How to Enhance the Customer Journey with KnoCommerce

Ecommerce brands that integrate tools like KnoCommerce can transform how they understand their customers, which is especially crucial as the industry moves towards a cookieless future. KnoCommerce enables brands to collect zero-party data through purchase surveys, seamlessly integrating with platforms like Shopify, Klaviyo, and Triple Whale to bridge the attribution gap and deepen customer understanding.

This data is invaluable, particularly when traditional tracking methods fall short. Properly leveraged, the data from KnoCommerce surveys can significantly increase brands’ ROIs. One brand using KnoCommerce saw a remarkable 75% increase in revenue year over year. This success was partially attributed to better data triangulation between platforms, allowing for refined marketing strategies and more targeted budget allocations.

By embracing KnoCommerce, brands can not only enhance their understanding of customer journeys but also make informed decisions that drive growth and improve customer engagement. This article will explain the details of KnoCommerce and how to leverage it to future-proof your marketing strategies and truly connect with your audience.

Overview of KnoCommerce

KnoCommerce is designed specifically for ecommerce brands to collect zero-party data through pre- and post-purchase surveys. This direct feedback helps brands bridge the gap in attribution, providing clear and actionable insights about customer origins and behaviors that are often obscured in traditional analytics.

Emerging platforms like TikTok have introduced new complexities in understanding customer pathways. While TikTok is a great discovery tool, its users often convert via ‘last-click’ on other platforms, leading brands to believe that TikTok isn’t driving value. But TikTok exposure can still be charted through KnoCommerce’s surveys.

KnoCommerce captures crucial data about where and when the discovery occurred, directly from the customers, allowing brands to effectively allocate their marketing spend based on more reliable data.

For example, despite Google Analytics often crediting the last click to itself, KnoCommerce has identified that approximately 80% of these purported Google-driven purchases on Shopify actually begin on other platforms.

Understanding the real touchpoints and influences in their customers’ purchase journeys enables brands to craft targeted strategies that resonate more effectively with their audience. 

Moreover, in an age where marketing budgets must be justified by clear ROI, KnoCommerce provides the empirical data needed to defend and optimize spending across various channels.

Deploying Your First Surveys on KnoCommerce

Here’s how you can successfully deploy your first surveys using KnoCommerce, tailored to extract valuable zero-party data and pave the way for informed marketing decisions.

Setting Up Your Surveys:

KnoCommerce offers an intuitive setup process that integrates smoothly with popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify. Starting with KnoCommerce’s built-in templates, you can launch your first surveys quickly—often on the same day you set up. 

These templates are designed to cover a broad range of questions that delve into customer demographics, purchasing reasons, and discovery channels.

Tailoring Questions to Your Brand’s Needs:

To begin, focus on crafting questions that reveal how customers find your brand and their purchasing timeline. For example:

• “How did you first hear about us?”
• “Did you discover us through platforms like TikTok, Google, or Facebook?”
• “Are you buying for yourself or as a gift?”
• “If you abandoned your cart, what stopped you from completing the purchase?”

Such questions are crucial for distinguishing between direct and indirect discovery paths and understanding the different behaviors of individual shopper types, such as gift buyers versus personal buyers.

Pre and Post-Purchase Surveys:

KnoCommerce allows for both pre-purchase and post-purchase surveys. This dual approach provides a comprehensive view of the customer experience, from initial interest to post-sale feedback.

For instance, pre-purchase surveys can identify barriers like price sensitivity or checkout process issues, enabling you to address these factors promptly.

Prioritizing Questions:

Start with less intrusive questions to warm up respondents and gradually move towards more detailed inquiries. This strategy helps maintain engagement and increases the likelihood of customers completing the survey. Always ensure the final questions aim to gather the most valuable insights you seek, whether that’s additional personal data or specific feedback on marketing channels.

Leveraging Response Rates:

While not all customers will complete the survey, KnoCommerce’s has an average 45% response rate to any part of the survey which provides substantial data to analyze. Even partial responses are valuable, giving you a snapshot of customer preferences and behaviors that can significantly influence your marketing strategies.

Continuous Improvement and Customization:

As you gather more data, continue to refine your surveys. Ask follow-up questions based on earlier responses to delve deeper into customer motivations, especially for repeat purchasers or MVPs (Most Valuable Purchasers). This deeper insight can inform more targeted, creative approaches to your campaigns.

By carefully crafting your surveys and continually refining them based on customer feedback, you can gain insights that drive more effective, data-driven marketing decisions in a cookieless future.

Data Analysis with KnoCommerce

KnoCommerce excels in its ability to gather zero-party data directly from customers via both post-purchase and pre-purchase surveys. This data, freely provided by customers, offers unfiltered insights into their preferences, behaviors, and motivations, offering a clearer view than third-party data or inferred first-party data, such as demographic assumptions based on credit card information. 

For instance, a brand may look at their purchasers’s credit card information, see that most purchases come from mothers in their 30s and 40s, and assume that that is their target demographic.

But by simply asking customers who they are, they may be surprised that most purchases made on those credit cards were not made by those 30-40 year old moms but by their 13-17 year old daughters using their parents’ cards, leading to significant shifts in marketing strategies, targeting, and ad designs.

