What do you do when your home page opens with a video, has an entire section of 5-star reviews from happy customers, multiple customer success stories, and a free trial link, and yet your conversions are stagnant?

Ask Missive, which by all industry benchmarks was doing everything right. The company’s answer? Ask the people who know what really works—customers. That’s what Missive did.

“You don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I have nothing better to do today, I’m just going to switch my entire company to a new email system,’” said Eva Tang, head of marketing, Missive, as quoted by Marketing Sherpa. “There are triggers, anxieties, and existing habits that happen to customers that drive them to seek out a new solution. We needed to understand and codify the context and struggle of our customers.”

To identify these struggles and triggers, Marketing Sherpa reports, the company conducted 10 “deep dive” customer interviews.

Today, after making some tweaks to the home page based on that feedback, the company’s subscriptions are up 27%. That’s without making any other changes. So what did the company learn?

Before…

While Missive had the right type of content on its home page, it found that it was missing the language that its customers were speaking and using to describe their problems. It was using generic language that wasn’t resonating when potential customers first landed on the page.

The original home page was clean and simple, with the headline: “The team inbox and chat app empowering teams to truly collaborate around email.” Underneath was a video with a company overview.

Below the video was the text, “We redesigned the inbox with a business-first collaborative experience in mind,” along with CTA buttons to “try it for free” or “book a demo.” 

This seemingly perfectly crafted marketing pitch was followed by customer testimonials. Lots of them.

But it wasn’t converting.

After…

So Missive took what it learned from its interviews and changed the text to reflect the way its customers were describing the challenges they were having (overflowing inboxes, siloed communications, uncertainty about who was responding to what) before purchasing the Missive solution.

It also added sections with text reflecting customers’ experiences post-sale and how their problems were resolved.

The headline was changed from: “The team inbox and chat app empowering teams to truly collaborate around email”; to “Inbox collaboration for teams that run on email.”  Missive then added a subhead that reads: “See what’s going on, know who’s doing what, and collaborate behind the scenes—without changing your workflow.”

Following the opening video, Missive made two more additions. First was the short section: “Enjoy having multiple cooks in the kitchen”; followed by another short section: “Always know who’s doing what.”  It added images of what the workflow looks like from the customer perspective.

Now the home page had become something potential customers could instantly relate to. In the eyes of frustrated and bedraggled team email users, Missive clearly understood their problems and spoke their language.

Results…

Within three weeks post-launch, Marketing Sherpa reports that the new homepage generated the following results:

• 3,431 new sign-ups (up 3%)
• 905 new organizations (up 33.68%)
• 237 new subscriptions (up 27.42%)

 “The biggest lift came from clarity,” Tang concludes from the case study. “We didn’t need louder marketing—we needed tighter alignment with what people were already looking for.”

The lesson? The customer is always right. You just have to take the time to ask them.