“A lot of tools that you have, like Hotjar and Google Analytics, tell you what’s not working from a data or visual perspective, but can’t give you much else to go off of.
Wynter provides qualitative feedback that allows you to dig deeper into why something isn’t working.”
Appcues is a product experience platform that was designed from the ground up to enable anybody, technical or not, to create beautiful, personalized in-app experiences that help their users fall in love with their product.
Use Appcues to improve how users engage with your product—from onboarding new users and driving product adoption, to creating awareness for new features and collecting customer insights—no developer needed!
Appcues turned to Wynter to test how their go-to-market messaging resonated with their exact target audience—product managers and marketers—by measuring that ICP’s feedback.
This was their original home page:
Appcues and Wynter conducted full-page message tests on their existing homepage and key pages from their funnel.
Our message tests allowed Appcues to highlight specific portions of their web pages for targeted feedback. Initial testing showed that the homepage was their biggest opportunity for improvement.
Wynter’s test audience feedback revealed that, while many visitors thought the homepage was well-written, they also struggled to connect it with a broader message or any clear solution.
Visitors were left with many different impressions of what Appcues actually was and who would actually use the product.
Design and copy work together to give your customer an impression of your company.
Wynter’s feedback also includes useful insights about the design of your page. Appcues’ design team saw several important comments that lead them to rethink key portions of their layout.
● “Not sure what this means until I read the four panels below and try to stitch the story together.”
● “I'm still not totally sure what I would use this product for although this now tells me how configurable the product is.”
● “I feel like I know all the information but have to put it together myself.”
● “What is the actual product?“
● “[It’s not clear] how the Create and Target sections of the product come together to help better improve user onboarding.”
● “There's A LOT of text to read. Honestly, I would havestopped reading by now.”
● “I don't know where to look, what you're trying to get across,or what the most important aspects are here.”
● “This page is very verbose.”
● “The image is showing a desktop image and yet thismentions the product is an app. Which is it? If it’s an app let’s show app UI images vs. misleading desktop imagery.”
● “The image doesn't add much value or paint a picture of what this app looks like.”
Not only did Appcues learn what wasn’t working, but more importantly they found out which aspects of their webpages performed well with the test audience.
● “My eyes go directly to the 2 boxes down there with the percentages. My mind already asks me 55% after how long using this product. I would click on the ‘Read full case study.”
● “The stats are very compelling and clearly displayed within the design.”
● “The actual metrics are really compelling, but I'd move them higher up.”
● “The 2 rates on the left are great.”
● “This deep dive into the process is a very awesome marketing tactic. There is just enough info to provide a solid walkthrough without all the nitty-gritty details that can detersomeone from wanting to learn more.”
● “I can immediately see use cases for how I'd use this. I can tell what 2 major ways this drives impact for customers.”
● “It's really clear what your value prop is.”
Additionally, Appcues utilized Wynter’s Buyer Intelligence Survey tool to better understand the pains and gains their audience felt about product onboarding and adoption.
This test provided ample voice-of-the-customer intelligence that could be utilized to improve homepage messaging. Appcues also learned how significant certain pains were to their audience.
After organizing this critical input in a spreadsheet, Anand Patel—Director of Product Marketing—went to work rewriting the homepage, with his new draft and Wynter’s feedback side-by-side.
Anand said having direct comments on his messaging from the target audience made his copywriting process much easier.
Inspired by our test audience feedback, the Appcues team rewrote their copy, revamped several design pieces, and created an all-new mockup of their webpage.
Appcues could have taken their updated webpage live, but they wanted to test it with Wynter again first. This proved to be a key part of the process.
Wynter’s second messaging test revealed that while the new version addressed many of the challenges of the first, it still had some issues:
● “Right off the bat, I don't know whose website this is. The fact that I have to read into the second line to know what company I'm reading about is odd. It's great that I can see your customers' pages on the right, but I don't know who you are.”
● “I know what Appcues does, though the headline could describe most SaaS businesses, so it really doesn't excite me about the unique potential of this solution or even this type of solution.”
● It's a lot to digest, really long H2, not very scannable, not immediately clear what product/market space they occupy, or what key differentiators are. A lot going on on the right hand side - assume these are customer examples?”
This surprised the Appcues team. Anand and his team felt they had addressed their audience’s concerns, but some of the feedback disheartened them, initially blocking the team from seeing what could be improved.
However, as Anand reflected on the feedback, heeventually saw how best to use it to create a new, stronger page.
“I think it’s very easy for people to get tied to things that they create, but it’s important to step back from that and really take the feedback and input into consideration.
It’s important to ask ‘How do I analyze all of this and bring it to life through whatever I’m creating?”
Because at the end of the day you are not creating whatever you’re creating for yourself, you’re building it for your customers and your audience. So it’s important to take their feedback into what you’re creating.”
Key lesson: Every piece of messaging you create is a hypothesis, since it’s impossible to predict how it will land with your intended recipient.
Wynter’s target audience feedback showed Appcues how to refine its webpage, and targeted the hero section as their top improvement opportunity. Their next step was to improve their value proposition.
Next, Appcues used Wynter’s Preference Test to find different ways to approach their hero copy. Together, with support from a Wynter copywriter, we tested Anand’s rewritten copy and three new approaches.
The Preference Test gave the Appcues team fast, highly specific feedback on their messaging approach for this key portion ofthe homepage.
The results show that Appcues’ target audience has a strong style preference.
Wynter’s feedback gave Anand insight into how best to tell Appcues’ story to potential customers and revise their narrative to distinguish themselves within the industry.
Anand and his team revised their page to address this new round of feedback. They had full confidence in the resulting homepage, even before they knew how it performed.
“The team was very happy with the new homepage, even before we found out it performed better. There was just a sense that ‘this feels better.’
And it wasn’t just from a content or design perspective, it was everything. In general, the team just felt good about the page, and luckily the data proved that out as well.”
To measure exactly what impact their work on messaging made on the business, Appcues’ team launched an A/B test of the original version against the revamped homepage they created using Wynter’s target audience feedback.
Appcues A/B test found that their visit-to-trial start conversion rate had increased by 73% with the new page. But Anand isn’t done yet.
Wynter’s feedback has led him to plan for more A/B testing that will help him continue improving Appcues’ homepage performance.
Appcues’ path to 73% more visit-to-trial start conversions included:
