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Customer Service Can Be a Treasure

Trove of Ideas For CRO -
MarketingExperiments
By Daniel Burstein

7-9 minutes

If you’re engaged in landing page optimization, step back

from the analytics for a moment and ask yourself a
bigger question — why do we have a landing page in the
first place?

Sure, you’re selling stuff. Getting leads. Achieving a

conversion. Blah blah blah. Yes, that is all true.

But, all of those objectives have a fundamental similarity.

The objective of a landing page is to help a customer

make a decision

And yes, that objective usually skews towards the get

them to buy/donate to/download something. But by
taking a customer-first marketing approach to your
landing page, you can see them with a new perspective
— not merely what you’re trying to get other people to do,
but how can you help them through this decision.

One excellent place you can get this information is from

customer service. What do customers have questions
about? What concerns them? What confuses them?
Should your landing page be able to answer these
questions? If so, why is there a gap?

Hearing from customers in their own words

If you work for a very small company or you’re a

solopreneur, you may be close enough to the customer
to naturally get this information.

But if you work for a company of any size, you likely

aren’t seeing this information every day. Can you work
with customer service call centers and email and chat
support to log both recurring topics that customers ask
about as well as examples of these customer concerns,
questions and frustrations in their own words? And can
you get regular access to them?

The bigger the company, the more complex this is. But I
don’t want you to feel it’s impossible. So, here’s an
example from perhaps the largest, most complex
customer service feedback to any organization in the
world.

During his presidency, former President Obama received

about 10,000 letters and messages every day. And he
personally read ten of them each day. The complex and
well-thought-out system to go from 10,000 to ten and
make sure the most powerful person in the free world
heard directly from his customers in their own voice is
the subject of this fascinating article from The New York
Times Magazine about the Office of Presidential
Correspondence.

An example based on my own failings

The reason hearing from customers about their

questions and concerns is important is because every
marketer has a blind spot — self-interest.

To wit, I’ve been working on the marketing for the

University of Florida/MECLABS Institute Communicating
Value and Web Conversion graduate certificate program.

I’m also a student in the program, so I should be able to

empathize with prospective students. And hopefully I
am. But once I’ve taken on the role of marketer, that
subtle, unintentional shift happens, and I start to look at
metrics and think of the landing page as a means to an
end I’m trying to reach. As much as I try to see through
the eyes of the customer, this self-interest somewhat
obscures my vision.

So, when our education team shared a customer service

email that asked a few key questions, it helped me see —
through that prospective student’s eyes — the gaps we
had on our landing page. You can see the current landing
page here, and below are some examples of changes we
made based on that customer service email.

How much does this cost?

Price is a huge concern for customers for every possible

product I can think of. Even if it’s free and doesn’t have a
monetary cost, what does the customer need to do to
get it?

Many ecommerce landing pages do a great job of

displaying the price. But for a more complex purchase,
like our graduate certificate program, the cost can get
buried.

Now, I’m not saying you should lead with cost. You want
to communicate value before cost, especially if you want
to win on value proposition and not price.

However, there will be a logical moment when a

customer has heard enough about the value and wants
to know what it is going to take to go forward with the
conversion action.

For our graduate certificate program landing page, we

thought a sensible place for the cost of a course was in
each course’s description (similar to a product
description on an ecommerce page). However, when a
customer asked how much the program costs, we
realized that many customers may not wade that deeply
into the page before wanting to know the cost, so we
made the cost accessible on the landing page without a
click.

Again, you don’t need to lead with cost. You should lead
with value. The image below might be misleading
because the cost is actually about two scrolls down the
landing page, not at the very top. You can see the page
here. But by that point, we figured enough value had
been delivered that visitors will start wanting to know the
cost.

When does the customer get value?

We were so focused on the date that was important to

us, our conversion objective — in this case the summer
semester application deadline of April 1st — that we
overlooked a crucially important date for the customer.

“When does the summer semester start?” — someone

asked in a customer service email.
So, we added in the dates when the summer semester
classes will actually take place.

This is another example that tends to be better on

ecommerce pages — when the product will ship, how
long it take to get to me — than on a bigger or complex
purchase.

For example, if I’m buying siding or new windows for my

house, when will the install actually be complete? That
may be equally as vital to a customer as when a
discount is ending.

What is going on in the customer’s life and how does it

affect purchase of your product?

One anxiety that potential students might have about

taking classes in summer semester is if they would still
be able to take a summer vacation. We were asked, “Are
all of the materials available at the start of the class so I
can work ahead for a vacation?”

So, we updated the landing page with that information.

Note how similar the copy is to the actual voice of the

customer. Building rapports and addressing concerns it
not about using fancy language (this is especially
important in the health care industry); it’s about talking
to them about their concerns in their words.

Customers may have concerns about taking a

conversion action that has more to do with their
personal lives than your product, so you would never
think to add that to your landing page. As in the example
above, our landing page is about a graduate certificate
program, not a vacation package, so why would we think
to talk about summer vacations?

Because that is what the customer is thinking about.

That is her priority, and it can lead to anxiety.

These concerns can take many forms, from health (“Is

the lox you’re selling made from farm-raised or wild
caught salmon?”) to ethical (“How does your mutual
fund company vote on shareholder climate change
proposals”) to safety (“Is your school located in a safe
area?”) to fear (“Will this medical procedure hurt?”) to
ego (“Will my friends think badly of me if I buy a giant
SUV?”).

If and when you have real value there (obviously don’t

just make something up to placate customers), how can
your landing page address these concerns to help your
customer?

In our case, the courses are on-demand so students can

naturally work at their own pace to allow them to enjoy a
vacation or fulfill any other work or life obligations or
plans they have while still meeting the course deadlines.
We just didn’t talk about it in that specific language on
the landing page before.

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