For 6 months, our startup was stuck in a loop. We would admit that our landing page wasn't good enough, re-write it, be happy for a few days and then the cycle would begin again. We understood the importance of getting our landing page right. We read every "how to write a landing page" guide and brainstormed headings for hours on end. Despite our efforts, we were never happy. Our poor conversion rate constantly reminded us that our messaging wasn't landing properly with website visitors. It was painful, disheartening and time-consuming.

We knew that we had to try something new. We came across an idea validation method from Stripe called Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR) and decided to give it a try to understand how much our target customers cared about the problem we said we were helping them solve. In the process, we discovered a whole new way to write landing pages and identify value proposition messaging. One week after implementing the results of our CPSR, we doubled our conversion rate, our onboarding success rate improved 2.5x, we tripled our website traffic and even saw organic referral between users.

I'm going to share exactly how we used CPSR so that you can get these results too! But first...

What is Customer Problem Stack Ranking?

CPSR shows how important a problem is compared to all the problems that your target customer is trying to solve. It's a unique survey method that helps founders and product teams to understand whether they're solving a burning pain point or just a mild inconvenience. By getting customers to rank problems by importance, you can pick ideas with better potential for organic demand and identify the messaging that resonates best with your target segment. We used our own free CPSR tool OpinionX so that we could run our experiment at scale quickly and easily.

5 steps to writing a better landing page using CPSR:

Step 1: Write The Question

Customer Problem Stack Ranking requires just one open-ended question. Most CPSR questions follow the same format of "What is frustrating about ______? or "What challenges do you face when______?". For our own CPSR, we asked Product Managers, "What challenges do you face as a product manager?"

Top tip: Ensure your open-ended question is focused on problems, not solutions.

Step 2: Draft Your Problem Statements

Most startups solve multiple problems. This makes writing a landing page really difficult; which of the problems is most important to target customers? We were tired of guessing and after 100+ interviews with target customers, it still wasn't clear to us! Even if we figured this out, we knew that we still had to understand the best wording to describe this problem to customers.

To test this, we turned our idea and landing page into multiple problem statements which we added to our CPSR. Some of these problem statements included:

It's hard to understand user needs.
I sometimes worry that we're shipping the wrong things
Stakeholders want to talk more about solutions than about problems, but we need to understand the problem first.
Finding product-market fit for a new product/feature is an ongoing challenge as a PM.
It's difficult to know if an idea has really been validated before we start building.

Top tip: Add multiple problem statements related to your product offering to your CPSR. You should even consider experimenting with different wordings for the same problem. These differences can reveal a lot about how your customers perceive different terms or phrases.

(Note: Interested in improving your landing page messaging? Use our solution, OpinionX, to stack rank customer problems and discover what will catch website visitors’ attention. Try it for free!)

Step 3: Add Peripheral Problem Statements

To understand how important your problems are to target customers, we need to compare them to other problems your target customers experience. To do this, we'll add problems that are in the same 'activity of focus' but that your product doesn't solve. The way to come up with peripheral problem statements is to just talk to some of your target customers and ask them. Otherwise, forums, blog posts and social media are all full of people talking about their problems :)

Some of the peripheral problem statements we used in our own CPSR included:

Our organizational knowledge is too disjointed.
Getting the company to start tracking KPIs is painful.
Moving users from a free plan to a paid plan is a big challenge.

Top Tip: Don't worry if you feel like you've missed some peripheral problems. OpinionX lets your CPSR participants add new problem statements to your list as you go, cover areas that you miss

Step 4: Send To Target Customers

Sending out a CPSR on OpinionX is as easy as copying and pasting a link. We spent an evening DMing our link to about 400-500 Product Managers in relevant Slack communities. We got 145 responses, giving us a solid sample size to trust our data. While sending out the survey, our list of problem statements grew from 19 to almost 60 statements in total. This was because participants could add new statements to fill any problems gaps that we had overlooked.

Below you can see the top 10 most important statements according to our participants:

This is a snapshot of the top 10 problems out of almost 60 statements in total.

Top tip: Choose just one segment to participate in your stack rank. For example, if we sent our stack rank to product managers and user researchers at the same time it would really mess up our data. Also, to ensure that you get a robust sample size, we recommend aiming for 40 participants minimum.

Step 5: Map The Most Important Problems To Your Landing Page

Once all the data was collected, we clicked one button to sort all the statements by what participants felt was most important. From this shortlist, we picked the 5 most relevant problems that we could solve and starred them on our list.

We took the highest-ranking problem — "Finding product-market fit for a new product/feature is an ongoing challenge as a PM" — and we just turned this straight into our headline value proposition, "Find Product-Market Fit For Your New Product or Feature". This remains the heading of our landing page today.

Top tip: Turn the highest-ranking problem that your product solves into your landing page header. You have validated that this is important so you can be sure it will catch the attention of your target audience.

Then we moved down the list and turned the next highest ranking problems into a benefits section on the landing page:

Problem: Stakeholders want to talk more about solutions than about problems, but we need to understand the problem first.
Benefit: Understand the problem before building the solution
Problem: It's difficult to know if an idea has really been validated before we start building.
Benefit: Easily validate your ideas
Problem: My attention is pulled in too many directions at once
Benefit: Focus your attention on what really matters
Problem: It takes to long to conduct robust user research so we end up cutting corners sometimes
Benefit: Robust user research without cutting corners.

We added a small paragraph under each benefit heading to explain it further and added some images that reflected what we were communicating.

Top Tip: Try and stay as close as possible to the original wording participants voted on in the stack rank. Rewording the most important problem statements using different words is tempting but can result in you losing the meaning that resonated with your participants. We learned this the hard way during customer interviews. We presumed that "identifying user unmet needs" meant the same thing as "validating ideas", but our CPSR showed that they were interpreted completely differently by our target customers.

Summary

Through Customer Problem Stack Ranking, product managers told us which problems were most painful for them. We identified which of the most painful problems our product could solve. We turned these problem statements into our value proposition on our landing page. Conversion doubled, successful onboarding improved, traffic ballooned and we even got an "I love you" message.

In hindsight, much of this seems obvious. All we really did was ask customers about their biggest problems and then communicated back to them how we can solve these problems. It's not rocket science, but it's also not the most obvious method for writing landing page copy. I just wish it was something we knew about before we spent 7 months doing 100+ interviews.

Now, we want to help you to get the same results. It only takes a few minutes to set up a free Customer Problem Stack Rank on OpinionX. If you want some help, request a free call so that we can make sure that you get set up properly and answer any questions you have.

How we doubled landing page conversion in one week (and you can too!)