How to Combine Surveys With Landing Page Optimization to Sell More Software

Ever feel like creating new things to test during a landing page optimization exercise is a crap shoot?

I know I often did.

I’d hear ideas like “What if we change the button to red to give the psychological impression of ACTION!”

Someone would counter, “I think the other color to test should be blue in order to keep the brand’s color scheme consistent.”

What it told me was that once you got past the headline and subheads, most marketing people struggled to offer meaningful tests.

Test The Language of the Customer, Not The Language of Marketers Trying to Act Like Customers

But, all that was solved after I started combining the quantitative results of landing page conversion rates with the qualitative results of surveys.

By poring over surveys from customers I got all of the creative ideas to test I would ever need!

No testing red buttons versus blue buttons. Now, I could test actual phrases, angles and concepts pulled directly from customer feedback.

I switched from testing ideas from marketing people to something 10x more valuable… testing the language of the customer. Now the landing pages were talking to the customer, in the language of the customer, using their own words, phrases and angles so they GOT it and understood.

How Surveys Help Your Company Sell More Software

The result: Shortcutting the process to major improvements.

What survey? Net Promoter Score (R) is the simplest and easiest. It is only three questions (when done right) and the third question I like to ask is, “If you answered 9 or 10, what would you say to someone when recommending our service?”

This is THE most valuable question you can get answered. It will be a tremendous source of ideas, angles and language that NO MARKETER could deduce.

It can also solve mysteries. Like the one I was caught in late 2010. At that time, I was consulting with an eCommerce company that sold supplements.

They had a product that did well in their catalog and in stores but for some reason they just couldn’t get it converting well on the web. We KNEW it was converting for others so we really were in mystery about this whole thing.

I launched an NPS survey to the people who had purchased the product. Everything looked fine except a noticed a couple of comments like “too hard to read.”

Odd.

I dug deeper. The product was for older people. I had someone follow up. What exactly was hard to read. The text, the bottle, the ingredients… basically everything, he said. He had to have his wife come over and read it.

Could this solve the mystery?

Not entirely. But, it did help. We did notice a boost. And, it was enough to keep the client’s interest up until we got a few more breakthroughs.

Something as simple as normal text being too hard to read for older people depressed response. And, none of us 20 and 30 year olds would’ve caught it. Ever.

But, the survey did. It also yielded us a use for the product and a major concern that none of us would’ve ever guessed.

All those coupled together provided a huge win in the LPO exercise. It is highly unlikely we could’ve “brainstormed” or “had a creative breakthrough” to get any of them on our own.

The takeaway: Run NPS Surveys on your list of customers and use the insights gained from it to create new landing pages to test during Landing Page Optimization.

Jason Bedunah

P.S. If you want to start a dialogue you can find me at either of the properties below.

@jbedunah
on LinkedIn

Lessons from 10 Years of Copywriting

I’ve been copywriting for over 10 years now. Here are a few of the major lessons I’ve learned in that time.

1. Never give your client what they want… give them what they need. This might be controversial but I’ve always regretted giving a client what they wanted when they actually needed something else. Many have come to me asking for a Facebook campaign when what they really needed was to get back into communication with customers who had abandoned them for reasons which had since been fixed. If you do this then you are essentially setting up the client, and yourself, for eventual failure. Or, at the very least, you are limiting the eventual income they will make.

What should you do instead? Tell them why you don’t think it’s a great idea right now and you can schedule for later when it will do much better due to the suggestions you are about to make. Then, give them the logical reasons why

2. Don’t get caught up in the hype. Salesmanship consists of basic, fundamental and time tested principle that do not change. If someone tells you that ‘Twitter changes everything’ or ‘Video changes everything’ don’t listen. Salesmanship is salesmanship. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. Why is this? It’s because human nature remains unchanged. If you don’t believe this simply look at the warnings in early philosophic and religious writings of 2,000+ years ago. They cautioned us against the same traps everyone continues to make today.

3. No amount of writing skill replaces understanding of the prospect’s mindset. I could write a whole book on this. Most copywriters, especially those trained in the internet era and/or those trained by the “copywriters” who have only ever successfully sold “get rich quick” products, go off half-cocked and write copy that LOOKS like copy but is a complete miss in the mind’s of their prospects.

4. You are not God’s gift to commerce. A copywriter CAN definitely do a lot of good for businesses. They can create huge influxes of cash quickly. But, that’s only part of the equation. There are employees, executives, managers, customer service representatives and line workers. Not to mention the product itself. All of that works together to create a sustainable business. Be professional. Professionals don’t need to act like they are God’s gift to business or marketing. They let their work speak for itself and use Positioning rather than boasting.

Jason