Customer-centric Research: How clarity helped software collaboration tool boost new subscriptions 27%

Action Box: Design Your Offer training

Join us for a new cycle of MEC200: Design Your Offer taught by Flint McGlaughlin on Thursday, May 22nd at 1 pm EDT (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

Missive is an inbox collaboration tool built by Philippe-Antoine Lehoux and his team.

BEFORE: The old homepage lacked focus on use cases, conversions were stagnant

The headline for the company’s homepage was: ‘The team inbox and chat app empowering teams to truly collaborate around email.’ The design featured a generalized product image that did not show a specific use case.

Creative Sample #1: Old homepage

High-quality traffic came in, but conversion rates were stagnant. Many visitors bounced without engaging further.

“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.’ There are triggers, anxieties, and existing habits that happen to customers that drive them to seek out a new solution,” said Eva Tang, Head of Marketing, Missive. “We needed to understand and codify the context and struggle of our customers.”

AFTER: Customer insights trigger a transformation

Inspired by the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, popularized by Bob Moesta and the late Clay Christensen, the team wanted to discover what ‘jobs’ its tool does for customers.

They conducted 10 deep-dive customer interviews, including law firms, property managers, and service teams. The team did not ask customers what they like/dislike about the product because the team worried the answers would not be accurate. Instead, they asked about what happened and in what order. They wanted to understand the timeline of events and the tradeoffs customers were and were not willing to make.

“Your customers know their problems best. The way they describe their motivation, struggle, and anxieties is the perfect fodder for your problem statements,” she said.

The team transcribed and organized responses by pushes, pulls, habits, and anxieties. Here is some of the recurring feedback the team noticed:

• “We were in the same office, using Gmail, and it was super manageable at first… until our inbox started exploding.”
• “We got to a point where we weren't providing the same level of communication, response, and service that allowed us to get to this point. We were relying on Outlook email, and it was like 'Are you responding to that or am I?’”
• “Some of our emails weren't showing up, we didn't know why, and that’s when I started looking for another solution."
• “With traditional Outlook forwarding, once an email was out of the shared inbox, there was no visibility. We never knew if it had been handled. It was chaotic.”

The biggest driver the team discovered was the realization from clients where they go from ‘just me’ to ‘oh we're working in an inbox as a team.’ So that's where they focused the positioning with a new homepage headline that focused on the job the product does for the customer – ‘Inbox collaboration for teams that run on email.’

Sections of the homepage focused on specific struggles and anxieties that come with employee growth. For example, a subhead of ‘Enjoy having multiple cooks in the kitchen’ along with a screenshot showing multiple employees discussing an email they received.

The testimonial section was changed to focus more tightly on the ideal customer, changing the subhead ‘Flowers from our happy customers!’ to ‘We love building for small businesses.’

Creative Sample #2: New homepage

RESULTS: Better than a sales call

A user commented that the new site ‘explains Missive better than any sales call.’

Within three weeks post-launch, 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%)

Overall the company has grown to $8M ARR without a sales team or a ‘massive ads budget.’

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

This article was distributed through the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

Related resources

Customer-First Marketing Research: 4 key data points from research with 2,400 consumers

Marketing Chart: Does customer-centric marketing fall short of satisfying the customer?

Marketing Research Chart: Question your assumptions for true customer-centric marketing