. It can be hit and miss. It’s hit and miss for sure because of the audience. The fact that you cannot really target exactly who you want. But before we go to that and how to actually leverage worth of customer research better and all of. To go into kind of step by step, I just want to get something out of the way which I know is an objection, which I know is something that people have in their mind when they think of user feedback, as you just mentioned, as synonym for voice of customer. I’m just going to read out the quote from David, David Ogilvie. Right. Who said before, the trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say. And so actually that’s been reshared by a very popular CMO at the minute on LinkedIn. Like this guy gets followed a lot. I’m not going to name him. That’s not the point. How do we. What do you say to that? Like, is it actually useless all user research because everyone is biased and they can’t, they don’t know what they think or. What do you say to that?

Addressing the Ogilvy Objection to Market Research

Momoko Price: No, I, But I think that you need to be smart. That’s like, that’s kind of a. It’s kind of a. It’s a bold statement and I understand and I’ve seen a lot of questions in surveys and stuff where I look at those questions. I’m like, you’re not going to get a good. Like you’re not going to get a useful answer from that. Like they’ll like, they’ll be hyper specific and it’s all the question is all about. I’m curious about something about my business and my product and we have some ideas in our committee room about what would work or not. So let’s just put it in front of them and let’s, let’s basically like we have a proposal for a new test. Let’s just ask them if they would. If what we think will work is something they would like or whatever. You know what I mean? And that I don’t think works because I think they’ve shown in studies and stuff, like with pricing and stuff, it’s extremely difficult to get people to get an accurate sense of what people will in reality pay for. And you can manipulate that in all these different ways. But what I do use surveys for is there is an experience that they live. And I think that there’s, there is a product, there’s a, there’s an experience that they live around the product. The before, during, and after that you don’t want them to, like, you just want to get that feeling when it comes to copywriting. You want to get that story and that, that sort of narrative arc so that you can put together a sales narrative that they relate to that’s relevant to them. Right. And you can’t. That’s something that if they perceive that if they’re, if their perspective on using the product is like, well, I felt like this and I had that. You know, then at least when you actually put together your sales page copy, you’re using language. If you’re building your copy off of that voice of customer research, then you’re using language and sort of like inception points, I guess, that they relate to because it came from them. So I don’t think that that’s useless at all. I do think that if you trying to do like product design questions and you’re using like focus groups to do that, you’re going to end up with like the Homer Simpson car from that old. Do you know the one that I’m talking about where his brother. Yeah, his brother, like gets. It was like, you can design whatever car you want and then they put together this complete monstrosity. Like, you can’t. That, that doesn’t work. You can’t just be like, well, what do you like this? What about this? Do you like this? What about this? And then come together with something that makes sense.

Louis: So let me give you an example of a bias question, right? And to be, to be clear, this show is not political. I’m just taking this example because it’s top of mind. A survey from Trump, one of the question number 14 was, do you believe that the media is engaging in a witch hunt to take down President Trump? Yes or no. So that’s, that’s the best example because super bias, the way the question is phrased, it’s a yes and no answer, not all free text. So people can’t really say anything. And I mean, there’s a lot wrong with it. But that’s.

Momoko Price: Yeah, it’s like, when did you stop beating, like, have you stopped beating your wife or whatever? You know, that’s like the classic one where it’s just like, you know, like, no matter. Like no matter what you say, you’re just. You’re. You’ve been painted into a corner. And I think that that’s. That’s where a lot of surveys go wrong, is that they’re focused entirely on getting answers that validate their perspective of what should be done, rather than putting together questions that investigate the experience that the customer is having around your product.

Louis: Exactly.

Momoko Price: And that’s. That’s the thing that makes you able to write copy that they like or that they relate to or that even makes sense to them because you bothered to sort of map that out and listen. Like another. Another really good. I think the Henry Ford thing, if I asked the customer what they wanted, they would have said, I wanted. Yeah, I want a faster horse, which.

Louis: I hate this. I hate this quote. And first of all, he never said it. Right.

Momoko Price: Did he never say it? I don’t actually even know.

Louis: He never said it. And that’s the first thing. But the second thing is that that’s the wrong question to ask. You don’t ask what they want. You ask what you struggle with. And they would say, it takes me five fucking hours to go see my mom.

Momoko Price: Yes, yes.

Louis: You have a better way to go there?

Momoko Price: That’s exactly what I wanted to mention, is that when you ask the question that asks them the pain, like, that asks them to expand on the pain that they’re experiencing, that gives the whole solution space of which you’re probably more informed about. Right. Like, if you’re a domain expert in whatever thing that you’re doing that gives you the perspective you need to put together the best solution that fits that key problem. But. But if you don’t ask the user what their pain is, you know, that’s. Then, like, what are you even doing? Like, why? Like, you know, so, like, so with the guy, with David Ogilvy, I totally get where he’s coming from. And I think it’s also because you don’t want to be. You don’t want your. Your copy to be. I think there was a term like data. I think Joanna Weeb said this in an article that I read was. It was a great term, which is data choked. Like, it’s just like all the soul has been kind of squeezed out of it. All the story, the arc, the natural emotional flow has kind of been squeezed out of the copy you’re writing because you’re going strictly by the numbers. You know what I mean? You’re not saying anything that has not been somewhat validated. So there’s no room for creativity. And when you completely lose that, then you’re, you know, there is, there is that je ne sais quoi to copy. Hey man, I took like, I. I was French immersion.

