Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I am having a difficult time identifying who my key buyers are.  I would like to start gathering some demographic info to improve my marketing. 

From my current order form, I can obviously obtain location and gender.  I am thinking of putting a form on the site asking customers age group, profession, how they heard about us, etc?

Would such a form be practical after the checkout process?  Or perhaps as a follow-up email? 

As an aside, I just finished a web analytics course and one of the things that stood out in my mind was the fact that Amazon has made their checkout form as less busy as possible.  They found that excluding menu buttons, etc. helps customers focus on the checkout procedure only.  They were previously losing a signficant amount of folks during the checkout procedure -- too busy and cumbersome.

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Charlotte Terry
RooKaps -- USB Replacement Caps


http://www.RooKaps.com

I`m a customer in various places, and I routinely get annoyed with questions about my demographic information. One that stands out is Radio Shack, where at EVERY transaction I`m asked all the questions about name, address, phone, and ZIP code. They should`ve had it once, and be done with it.

I never fill out demographic surveys, and if I`m forced to in order to conclude a transaction, either I abandon the shopping or (if I totally have to have the product) fill it out, then try to find some other place to shop.

For many years, mail-order companies have found demographic information by using a PO Box number assigned to advertising media or other demographic splits. That makes the most sense: just include an address or email name (alias) for various advertising. When you get an order for PO Box 2934-A you know it came from the TV Guide published in the Southwest, for example.

Same with an order coming to "customer-service" or "information" or some other alias.

The only time I feel like filling out survey information is if it`s a whole separate transaction, I have a choice to do so or not, and/or can do it later. Usually it`s when someone asks me would I like to help them out with a short survey. That, I can understand, and often I do feel like helping them out. :-)

I just checked out your site. It looks a bit of a mess in my browser. Could be that your site has been built for IE? I, along with many millions of others use Firefox. May be worth checking?

Shrunk screen capture of your site just to give you an idea of what it looks like on an Fx browser with nothing added.

[edited to add] for some reason you may need to refresh the page (press F5) after clicking on that link.

The best way to get people to fill out demographics is by offering them a coupon for a discount.   Make sure it`s an offer, somewhere in the check out process tell them that if they cann fill out the demographics form and receive a 10% discount. 

Keep in mind that you will get some folks that will fill out fake data as well as garbage date like lkjsdfkjsdflkjdf.  But you will get a lot of folks that will honestly fill it out.

Hope that helps!


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Arsenal Marketing
WEB 2.0 Internet Marketing for Business
http://www.arsenalmarketing.com
Joe@arsenalmarketing.com

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