What is Message Mining?

Communication plays a pivotal role in engaging with customers in the digital age, and it’s crucial for businesses to understand the impact of their messages. This is where message mining comes into play.

TL;DR

• Message mining = systematically pulling customer language from reviews, surveys, interviews, social media, and support tickets to find patterns in motivations, anxieties, desired outcomes, and proof.
• Use it to write PDP headlines, bullets, objections, FAQs, email subject lines, and ads.
• Quick start: mine reviews → code themes (Motivation/Value/Anxiety/Proof) → create copy change drafts → A/B test → roll out the winners.
• Grab our free VoC Review-Mining GPT to auto-extract themes and ready-to-use copy.

In this blog, we'll be exploring what message mining is, why it is important, how to run it effectively, the significance of A/B testing copy on your website, and what you can achieve by implementing message mining techniques.

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What is Message Mining?

Message mining is the process of analysing and extracting valuable insights from a range of communications with customers, like social media conversations, surveys, polls, one-on-one interviews, reviews, and more. It involves using natural language processing (NLP) and data mining techniques to uncover patterns, sentiments, and trends within textual data. 

In layman's terms, you're scouring the internet for anything on your brand that others discuss (like gossip). Using that, you can discover specific good and bad patterns in how your users perceive your brand and/or product/s, from which you can take actionable insights. You want to know how customers talk about your brand and how your products have impacted their lives. 

Why is Message Mining Important?

Communication is the backbone of any successful business, whether eCommerce or brick-and-mortar. With eCommerce, message mining allows businesses like yours to deeply understand your customers’ preferences, pain points, and expectations. Analysing these messages exchanged with customers helps to identify recurring themes, sentiment trends, and areas of improvement. 

You’ll be able to refine your messaging strategy, personalise interactions, and enhance customer satisfaction. You’ll be able to use all the good things customers say in your marketing copy. 

Instead of writing a product description listing all its features or spending hours trying to word the benefits, you’ll be able to find the exact pain points that your product solves for your customers right from your product reviews.

Message mining is an excellent tool for Conversion Rate Optimisation. While many eCommerce businesses focus on design and shade, you’re probably more likely to win over those sales with the correct on-site messaging than you are by changing the shade of your CTA (unless they fail accessibility, but that’s an entirely different conversation).

We’ve seen firsthand how powerful this can be in practice. For one well-known pain relief provider, we used message mining to rebuild their product descriptions using the PAS framework (Pain, Agitate, Solution). Instead of leaning on generic features, the new copy spoke directly to the frustrations and outcomes their customers described in reviews. When we A/B tested these rewritten descriptions against the originals, the results were striking: a 257% uplift in conversion rate. A clear example of how refining the words on your page can outperform even the most dramatic design tweaks.

How to Conduct Message Mining

There are many ways to conduct message mining, and it all depends on the purpose of your data collection. Here are four of them:

1. Conduct Visitor Surveys

These surveys are just for those who visit your site. When it comes to conducting a visitor survey, it’s important to implement a strategic and structured approach. Clearly define the objectives of your survey and what specific information needs to be collected. Some examples of this would be understanding visitor demographics, their motivations for visiting your site, satisfaction levels, expectations, etc. 

You need to design a survey questionnaire that effectively captures this information, utilising a mix of multiple-choice questions, rating scales, and open-ended questions to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. Keep your survey succinct and user-friendly. Remember, these customers are just popping into your site. And because they’re visitors, it may be a good place to analyse what these visitors experience and expect from your site.

How to Conduct a Visitor Survey

Depending on your goal, this will be placed on your site at specific stages in the journey and can be accomplished using a tool like Reviews.io or Omniconvert. For example, a website usability survey can be placed on the collection page, while an overall survey can be placed on the order confirmation page.

2. Conduct Customer Surveys

These surveys are generally for customers who have interacted with your brand before and subscribed to your email marketing. Like with visitor surveys, you’ll need to clearly define your survey objectives and what information should be collected.

How to Conduct a Customer Survey

This survey is sent out through email marketing with a link inviting customers to complete a few (be specific and tell them the number) questions. Like with the visitor survey, you'll want to include closed-ended and open-ended questions. You should even include comment boxes. You need to clearly communicate the purpose of the survey with your customers, assuring them of confidentiality and providing an incentive for participation.

3. Conduct 1-on-1 Interviews

This interview is more personal and empathetic. Depending on the insights you're looking for, you will need to identify a representative sample of customers based on various demographics and usage patterns.

How to Conduct a 1-on-1 Interview

Using a tool like Omniconvert Explore, you can recruit shoppers via on-site intercepts, schedule 15–20-minute 1-on-1 Zoom/Meet interviews and record (with consent), and quickly turn transcripts into testable copy.

You will need to reach out to these customers individually and explain the purpose of the interview, highlighting how their feedback will contribute to improving products and services. Ensure to create a comfortable, non-threatening environment during the interview and allow customers to express their opinions openly. 

Preparing a set of open-ended questions that cover topics such as their experiences, challenges, suggestions, and future expectations, will allow you to gain the necessary data to improve your brand. Remember to respect the customers’ time and privacy and follow up with a thank-you note or token of appreciation for their participation. 

Once your surveys are complete, you will need to ‘clean’ the data by removing ‘noise’. Only include relevant information based on the goals of your survey in the beginning. Standardise your format, like in an Excel spreadsheet. 

An excellent way to sift through this data is to answer questions like:

• What was the main topic of this message? [Comment box]

• What aspect of the conversion formula is being addressed in this comment? Motivation, Value, Anxiety

• What did they say? [Comment box]

While this will take some time, it will bring insights that will prove incredibly valuable to the long-term success of your eCommerce business.