Louis: Yeah, everyone says that. Everyone says that in the podcast. Oh yeah, I took French. Yeah, I speak French. So anyway, thanks for painting this picture of like the problems, the way people do it wrong and all of that. So. And the value that it has when it’s done the right way.

Momoko Price: Yeah, like you have to have a plan with what you’re going to do with the feedback that you get back.

Louis: Well, now let’s do this right. So I think maybe we can talk about briefly the type of question to ask if you want to do that. Like maybe the collection of voice of customer research or maybe you want to talk more about now. Let’s consider you already have some and how to organize it better and whatnot. It’s up to you. You can start from either end.

Momoko Price: Man. I feel like the tricky thing with the how to organize it is that my answer is like, I have a spreadsheet that I have tinkered with over a long time. So I don’t know, like if I.

Louis: So let’s start from scratch. Let’s take a fictional example so that we don’t get into actual example of like past clients or whatever. Let’s just take an example of an industry, a type of company you are used to work with. Just give me one. Like a type. Wait, is it SaaS?

Momoko Price: Yeah, like we’ll say, like let’s say, let’s say B2B SaaS. That’s a very common one.

Louis: Software company sending to businesses, very common. Can take this example. So let’s say you start working with them and they send you this spreadsheet that has nothing in it. Right. So it’s just, you can’t use it. Right. It’s like, okay, so talk me through the way you would typically collect voice of customer, like in exact detail. What I mean is, if you said, if you say I go through intercom conversation, do you copy paste each and put them on Excel or do you put them in airtable or do you put them in. Do you just remember them by heart? I don’t know. So how do you do it? Step one, you start with this B2B SaaS company. What do you do first?

The Hierarchy of Useful Feedback

Momoko Price: One thing that I make sure to do is that I don’t know about other people’s processes, but there is definitely A hierarchy of useful feedback when it comes to a given client. And generally speaking, the golden combination that I like to get every time, if I can get it, is I would like to be able to send out a very like intentional, well designed survey to their customers, like paying customers emailed to their customers to get responses from them. And then I will also have a separate survey that I have put together that it specifically targets prospects. Right. And we want recent, relatively recent customers if I can get at least that. Because sometimes it’s hard to get like, like intercom conversations and like support chat and all that stuff. Those are like night. Those are almost like nice to haves. If I’m dealing with like a conversion specific issue of like getting people from non buyers to buyers, then the two that I really like to make sure I get are the prospect survey on the website and then the, the customer survey in the post purchase survey. Like once they have actually bought the product and used and used it and

Louis: used it like that’s, that’s important, right? So you don’t want to wait like for B2B SaaS if you get the value after like 2 months, you don’t want to get it straight away after purchase because you’re just going to get nothing. Well, we just bought it just to

Momoko Price: talk about with the exception of one question or a couple of, or a couple of questions. So. Okay. The reason that the sort of like ideal base feedback that I always like to make sure I get is from surveying prospects and surveying paying customers is because in, whenever you are putting together a sales narrative like you’re putting together, whether it’s on a sales page or it’s across, like an email campaign, you know, like a drip campaign, whatever, doesn’t matter. But when you follow that flow, it is a sales narrative that always follows generally like before, like an understanding of like how the person is feeling or the problem that they’re dealing with before they buy the product, right? The evaluating whether or not to choose that product over other options, right? Identifying and that’s the value proposition part. Like is like identifying that like oh, this is the one I want. Not this one, this one or this one. And then the acquisition of whatever the awesome life improvement is that you get from the product, right? So it’s a before, during and after thing. And so the reason I always like to make sure that I get prospect survey and a customer survey done at the very least and some sizable numbers is because that lets me get a relatively quantified sense of the people who are, who are in the before situation and the people who are in the after situation and like a little bit like getting like if you get recent customers and you get people who are on the website, people who are kind of dancing around that during like that the shopping point. So that’s why that’s so important. So if I have those components that’s great. And like some people will just like they’ll just rely on interviews or whatever but interviews you can’t get. You can’t go through 300 interviews, right? Like it’s just not, it’s not scalable stuff. So surveys are scalable. So that’s why, that’s the key for that.

