Ask Your Shoppers What Motivates Them and You Shall Receive

I've often wondered why more marketing departments don't take advantage of surveying their customers to find how what motivates multi-channel shopping habits. Pottery Barn Kids marketers seem to be taking advantage of surveying their customers and ask really great questions to get to what drives the consumer.

After completing a baby registery at their store, I received a survey with some great questions to find out what would drive me to shop at their store in the future and what drove me to register at their store. Another "no brainer" question was what competitor stores I also registered at. After completing this survey, they'd be able to identify if I'd shop their again based on a $50 off $300 order or whether a meager 10% coupon would do the trick.

So why are so many retailers paying research firms for these answers when they can just ask their customers themselves? I've found the most common answer to be that they don't collect the proper data on their customers in the first place to be able to segment their customers properly. I mean, Pottery Barn Kids had to be able to segment only customers that had a baby registry and had completed their registry in the last 60 days. They had to also know that I hadn't already completed the survey. It seems simple but without the proper database management and email applications in place, collection can become quiet daunting. However, once put in place, the sky can be the limit on marketing research not to mention the personalized customer experience that's brought to all of your customers. And Pottery Barn Kids didn't use some fancy surveying software. They used Zoomerang, which anyone could set up in about 5 minutes.