I spend a lot of my time thinking about marketing and sales.
We can track clicks, impressions, telephone calls, emails, live chats etc etc., but none of this data will answer one of the key questions:
Why us?
Why do people choose to register their domain name(s) or get hosting (or both) with us? Is it because of price? Location? Customer service? To be honest I wasn’t 100% sure (I’m still not!), but I think it’s a question that needs to be asked regularly.
So with that in mind I threw together a quick poll a few days ago to try and get an answer.
NB: The poll was not scientific and the data sample set was not particularly big.
The question being asked was pretty simple:
Why do you use us for hosting or domains?
This assumes that the respondent is already using our services, which for this particular poll was key.
The answer options available were:
A – Customer service / technical support
B – Range of products / services
C – Reputation (word of mouth)
D – Price
E – EU Based
F – Irish owned
G – Other
And the poll was setup so that people could choose more than one reason.
I wasn’t sure what people would choose, so I was genuinely surprised by some of the answers (and comments)
Results below:
Seemingly the most important factors were:
We are Irish owned, the quality of our customer service and our reputation.
Price came in 4th.
You can read the comments and see the full poll results here.
Now the next question is, what are we going to do with the data?
Well the obvious thing is to tweak any parts of our site where we try to answer that fundamental question:
Why choose us?
What do you think?
For me its:
Reliablity (oddly not on your list)
Knowing that you care if something does go wrong.
Being owned outside the UK or USA.
Beyond reliability and being Irish based etc the big issue for us in choosing Blacknight is that you’re upfront about issues and problems and communicate what you’re doing about them well. Too many companies stonewall and get evasive when a problem crops up – it’s unrealistic to expect there never to be problems, its how you actually handle them that makes Blacknight stand out.
For your shared hosting Blacknight has more than a few favourable mentions on the Drupal.org forums, personal recommendations from real people who have used your hosting. If you’d offer Xen based VPS Blacknight would be perfect, but your shared hosting is excellent.
Gordon
Thanks for the comment.
When I was doing up the poll I picked a few common possible reasons.. we strive to be reliable, so I wouldn’t see it as being a USP as much as some other things we mentioned / suggested in the poll
Thanks
Michele
Piers
Thanks for the feedback.
It’s the company policy to be as transparent and upfront about issues as we can be.
As for Xen VPS – it’s something we’ve been looking at, though we’re a bit restricted at present in what we can offer.
Thanks for the comment
Michele
Customer Service and Service Reliability in that order.
Of particular note, when you call you get 2 options that connect you to a human being within 30 seconds: 1 for Support and 2 for Sales (Support being ahead of Sales… which is nice).