Louis: This is your go to tool and especially if you are, if there is some urgency, right? If this client hires you and say listen, we’re in the shit, we need to change things quickly. Those are your go to and I would say something on the post purchase survey versus the prospect survey and I want to know what you think. Post purchase survey is great because you’re asking the opinion of people who’ve bought already. So you’re asking the opinion and the experience of people who went through the experience, who took their wallet out, discussed it with their colleagues, actually went through, used the product. So their feedback is extremely valuable because you want to get more of them. How do you deal with prospect on the other side who are not necessarily customers and who actually might not fit the description or the type of customer you want. Right. It could be people just wondering, the website who don’t fit the profile whatsoever, how do you deal with them? How do you exclude them?

Filtering Prospects from Existing Customers

Momoko Price: Yeah, that’s the way. So one of the like, one of the things that can come up really often especially for a SaaS product is, and this is like a, this is like a quick and dirty hack that I’ll do is when you, if you have a pop up survey that’s just people coming to your website, the number one thing you want to understand is like what proportion, like what, how familiar are the people who are coming to your website about your product. Right. So that’s, that comes back to awareness or product awareness. And so a quick like the first question I always ask on those surveys, those like pop up surveys is just like which of these best describes you and there’ll be a range of options and it will go from like I’m considering this kind of product for like the first time. Like I’ve never really bought it before. I’m not, I’m not even really sure if this is like what I need. Like I have no idea. Obviously the copy is not that rambly. The middle one is sort of like the comparison shopper because that’s the person where it’s like you really want to emphasize differentiating your product from other options because they’ve already. You don’t need to convince them. If your audience that’s hitting the website is mostly those people, you don’t want to be wasting their time trying to convince them that they should buy whatever type of product you have in general, they’ve already made that decision. They know they need a microphone. You know what I mean? Like they know they need it for podcasting. They just want to find the best one. So you have an option in there that’s like, I know I want to buy X, I just need to find the right one. And then you have the option of like, I’m just here to order, like I know what I want, get out of my way. And then the last thing for B2B SaaS or for any sort of membership subscription based thing is I am already a customer of whatever. I already am a member, I already am a user. Like I’m just here to log in. Because if you don’t do that and you don’t have something that lets you at least get some of that noise out, then you’re going to get some, you’re. You’re not going to get the best feedback because they’re not, they’re not your, they’re not your audience, the prospect audience. They’ve already been converted. Right. So it’s kind of polluting your stuff. That being said, you can also like the really clean way to do it if you wanted to is to set up your survey so that it only triggers if the person who’s coming to the website has, does not have a, like a user id. You know what I mean? Like for. Yeah, that’s getting into like analytics stuff. But that’s the, that’s the ideal way to do it. But a lot of businesses don’t have that set up.

Louis: Yeah. And things can still slip through the crack. Like they might using, they might be using a new browser. They have never logged into this one. So yeah, to be safe, the safer is usually to ask. And if you can combine it with probably asking plus some sort of a, like removing people who used to log in or like who have a user id, then start getting some decent data. Right?

Momoko Price: Yeah, then you get some data.

Louis: So that’s the first question. And so that’s for the prospect survey which. And you can use multiple solutions for that, I suppose. Can you. So here you’re talking, we’re talking about a pop up survey, like something that will appear on the website. Right. And for the customer survey you’re talking more about an email survey.

Momoko Price: Yeah, for customer surveys it’s for, I usually do email because you know who you can literally just, I mean this is assuming you have a list, right. And you have people who, that you know have bought your product. You just, you just like limit, try to get some of those people and then you just send them an email that asks them to fill out an email. And I mean generally speaking I find that your pop up surveys get much lower response rates than email surveys. And it makes sense because like if you’re targeting the way that I’m talking about it makes complete sense because your prospects haven’t bought from you. They have zero loyalty. They don’t, they don’t even know you know what I mean? You’re probably irritating them a little bit by interrupting them in the first place. Which is, I mean that, that comes back to another issue that I always like to make sure people do is when they write their like people tend to not give a shit about, Sorry, I don’t know if I can swear but they don’t really put any effort into the copy that they, their invite copy for their surveys. And it seems really trivial. But like I try to remind clients that that is when you are trying to gather user feedback, especially when you’re not paying for it, you’re like literally asking people to do you a favor. It is a conversion optimization. The conversion is different. It’s not from prospect to buyer, it’s from anonymous to respondent. Right. But it’s still a conversion. You’re still trying need to use persuasiveness to get people to actually engage with you and not get pissed off at you. Especially because a lot of times surveys are never ever going to be a, they’re a priority for us as business owners because we get valuable feedback. They are never going to be a priority for your customer ever like because they have other stuff to do.

Making Surveys Enticing and Persuasive

Louis: What are your tips to make them enticing? Especially the prospect survey which I think is more difficult to get an answer to as you said.

