How one customer interview generated six figures of revenue
How one customer interview generated six figures of revenue
Steal this step-by-step process: how to get the insight that led to the best performing ad of the year for Thriva.
Full disclosure: Thriva are a current client but this post refers to a campaign we ran when I was head of growth in 2017.
This ad was one of our big early winners at Thriva, unlocking six figures of revenue. It all started with one question in one customer interview.
“Who needs to talk to customers? I’ve got all the data I need.”
Customer interviews are as important to growth as managing your experiment pipeline, understanding Ads Manager, PMing your homepage, or generating LTV cohorts.
Why? Because good customer interviews teach you why your customers do something.
This isn’t about analysing data, looking at demographics, or creating personas.
This is about in-person conversations.
For the first eight years of my career I was all about raw numbers and data. So when I was introduced to the concept of customer interviews, my gut reaction was that data could provide all the answers. It was 2017, Thriva had just joined 500 Startups’ growth accelerator, which at the time was led by Matt Lerner and Nopadon Wongpakdee, and they both championed it. Turns out, it was one of the most valuable things I learnt in that programme.
Quantitive data can confirm insights and hypotheses, but it’s far harder to understand why something happened. To do that, you have to speak to people.
How we asked one question that led to our best growth that year
Email your customers who have just signed up
Do not invite people who have been using you for a long time. They already love you, which is great for the ego, bad for insights. You want people who are fresh.
This cannot look like a marketing email, it has to be plaintext. Either manually email people in Gmail. Or use Zapier to automate it (hint: we did a random delay after signup, so it looked less automated).Invite new customers for a customer research interview
“I was hoping to have a chat to learn more about you and ensure we’re working on the right things. I’m the founder of X, we only launched six months ago, and it would really help us. Are you open to a 30 minute conversation?”
Jobs to be Done interviews are important for so many reasons. First, they really help give a starting point for your marketing. Second, they’re useful for product, and especially when you’re pre-product market fit. Understanding customer needs and their psychology helps you build for them better.
Before you speak to a customer though, buy and read The Mom Test. This is a short book and the most important thing you’ll read on interviewing. To go deeper, read Lean Customer Development.
Pre-pandemic, we ran all of our interviews in person. It is a lot more coordination, and a lower hit rate, but in my experience, the value is much higher.
Your subject line matters. I always went for a variant of:re: feedback on {product name}
Ask: “what almost stopped you from buying us?”
This is the question. All the interviews were useful. But for me at least, this was the single most important question we asked.
Why?
Because it allows you to understand customer anxieties. Customer anxieties are a goldmine. Whatever people list here are things you need to address somewhere.
And the anxiety we unearthed? “I was afraid it was going to hurt.”
For context, Thriva offers tests where you have to prick your own finger and bleed into a tube. Turns out our customers felt anxiety about this before purchase. We can only imagine the anxiety the non-customers felt.Brainstorm the anxiety
Write those anxieties on a whiteboard and work out ways to answer them in ads.
We had the idea to visually show people doing the test without being in pain.Produce content insanely quickly
No matter how good your insight, ads will always surprise you. You can get 50% of the way there with logic, but the 100% needle movers are often illogical.
So like with any growth experiment, you should build quickly.
We went from insight to live ad in one day. We used my Google Pixel on a tripod. Asked people in the office. Shot it. Edited it in iMovie, and later that day it was on Facebook.
How the ad performed
It’s important to note, that we only ever saw this as a retargeting ad.
Entirely by mistake, I put it into both prospecting and retargeting. By that evening, we saw some decent numbers roll in to our sales channel on Slack.
I’ve always measured ad success in two stages:
Can it beat the previous best ad creative in an AB test
Can it sustain for a long period of time
This won on both counts and we ran this as the hero winner for a long period of time.
Why it worked creatively
It tells a story
In our first act, we meet a group of people on an adventure to do something – we’re not sure what it is yet, but soon learn it’s doing a finger-prick blood test.
Our second act shows our heroes hitting an obstacle. They have to overcome their own fear.
In our final act, we get resolve. They have beaten their fear, and are on to the next part of their adventure.It makes you laugh and surprises you
Ads that make you happy or surprise you are more effective than ads that prompt negative emotions.
This made people laugh. One of our colleagues fell over in mock pain during filming. It was ad lib, meant as a joke for all of us, but we kept it in. There was plenty of downside risk to this – but it turns out it was the funniest part of the ad.It feels native (long before UGC was a thing)
This was 2017. The UGC/influencer boom was years off. But the fact it was shot on a phone, was super low fidelity, half the people were out of focus, and the other half had muffled audio, kind of worked.
It’s fast-paced, with quick edits
Again, the pace of the edits here is reminiscent of a load of ads you see today. While I think this trend is starting to retreat, at the time this was different and captured attention.It piques curiosity
Intrigue is important – so long as it pays off. A lot of ads go wrong today because they leave too much to the imagination. But if you pique curiosity, and then tie it all together. That’s impactful.
A lot of this was counter-intuitive.
All the logic at the time stated you had to show the brand in the first few seconds. We didn’t.
Logic implied we shouldn’t highlight potentially negative attribute. We did.
And there was no reason it on paper should work with a cold, unengaged audience. But again, it did.
Anyone who has read Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy, will know that big ideas are often ones that on paper shouldn’t work. We had landed on one here.
Today, the creative execution of this ad would be different – but the strategy is one we use with our clients today.
The best marketers are inherently curious. Asking why something happens, rather than just accepting it. Turning curiosity into a desire to understand your customers becomes a competitive advantage.
If you’ve hit a wall in your ad creative this week. Here’s a starter for 10: when was the last time you spoke to a customer?