By segmenting survey responses by detailed data points like age, gender, discovery channels, and purchase motivations, KnoCommerce helps brands understand varied customer segments’ behaviors and preferences. 

This granular breakdown aids brands in refining their marketing strategies and attribution, enhancing how they engage in brand-building activities and adjust their tactics based on real customer journey data.

Actionable Outcomes & Collaborative Strategies

KnoCommerce transforms customer insights into actionable outcomes, enhancing ROI through targeted actions driven directly from survey responses. 

KnoCommerce effectively encourages customers to engage in actions like app downloads, joining loyalty programs, or social media interactions. 

For example, a hair care brand specializing in curly hair products prompted customers to download their app at the end of a survey, resulting in over 1,000 new downloads in two months, thereby significantly enhancing customer engagement and increasing lifetime value (LTV).

Furthermore, KnoCommerce’s strategic partnerships with leading platforms like Klaviyo and Triple Whale empower brands to craft personalized customer experiences. 

By integrating with Klaviyo, information gathered from surveys can trigger personalized email campaigns, segment customers based on their feedback, and tailor content to match preferences and behaviors.

Integrating KnoCommerce with platforms like Triple Whale leverages the Total Impact model, combining direct feedback from KnoCommerce’s surveys with Triple Whale’s tracking of clicks and conversions to pinpoint which platforms, audiences, and creative strategies are truly driving results.

For instance, a cosmetic company used KnoCommerce to evaluate the effectiveness of two different TikTok ad campaigns. Initial data from TikTok suggested that the first ad was performing exceptionally well and the second ad was underperforming, while Triple Whale suggested the exact opposite.

However, using KnoCommerce’s survey insights, the brand discovered a substantial number of customers specifically mentioned that the second ad influenced their purchasing decision. This direct feedback was in stark contrast to the platform’s analytics, which had misattributed the success to the first ad. 

Armed with this accurate customer response data from KnoCommerce, the brand confidently shifted their advertising focus and budget towards the second ad, leading to optimized spending and significantly improved campaign performance.

In another scenario, a brand discovered through KnoCommerce’s data that an influencer was driving significant organic traffic and conversions. This insight, gained from customers directly naming the influencer in post-purchase surveys, enabled the brand to strengthen their collaboration with the influencer, tailoring marketing efforts to leverage her authentic connection with the audience.

These partnerships simplify technical integration and data management challenges while enhancing the ability of brands to deliver personalized experiences, make informed strategic decisions, and adapt to the evolving digital marketing landscape in a cookieless world.

Benchmarking and Performance Insights with KnoCommerce

KnoCommerce provides a unique opportunity for brands to benchmark their performance against the broader network of stores using the platform. 

Global benchmarking aggregates data across all companies using the platform without differentiation by industry vertical. This broad overview allows brands to understand general trends and patterns, identifying where they over-index or under-index in various aspects of their marketing and customer engagement strategies.

For example, an interesting trend observed from January 2022 to January 2024 was a significant increase in responses categorized under “Other” in the question “Before you go… How did you first hear about us?” 

This shift suggests that brands are exploring a wider array of marketing channels than they were two years prior. The growth in this category likely reflects emerging marketing avenues such as influencer partnerships, affiliate programs, and increased word-of-mouth or direct consumer engagement strategies, pointing to diversification in how consumers discover brands.

If a brand notices that it under-indexes in customer discovery through social media compared to the global benchmark, it might consider boosting its social media marketing efforts or reevaluating its strategies on platforms like TikTok or Meta.

Understanding how a brand performs against direct competitors within the same industry could offer more granular insights and drive more targeted strategic adjustments. 

KnoCommerce could potentially introduce vertical-based benchmarks that could significantly enhance the utility of the data provided, enabling brands to make even more precise decisions based on industry-specific trends and consumer behaviors.

Future Prospects for Ecommerce Brands

In a digital marketing environment that reinvents itself every few months, brands must stay agile and informed about their customers’ preferences and behaviors to remain competitive.

The impending shift towards a cookieless future poses significant challenges for traditional digital marketing practices, particularly those reliant on third-party data for customer insights and targeting. 

This transition underscores the urgent need for ecommerce brands to adopt zero-party data collection tools like KnoCommerce. By engaging customers directly through surveys, brands can acquire precise and consent-based insights, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations and enhancing the accuracy of their marketing strategies while forming a deeper connection with their consumers.

Looking ahead, the integration of survey data with other marketing technologies and platforms will play a critical role. Collaborations with platforms like Shopify, Klaviyo, and Triple Whale not only streamline the data collection process but also enhance the analysis and application of insights gained from customer feedback. 

As digital marketing tools evolve, the ability to seamlessly integrate and analyze data across platforms will be key to optimizing marketing spends and enhancing customer acquisition strategies.

These tools will go further than compensating for the loss of traditional data sources to empower brands to navigate future market changes with confidence–cookies or no cookies.

About the Author: As the Strategy Lead for Paid Social at adQuadrant, Daniel Shepherd brings ad buying experience across the multitude of social and search platforms with millions of ad dollars managed annually. He loves being a great teammate and learning new skills often. Outside of work, you’ll find Daniel doing the following: swimming, drinking Philz Coffee, lifting weights, reading the Bible with friends or neighbors, dancing, perfecting his fantasy football team, and most of all spending time with his wife and kiddos.