Momoko Price: Yeah. So prospect survey. So some baseline things that I generally do is I don’t if I can avoid it or as long as the audience, the spirit split of the audience allows for it. I will tend not to use activate pop up surveys on mobile. Right. Because it’s just too annoying. Like it’s, it’s so aggravating to have your entire viewport just like be over and then you can’t get, like sometimes you can’t get rid of it and all this stuff. So that’s number one. Number two, I never choose a tool that doesn’t have a pop up experience that is like soft and gentle and very easy to click out of. Like very easy. They should be able to, they should be able to click on anywhere other than like the pop up and it will disappear. Right. And I think, I think hotjar is like, that’s why one of the reasons I keep using hotjar because like they’re, their pop ups are very like unobtrusive and you can kind of, you can get out of them very easily. So that’s, number one is just like respect the user’s choice to not want to engage. Number two is I never use the template feedback or the template copy that is given in a survey tool ever. Because it’s so generic. It’s so. Because they, because the, you can’t, the person, the company that is making the tool like cannot make copy that is relatable because it has to be something that will apply to all of their customers. Right. All of the users that they have. And that can be across all kinds of different industries. So it will invariably be just the most robotic. It’s just like, we value your feedback, please, blah, blah, blah. Because they don’t know. They can’t be like, oh, let’s be zany, let’s be cute, let’s be this. They can’t do any of that. They don’t have the luxury. So you have to make your own.

Louis: So what do you leverage? What emotion or what hook do you leverage to make people? Like, let’s say if you don’t offer a price, it’s possible that you might offer a price or prospect. I don’t know prospect. So I don’t know. But let’s say if you don’t offer a price, how do you entice people to say like, we value your opinion? Like what’s the hood there? What do you make, what do you say to make them answer this?

Momoko Price: So one of the things I really try to do is I try to leverage. So I don’t know if you, you know, like Robert Cialdini’s book.

Louis: Yes.

Momoko Price: With Equation. Right. He had the old one that was six principles and then he added a second one. Yeah, yeah. And he gets, I think the seventh one was like, like sort of like tribalism, which.

Louis: All right.

Momoko Price: If you look at the political landscape, like it Works like us versus Them has historically shown to be very effective in getting people to engage with you. I don’t try to use it ethically, but a lot of times if people are, if, if people are coming to use your product, they. There is some kind of common ground identity or label that they ascribe they. That they would call themselves, right? Like, one of the things for my course that I did for CXL, we. We optimized a page called petdoors.com, right? And obviously they sell pet doors and most of those. So that means they are cat and dog owners, right? Or cat and dog lovers, right? So that’s a label that gets people to. You call them out, you say, calling all, you know, cat and dog lovers or pet lovers or pet owners, you know, and something that. Where they go, oh, that’s me, right before you ask them to do you a favor, right? But they’ll see that and they’ll say like, oh, that. Okay, I got to keep reading, right? So that’s the first thing I do is I try to think of whatever the product is. Like, if it was a B2B, you should have an idea of like, a label that would correspond to your target audience, right? Like, if it’s a B2B SaaS app,

Louis: there’s to their identity and not their demographic. Right? It’s. I mean, this is.

Momoko Price: Can you imagine calling all straight white men?

Louis: Calling all straight white men working in New York City? It might work, but, yeah. Identity. What do they believe? What do they believe that most of those don’t? Like, if you sell accounting software, you could say, for calling all people who hate spreadsheets or like, you know, financing. You know what I mean?

Momoko Price: Even just like, if you know that the most of the people that you work that you’re making your software for, if it’s accounting software and you know, most of them are small business owners, like, calling all small business owners, like, it’s not like it’s, you know, you don’t have to like, over complicate it because it still has to be short, but. Or like calling all copywriters, you know, or whoever, you know, so. So that’s the. That’s the first thing I do, which tends to work really well. And then the second thing that I do is in the copy. I always make sure that you. You can never get away from the what’s in it for me factor. Right? Like, even though technically the benefit to them, like, you have to think of it like, well, how can I frame this in a way where, like, I’m gathering this feedback, but I’m doing it for you. Like, I’m doing it, you know, and so one of the things that’s very convenient for me is that I’m invariably hired to, to make people’s websites better, right? Like clearer, easier to use, easier to convert. Like, clearer and easier to use means easier to convert, right. So a lot of times I will literally just say, like, you know, we’re really working hard, like calling all marketers, you know, we’re really working hard to make this tool better for you. Right. Do you mind if we ask you a couple of questions? Keep it short and like, make it very clear. Like very short, easy question. And then when I’ll optimize the call to action, I like to make sure that I make it. I don’t know, I don’t actually know. I’ve never tested this and I don’t know if it actually works. But my gut feeling is like, I think it has an effect, which is that I will make the call to action representative of what a kind person would say, right? And I make the, the, the option to say no. I don’t make it like, like I, you know, those pop ups that are

Louis: like make you feel guilty.

Momoko Price: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they make you, they just make you feel like they’re, they just frame you as an asshole. Like they’re just kind of like, you know, do you want free stuff? And then the, the, the call to action is like, like, of course I want free stuff. And like the call, the thing to say no is like, no, I’m an idiot. I don’t want free, like, so I don’t do that. But I’ll do like, I’ll just make it like, like the, the call to action to say yes is like, sure, happy to help. Question mark. Like, I’m a nice person. And then the. Go ahead, sorry, the, the negative, like the opt out is just sort of, just like kind of. It’s not mean, but it’s just very neutral and kind of cold. Like it’s just like not interested, like just rude. So like you can like not, not super like over the top, but just the equivalent of what you would say to a, to a person that’s fundraising on the street when you walk in.

Louis: Exactly. That’s what it is. Think about the way you would say it in real life. So, okay, thanks for going through that because we have to cover how to organize this data then, right?

Momoko Price: Oh yeah, yeah.

Louis: So we talked about those two type of surveys. We won’t have the time to talk about the exact questions, but we’ve talked about that those topics multiple times in the show before. So if you, if you search for like survey or question to ask everyone, hatesmarketers.com, you should find enough question to start with. But that’s not really what I’m the most interesting interested with you because you mentioned a few stuff already you had never mentioned really on the show. So the next thing is, okay, let’s consider we have those answers. Let’s consider we understand the journey people go through from start to finish, the objections, the reason why they chose you, et cetera, et cetera. How do you transform that very raw data, as you mentioned in the intro of the show, into something valuable? How do you actually take it from this spreadsheet that you’re probably going to have to export as a survey expert into something valuable? What’s your process?

Organizing Raw Data into Actionable Insights

Momoko Price: So mine always comes back to spreadsheets. I’m like a broken record when it comes to this. I’m like, survey, spreadsheet, survey spreadsheets, right? And one of the things that is particularly handy about Google Docs is that you can make a Google form for yourself where you can just format it so that as you add in the messages that you’re collecting, that it will put them into a spread. Actually, you know what, don’t even worry about that. That is one option for a different scenario that has been very popular to people in the past. But I’m going to say for, specifically for surveys, if you get a lot of raw responses, I like to make sure that my surveys, every question is related to pulling out a message, a type of message, right? So there’s a question that if I have a question that I want to know, pain, there’s a question that asks about like, what is your top pain or whatever. If there’s a question about anxiety, then I want to know what are your objections or your fears or whatever. So each question kind of relates to a different part of the sales narrative. And but once you get that those survey the answers to those surveys back, then what I will do is I will make a spreadsheet where I will go through and I will grab a column, one column, one question, one message, right? So all those answers are people’s. It’s like a histogram of different kinds of answers to if I have like, what’s your number one problem they give me, it’s just a list of problems, right? And some of them are more common than others. So you just take that column, you put it into A spreadsheet, right? And then you go through and you just start categorizing, right? So you go down the list and it sucks because it’s boring. I do have some ways to make it a little bit faster and more effective because the key is that you want to have it so that as you’re categorizing the types of problems that people bring up in this particular example, you want to be able to count up how often within this population certain problems come up over others. Right. So the key to doing that is to be able to make a pivot table from there. And so what I like to do, I wish I had this blog post written because it’s almost done, but it’s where I map out this way and I’m going to link.

Louis: I know it’s going to be live. So this episode is the. If you’re listening to this right now, the blog post is live. So we won’t have, we won’t have the address just yet, but it is in the show notes. So go to everyoneheimarketers.com check the last episode and Momoko will have given me the URL before that. So now you have to write it.

Momoko Price: The miracle of this. So I actually set up my, set up a sort of survey response tagging spreadsheet in Google Docs where it’s this template where if you use it, you can, every time you read an answer in the subsequent columns, you can add like, tag it, like, describe it however you want. And then in a separate spreadsheet that’s already created for you, it will tally up in real time the pivot table of that stuff.

Louis: So you can use, there’s a few formulas to use for that. Right. But to keep it simple the way I do it, just to remove having to wait for your template, right? Like to keep it simple, you can have one in Google Sheet, you can have one sheet per question where the first column is all the answers and then each column after that is a tag. So let’s say you talk about objections and people say price, right? So the second column you would add price on the top and then you just tag one. If someone mentioned price, you put number one next to the answer and then boom, you hear another answer. Yeah, they don’t answer and boom. So it’s, I mean if you don’t want to use formula, it’s even faster. But what it seems like what you like to do is exactly what I like to do as well. So you categorize things really and you number things down. So you start turning this raw data into something a bit more quantifier. But I’m curious about something, right? Which is something I do when I write. Copy is sometimes in the answer, even if it’s an answer related to a problem. You can see that there’s a few words together from this customer that are just so powerful, you can’t ignore it. And what I like to do is I like to extract it and put it in a kind of a board or another sheet that is like gold copy. Like things that I know I have to use it somewhere. How do you handle this type of.