4. Mining Reviews

Another way to conduct message mining is by going through reviews left for your products or even (gasp) your competitors. You can then “mine” for words, phrases, and benefits that your customers talk about and leverage this by mirroring this speech within product descriptions or email marketing copy.  

The benefits that you perceive your customers get versus the benefits they actually get can be slightly or completely different. You may even find that your product solves a problem for your customers that you didn’t know existed.

Choosing the Right Approach 

Each method has a unique role in message mining. Below, we've provided a summary to help you find the best fit for your brand.

Often, a combination of these techniques provides the best insights. For example, surveys (for breadth of data) are complemented by a few interviews (for depth), plus review mining is used to harvest the exact words customers use. By weighing these pros and cons, you can choose the approach (or mix of approaches) that best fits your goals and resources.

A/B Testing On-Site Copy

A/B testing is a valuable technique for optimising website copy. By comparing two versions of a webpage or specific messaging elements, businesses can determine which variant performs better in terms of conversion rates, click-through rates, and engagement metrics.

Incorporating A/B testing into message mining allows you to refine your messaging based on real user data and preferences. By continuously testing and iterating, you can create compelling and persuasive copy that resonates with your target audience.

What You Can Achieve with Message Mining

The goals of message mining vary based on your brand and specific needs. Here are some key objectives you can achieve through message mining:

• Enhance customer satisfaction: By analysing customer messages, you can identify pain points and address them proactively. This leads to improved customer experiences and increased satisfaction levels.  

• Personalise communication: Message mining enables you to understand individual customer preferences, enabling you to tailor your messaging and offers accordingly. This personalised approach fosters stronger customer relationships and increases customer loyalty. 

• Optimise marketing campaigns: By analysing customer feedback and sentiment trends, you can gain insights into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. This allows you to make data-driven adjustments to your messaging strategy and optimise your marketing efforts. 

Improve product development: Customer messages often contain valuable insights and suggestions for product enhancements. Message mining helps you to identify these ideas and incorporate them into your product development roadmap, leading to more customer-centric offerings.

What Metrics Can Be Impacted Using Message Mining?

Depending on the location of your testing, metrics like Add to Cart Rate, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Revenue per Visitor, and Reached Checkout Rate.

For example, adding copy on your PDP that highlights benefits or descriptions in a way that resonates with your audience can increase your Add-to-Cart Rate, while relevant copy in your cart drawer that encourages users to add more items to their cart can increase the Average Order Value.

The metric impacted will depend on what you test and where you test it, but the important thing is that you test it.

What Blend Has Achieved with Message Mining

Beauty Brand

Blend worked with a Beauty Client whose overall goal was to increase the Customer Lifetime Value in their store. Naturally, we took the opportunity to test-run message mining by conducting interviews and mining reviews to change the copy of their product descriptions. One simple change to each product—shouldn’t make a huge difference, right?  

Wrong.

✔ 25.12% increase in Conversion Rate

✔ 6.39% increase in Average Order Value

✔ 33.33% increase in Per Session Value

Jackson's

For this client, the existing Smart Cart heading for additional recommendations was the generic “You May Also Like” and lacked emotional or brand relevance. Given the brand’s playful tone and customers mentioning the ‘crunch’ impact of the chips themselves, we saw an opportunity to introduce more engaging, persuasive microcopy. We test the original versus a variant that said “Add more crunch to your cart!” which aligned more closely with the brand voice while making the upsell prompt more attention-grabbing and action-oriented.

This test resulted in:

• +5% increase in Conversion Rate

• +5% increase in Cart Completion Rate

• +83% increase in product additions through the Smart Cart’s product recommendation module

• +6% increase in clicks on ‘Proceed to Checkout’ in the Smart Cart

PerTronix

Based on previous CRO work and message mining insights from this brand, we consistently noted the impact of copy on conversion behaviour for the brand’s audience. Like with Jackson’s the Smart Cart had “You may also like” above additional recommendations. Given PerTronix’s audience of automotive enthusiasts, we proposed testing more relevant, brand-aligned microcopy with the test variant displaying “Rev up your cart”.

The results?

• +12.91% increase in Conversion Rate

• +40.37% increase in Revenue per Visitor

• +21.18% increase in Average Order Value

• +21.65% increase in Checkout Visits

Blend & Message Mining

Message mining empowers you to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of your customers, refine your messaging strategies, and enhance your overall communication effectiveness. By leveraging NLP techniques, you can uncover valuable insights hidden within customer interactions and use them to drive meaningful improvements across various aspects of your operations. As a reminder, you can grab the free VoC Review Mining GPT right here to help you get started.

Contact us at Blend today to embrace the power of message mining and unlock the potential of your communication, and propel your business to long-term success.

Message Mining FAQs

Is message mining just "copying reviews"?

No. It's extracting patterns and phrasing that resonate, then crafting clear, on-brand copy. 

How many reviews do I need?

You can start seeing patterns with 50-100 reviews; more is better if you have multiple SKUs.

Should I include competitor reviews?

Yes, for unmet needs and objections. Note them clearly as competitor insights.

Where should I implement first?

This depends on your site and audience. You want to optimise the areas where users face their conversion-critical moment, like the PDP. Optimise your PDP headline/subheader, description, and FAQs.

How often should I re-mine?

Quarterly or after big launches/seasonal peaks.

What if reviews are sparse?

Run a post-purchase survey and mine support tickets/cancellation reasons. Additionally, you can mine competitor reviews to determine industry-relevant language.

How soon can I expect impact?

You can implement your first change test within a week and analyse results in 2-4 weeks, depending on traffic.

What metrics do I watch?

Add-to-Cart Rate, PDP to Cart progression, Conversion Rate, AOV, and Revenue per Visitor.