Letting a company’s current customers sell to new ones

ChurchInsight have been providing websites to churches, charities and other organisations since 2002, developing and improving their platform many times over along the way.

I came into their new UK sales web site project as a copywriter, but ended up having a big say in the overall structure and tone of the site. Insight does so much that the important thing was to draw out a few selling points clearly and simply instead of trying to get them all in and losing people in the ensuing melee.

We decided to build the pitch around the system’s many applications. The first thing was to brand them ‘features’ (what’s an application to their customers, anyway?). The second thing was to decide which features to include. Having lots of features is itself a feature, but I recommended keeping it nevertheless to a round 20 (there are many more).

ChurchInsight sales site front page

So not all of Insight’s applications made it; nor are all those that did actually applications (another reason to call them features). But the 20 featured are significant functions that ChurchInsight’s potential customers want. And that’s the important thing.

Each feature needed a name, a tagline/tooltip, a summary and additional copy. The multitude of selling points needed condensing into three concepts for the front page. In addition I wrote comprehensive FAQs, landing pages for the tour and free trial offer, and descriptions of pricing and additional services.

To generate some fresh customer testimonials and case studies I devised a questionnaire for existing Insight customers. I learnt that asking for criticism as well as praise is a huge incentive to reply, and that it’s good to honest about your angle on the research (‘your feedback helps us develop our product and we want to quote you on our new web site’).

Testimonial worth sharing

One spin off from the research was the discovery of two dominant themes in the feedback. ‘Easy to use’ and ‘helpful support’ came up again and again. I worked that back into the copy. It is satisfying to build existing customers’ favourite things about the platform into the sales message for new people. And it helped with the tone: on the whole hard-selling web sites to religious third sector groups does not work as much as showing the benefits confidently and honestly.

Apart from writing all the pages, the main work for ChurchInsight was in deciding what – in the whole sea of features and selling points – to represent simply as the main message. It was pleasing to have existing customers help me out.