Extracting Golden Copy Nuggets

Momoko Price: Well, I do the same thing. But what I actually will also do is I will take the survey response. This is something that I love doing now is that I will take the survey responses. I’ll put them in a separate sheet. I will sort them from most like, like longest word count to shortest word count. Because the ones with the shortest word count are usually like the least useful. So you get like or. I mean, they. They’re good for direction, but they’re not good for copyright. So you want the meatiest responses up top. So I’ll sort them like that. Then I will do a series of find replaces for pronouns. So every time they say I or we, I change that to you, right? And then I’ll do like a couple of other things so that eventually, like, it takes like two seconds. But eventually once you do that, then your entire survey responses are. Are all in second person. So you need this. Like, you want this. You hate it when da da da da da da da. So that gets me to start reading the copy as proto copy. Like it’s already in. Because good sales copy is usually in second person, right? So I kind of make those switches just so that. And you can do it like, it’s actually not that hard. You’d think it would turn the copy into sort of like gobbledygook, like, with a lot of weird grammatical awkwardness. But it actually doesn’t. Like, if you account for like apostrophes and, you know, a little bit of grammar, you can do it pretty quick. And then once you do that, you can just read through it like that. And it’s just like, as soon as I see a sentence that stands out in that phrase, I just grab it and then I just, I put it in a swipe file, like what’s called a swipe file, which is basically just like where you just keep bits of copy that you like. It can be just a Google document. And then I just read through it and because I’ve already sorted it from most verbose to least, it’s generally like the last third is like kind of useless, ambiguous copy. And I don’t have to worry about it. Like, I don’t, I don’t listen to it. Oh, there is one more thing, which is that depending on the survey questions that you get back, you can, you, you probably would like. Another question that I will have in certain, specifically for paying customers is to get their, get them to rate, like how much they love, like use an NPS score or whatever. And then that way I can, I can filter out all the ones that are super negative because I’m not going to be using like every, every company has people who are not satisfied with the product, but I don’t want to be spending my time looking over their answers for when I’m trying to write highly positive copy. I’ll save those to send to the product design team or to the business owner because it’s like, okay, you have some issues that need to be dealt with. Here’s what they’ve said they need help with. But for writing copy, I just want to be looking at like the super positive stuff. So I’ll filter for that and then I’ll do it.

Louis: And you want to be in a confident place when writing copy. This is, it’s interesting. This is something I played with, like, mentally, depending on the mental state you’re in. Like, if you’re quite negative or not quite neutral and try to write copy, it’s going to be way less confident than if you obviously if you’re confident. I mean, that’s at least my personal experience. So I prevent, I stop myself from writing copy if I feel like shit, to be honest. But when I feel very pumped up and confident and whatnot, and I read all of those comments and I’m like, then I’m in a good state to write something. Is that the same for you?

Momoko Price: Yeah. Yeah. And like, to be completely honest, like, I find that the companies that I like to work with the most are the ones where my specialty is specifically their weakness. But they’re strong in the other aspects of the business. So they’re committed to. Right. Like, they’ve built a good product. Right. And like, for the people that they have managed to convert. The people love it. Like when you actually read the responses they get, they have like a loyal base because they have figured out some kind of value. Right. And they’re really committed to providing that. But they just suck with words like they like. And they don’t have Time, they don’t have time to figure out how to be persuasive and all that stuff. Right? So they’re just like, we need someone who can take the awesome that we’re, we’re kind of like cock blocking from, from anyone else finding out about because we just don’t know how to say it. And so they can just drop me in there and then I’ll go and I’ll just free it up and like put it where it needs to be in the order that it needs to be.

Louis: So we have those surveys, we’ve collected responses. So we have surveys from like website surveys from prospects, email surveys from customers. Then we have this massive spreadsheet where you can organize it as you described, where you’d have like a sort of a tagging system with another kind of sheet that grabs those tags or you can use multiple sheets. But basically at the end of the day, I don’t think you should overly obsess about the method. It’s more about do you have the fucking copy itself? Do you have the, I mean the voice of customer? Make sure you categorize it some way. I know airtable has some sort of solution out there. I think it’s using what you’re describing initially, which is the Google form, which is interesting as well, which is like you basically write down depending on where it’s at. You write down on Airtable or on Google form where it’s basically if it’s a problem, you just write it next to problem, then automatically it should bring you to the right section. So you have plenty of ways to do that. But I wouldn’t obsess over the way to do it. What matters is that you actually read this stuff, categorize it. So now let’s say we have the categories. We have some copy, like golden nuggets of copy in our slide file and we have the categories. What do you do next? Do you talk to the CEO? Like what do you like to do next?

Momoko Price: So that’s the thing for me for a lot of my. And this is why I sort of alluded to this at the beginning of the interview. Like traditionally what happens is I will be hired to do my thing. When I get the results, I will figure out, I get the, like, what are the key messages and the most common messages that come up? And then I will draft. I like honestly I draft a report. Like I draft a big report that goes to the CEO, it goes to everybody in management, goes to all those people and they get it. And it usually kind of a Lot of times it kind of drops like a bomb because it’s like they’re just kind of. They, they see it and then. Because it takes. Yeah, because it takes a lot of. You need to have someone who’s like on the outside that is just totally focused on just distilling messages. Whereas like in, in house, copywriters are pulled in so many different directions, they don’t have time.

