The Problem
As a business grows, it’s homepage gets more and more vague, trying to cater for everyone who comes through the door.
But the dog who chases two rabbits, gets none, as the saying goes.
Conversion goes down, way down, compared to when you were dealing with a tiny niche.
So, when you see your conversions starting to fade, even as traffic goes up, this is the perfect time for a Rewrite.
The homepage should pick the biggest problem for your best prospect.
But what is that problem, and who is that prospect?
This is how we find out…
The Research
This isn’t a client job so I didn’t have access to all of the juicy internal sources I dig through on a live rewrite, but I am a user of the product, so I could take a look at:
Builtwith.com data – which showed us a typical site is a small blogger with low overall marketing spend, not a big team or an enterprise user. I can also see which tools MailerLite wins customers from, and which ones it loses customers to.
A Facebook Community so I can see what common problems users have with the product, and the scale of projects they’re working on.
Google for common questions, product reviews and gripes
Also our own experience of building a few side-projects on the product, gave us some great insights into what makes MailerLite great, why I’d pick it over other tools, and at what point I have to ditch it in favour of a more powerful upgrade.
Finding people who are just on the brink of buying, or who just bought, and can remember exactly what problem they were trying to solve when they found you is one of the most powerful research techniques there is.
I not used the tool for long so I can count myself in that number, but always sense check by looking for plenty of other users with the same problems.
The Insights: What they want
There’s a lot inside MailerLite, but our aim is to find the most important benefits that will tip someone into a trial.
With small business SaaS, people only pay after they have experience of the product, so the product itself, and the onboarding through the product and email are responsible for the next step.
We need to sell them on what they’re looking for.
When I landed on MailerLite I was looking for three things
- A landing page to collect emails
I didn’t want to have to use a separate tool or a WordPress site for this. - Follow-up emails to move signups to the next step in our funnel
Incredibly, our three-figure-a-month Hubspot tool didn’t give us these. - Segment users who “take it to the next step” by getting on a sales call or buying a product.
There’s other stuff, like being able to send a blast to all users and have most of it arrive in the inbox, but I’d expect that from any email tool, and deliverability is very hard to judge from the outside.
Oh, except MailerLite also runs a deliverability tool (Mailcheck), so they probably know a few things about that.
But this is next-level stuff. Let’s get back to enticing our less experienced target audience.
What they want is a way to build their list without faffing about with either code or integration tools like Zapier, without WordPress plugins, expensive landing page tools (like Leadpages or Unbounce) or, well, anything really.
What MailerLite can prove it can give you
MailerLite does very well as a beginner tool to build an email list and try out a business idea. It’s a well established business with hundreds of happy customers. It’s not a household name though, so we have to prove ourselves every step of the way.
Things we can prove:
The fact that MailerLite wins business from Hubspot shows that it’s more than capable of dealing with content and follow-up emails.
It has worry-free deliverability as evidenced by several benchmark tests.
It can grow to great things (it’s used by GoPro, Marvel & BMW, but this took some digging to find out)
There’s a bank of well designed landing page and site templates that we can show them.
The Rewrite
The rewrite made three changes to the hero area of the page – immediately after the navigation.
Here’s what we changed:
1 “Your way”
I have no idea what this means, and I’m sure MailerLite has no idea what “my way” is yet.
I mean, my way is pretty whacky and includes a writing tool that I chose because it makes old fashioned typewriter noises.
So how can they deliver on a promise when they’ don’t know what “my way” is?
Vague and “witty” headlines that win creative awards won’t cut it when it comes to moving customers. We need to be more believable and specific.
2 Animations
The grey text changes between “Create”, “Grow”, “Optimize”, even “Conquer”.
There’s no explanation of the mechanism to achieve any of these, so they’re just empty claims.
3 Our new headline
Our insight is that email marketing is more than sending emails. You need to solve the list-building problem too.
This is especially true for content creators where there is a lot of communication before anyone gets near a checkout.
MailJet’s answer is its site builder that you get even on the free plan, and it’s barely mentioned.
You can even connect to Stripe to make sales on a pretty cheap Pro plan.
It’s basic, but it’s all there.
But there’s no mention of most it.
We changed that with our new headline : “From Sign-Up to Sale”
The Rewrite
We took the headline text, made it easier to figure out in an instant, and referenced the fact that email needs list building as well as sending.
What’s next?
If this was a “real” client job I be testing this, and other elements on the page to see how high I could push the conversion rates.
I’d dig further into whatever data and customer feedback the business has to check our huncehs and to dig out new insights.
And if there’s enough traffic I’d keep doing it every couple of weeks, because conversion isn’t a goal you ever reach.
If you’d like me to run a Rewrite project for your brand, get in touch and I’ll see if you’re ready for it yet.
How to get more of these case studies
If you got something out of this Rewrite, please give the Twitter thread a like, or better, a retweet:
What’s a Rewrite, and why are we doing this?
The Rewrites are our short “here’s what we would have done” case studies of how we’d fix some common marketing site problems.
These aren’t clients (at the time of writing) and we don’t have full sight of the data that drives insights and copy, but I hope we can give you a flavour of what happens when we give a site a make-over.
We work in a consistent method:
- Discover who our audience is
- Discover what they want
- Find the features that answer those wants
- Write copy that lures them in to find out more
This case study has been a quick example of these steps in action
If you’d like to get more of them, sign up for The Rewrites by email