Louis: You can’t really read the label inside a jar. Right. That’s the other thing.

Momoko Price: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Louis: Even if they are talented, they’re just being polluted by the internal lingo, the, the internal knowledge of the product, the assumptions that they have that it becomes very difficult to actually get value out of it from an outside perspective. So what, what does the report look like briefly, like in terms of structure? Like, do you have a tldr, a summary at the top?

Creating Messaging Customer Journey Maps

Momoko Price: Yeah, like, I mean, it’s pretty. I mean, I hate to say it, but it’s pretty corporate. Like, it’s, you know, you got your executive. Like, what I generally do is I will write it backwards because you know how like in high school they’re like, never write your introduction first. Right. So I have the. I have basically like, my report is always like, there’s like the key like this, the executive summary, that’s kind of like the abstract of your scientific paper or whatever that just breaks down the main findings. I write that last. The first section I do will be the research. So it goes executive summary and then it goes strategy and then it goes research that everything is based on. Right. So it’s kind of just like, here’s the high level of what we found. Here’s what we’re going to do. Like, these are the, like, this is the approach. This, this is the areas that we’re going to target and wherever funnels. And here are the reasons why. And then it’s almost like the research is like the. It’s like this. It takes up half the report, but it’s like it, it’s like this massive validation of like this here. If you want to know why the strategy is like this. Here’s all the information that we got. So all of the sort of like tables of what are the most common messages, all that kind of stuff, bar charts of, you know, like choices that people made in surveys that all gets in the research. And then the strategy part is where I’ll kind of map out like flows of like, okay, we know that these funnels need to be targeted. Here’s like, you know, it’s almost like A it’s like a flowchart of like, okay, here’s here are the pages that people need to go through to complete the funnel and here are the call to action. So that’s kind of like the high level. And then along with that is for each page that’s in this map, there’s going to be a messaging hierarchy of like these are the messages, which is based on the research. But at this point when they hit this page, the thing on their mind, they’re most likely in X state from the research that we’ve looked at. So we’re going to say these things in this order on this page and then we’re going to move them to the next page and then that’s in like the map and then, you know, next page messaging, hiring. And it just keeps going like that.

Louis: So you’re linking, you’re linking the stage of awareness that they are in the funnel or the stage they are in the funnel with the objections they have, the concerns they have, like what they want to achieve at this stage with the copy, the nuggets that you’ve extracted and stuff, right? This is kind of the.

Momoko Price: And it usually goes from like ad, there’s your super top of funnel copy. That’s all about attracting the clicks, right? Whether that’s an article or whatever. And then once. And that kind of anchors their expectations. So you should be fairly well aware of what they’re seeing before they get into the funnel and they start going further in. And then like by doing that, you can kind of say, okay, once they get to this point after they’ve clicked that, you know, some of the expectations they have are X or Y because of what we said in the ad. And then we need to move them along the awareness spectrum like of being skeptical and like not really understanding what this is all about over to super excited and like realizing that what you are offering is exactly what they need, right? The thing that you got to get them through. With copy.

Louis: This sounds like a customer journey map in the sense it basically is.

Momoko Price: But like with messaging it’s not you. It’s less UX and it’s more.

Louis: More messaging. I like that. And I think this is kind of the outcome of this, right? Like once you’ve. So you’ve set up your survey for prospect for. For customer, you’ve done it in such a way that is like make people answer them. You change the copy that you get from the default kind of copy provided by the software that you’re using. You make sense of it. You add spreadsheets you tag them along, you categorize them by like the stages and the problems and whatnot. You put aside on the swap file the copy that you need. But then I think the last step, which is almost, we don’t have a lot of time to cover it but very interesting is this, it’s like this customer, this messaging customer journey in a sense. Yeah, it’s okay. They don’t know anything about your product. What do you need to say? What are there? Because based on the research, you know that this is what scroll with at this step. Now let’s move down to the next step. Next step, yeah.

The Why-Try-Buy Framework for Persuasion

Momoko Price: And I try to remember like there are a lot of copywriting formulas out there, right? And they’re all about how to write a sales page in a different way. But if you actually break, like there’s like the problem agitate solution, there’s like the four P’s, there’s the ida and like there’s all these different formulas. But at the end of the day I always try to bring it back to like it comes down to context, value and that. Well, the best way to say it is, it’s. I can’t, I can’t remember his name now, but it was such a great thing. But he said it doesn’t matter what the product is, doesn’t matter how long the sales cycle is. Everybody, whenever you’re trying to persuade someone to do something or to buy something, it really comes back to why try buy, right? Like you want to, like you cannot. And by why try buy I mean why is like wherever their head is at, the pain that they’re dealing with, the issue that they want to solve, the enhancement that they want to add to their life, whatever context they’re in. That’s the why, right? The try is where you need to neutralize any possible objections and skepticism that they might have about your particular offer and your particular solution, right? You do the why so that they’re like, oh yeah, that’s me. Okay, cool. Okay, tell me more. I’m listening. But I’m not convinced because I don’t really know what you’re about. So that’s the try section where it’s all about demonstrating and proving your claims, right? Like you said that you have a solution to X. Well, here’s all the different levels of awesome and benefits and proof and testimonials that will allow you to really feel like this is a safe bet because I’m getting a sense of it’s not a one to one demo of the product, right? But Sometimes you might want to give them a demo, but it gives them a sense of reassurance that they know where they’re. If they’re going to hand over the money, they know what they’re getting on the other side, right? And then the buy is where that’s like you get them in there and they’re like, oh, this is. Oh, you’ve gotten them from like skeptical and whatever to like excited because this sounds perfect and they can practically feel it in their hands. Unless it’s a digital product, in which case that doesn’t really make any sense. But. And then once you get them to that point you that the climax is the buy section, it’s like, all right, take the leap. You know what I mean? Like, go for it. Here’s the gate. Here’s the door into that awesome. That you want, right?

Louis: I like that a lot.

Momoko Price: Yeah, it’s great.

Louis: So why try buy? It’s great. I’ve never heard of this one before.

Momoko Price: It’s not even a thing. It was just there’s. God, I can’t even remember. He was a guy in the Bay Area that I worked with and he did predictive analytics. Really smart guy. But he said that and I was like, that is gold.

Louis: That is good. Yeah. And gold. Momoko, thanks so much. I usually ask a few questions at the end of the show, but I think you’ve covered so much ground and I’m conscious of your time that I’m not going to ask them. Actually you’ve answered them on the first episode. So people can search for Momoko Price on everyoneheightsmarketers.com and they’ll find Delphine your recommended resources. Is there anything you like to add that I haven’t asked that you think is super, super important to this overall concept of voice of customer and how to organize it?

Momoko Price: Well, one thing that I haven’t really talked about but I do think if you have a SaaS product or not even a SaaS product, but if you have any kind of product that people buy online and you are not having a one question survey that’s embedded in the post conversion experience where you can ask them right after they bought, why they bought or what were they planning on solving or did they have any. Was there anything they were worried about? You can use that as an like. Use that as a way to have to continually optimize your messaging because it’s right there that people are happy they’re there. You’re not blocking or lowering like conversions. They’re right there and you can Just keep collecting feedback from those one questions and then use them to create ads, fix friction problems, do whatever, but just have it embedded and use the responses. The number of times that I have come across people, they have questions in an onboarding flow or they have intake forms in their post conversion experience for SaaS where they ask a bunch of questions but then the data is like locked somewhere and nobody’s looking at it, or they gather it and then they create a really nice chart full of pie charts and stuff that doesn’t inform your stuff. Get that messy data that you get from people the moment after they bought and start using their input at that moment to start clarifying your messaging. Whether that’s in an ad or on the sales page or in the funnel, whatever.

Louis: That’s a great tip. That’s absolutely the best place to ask for feedback because people just bought and they’re in a happy mood.

Momoko Price: Just one question.

Louis: Yeah.

Momoko Price: And the other thing too is you can give them a discount they already bought. So if you want to incentivize them, give them a discount on their next purchase. Just get them to answer when they’re happy and you know, and it works for anything.

Louis: Like it’s not just us. So that’s perfect. Momoko, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks again for sharing all of your tips as always. I’ve learned a lot from you this episode. Again, you’ve added a lot of value. I’m pretty sure this episode is going to be even more popular than the first one, so.

Momoko Price: Yeah.

Louis: Where can people learn from you, connect with you?

Momoko Price: Well, to be totally honest, I’ve become such a recluse. I mean, I do live in the woods of Vancouver island and I have actively killed my Twitter account and I don’t really post on Instagram that much either. So go to Kantan. K A N T A N IO if you go there and you sign up for my mailing list, like that’s a way for us to go back and forth. Cause I always answer the questions that people send me. But to be totally honest, like I’m getting really. I’m getting dangerously, dangerously into getting rid of social media from my life. Yeah. Like it’s things I’ve been just. Yeah, it’s been a slow. Just kind of getting rid of it because it’s just so distracting. So.

Louis: So Camtan IO or.

Momoko Price: Sorry, best way. Best way is probably LinkedIn. I’m still there.

Louis: Okay, so Momoko Prize on LinkedIn. Momoko, once again, thanks so much.

Momoko Price: Yeah, bye.

Louis: And that’s it. It for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Out. Daily. I send very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, shocking, entertaining content to help you Stand the Out. It’s ateveryonehates marketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just going to read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Zuma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna Said, I just realized this morning that my email habit is now to 1. Skim through the list. 2. Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly skim yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content that’s coming from you. It feels really lovely. I like your writing a lot. It really resonates. There’s so much bullshit out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I fucking love this email. But brilliant. I hope you subscribe. You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side.