2019 Customer Survey - Results and Action Plan
This is my favorite time of year, but it's not due to the holidays and presents. It's because for the last 5+ years we have sent out our annual customer survey in December and received tons of feedback to help guide and grow our businesses. After reviewing hundreds of responses from our 2019 survey, I'm excited to share some of the key takeaways and action items that our team will focus on as we enter a new decade.
Thank you to those who responded – your feedback is greatly appreciated! And your positivity and praise are incredibly motivating for our team. We're excited to dig into your requests!
p.s. If you did not fill in the survey, you can still do so here: https://withoutcode.typeform.com/to/izE8Kx
Why are we sharing the results?
I like to share the results of our survey for a couple of reasons:
- It demonstrates that we are listening. So many businesses ignore the true needs of their users and focus on items that won't make a real impact. You spend all day building sites on Without Code, so you definitely know best what's great, and what's not. The items listed below are the takeaways we saw listed most frequently.
- It builds community. Our users share many similar traits, and it's nice to know that there are other designers who have identical needs and face similar challenges. It also helps us to identify who our true market is and helps tailor our marketing efforts to that customer profile.
- It helps our customers grow. I try to treat all of our customers like investors in a business – you've invested time and money in our platform and deserve to know how we are doing and the direction we are headed. Proper planning is fundamental to any business, and the more information we share, the better you can plan your future growth.
Section 1 – Customer Demographics
What we asked:
We wanted to know whether our customers consider themselves freelancers or work for large agencies. Also, whether they built sites for themselves vs. clients, and how many they build per year.
The results:
- 60%+ of our market is freelance designers, who primarily work alone.
- 25% own a business that employs a team of 5 or less people.
- They mainly build sites for clients (instead of a company they work for).
- 75% build between 2 – 10 sites per year. 15% of users build 10+ sites per year.
- Freelancers and small business owners are more price sensitive than large businesses. We need to be careful to stay competitive and ensure high value at a very reasonable price.
- Our product road map should focus on tools and services that allow a single person to do as much as possible themselves (since they work alone).
- We need to develop tools and services that make it easier for designers and agencies to grow their businesses, not just develop websites (billing, CRM, white label training, etc.)
- Our development and technical support teams should be a highly valuable resource for these designers – how can we foster / streamline this relationship?
Section 2 – Pro Member Benefits
What we asked:
We wanted to know what the most relevant benefits for our paid Pro members are, and how likely they are to renew their memberships. Also, if they have a published a site yet and if not, what can we do to help.
The results:
- 84% of our Pro members intend on renewing their memberships, and 14% are undecided.
- 2% of Pros said they would not renew; however, the most common reason was retirement or transition out of the web design space. Understandable!
- The most popular suggestion for encouraging Pro renewals was a price reduction.
- The most valuable features to our Pro designers are the sub-user CMS, the large volume of Pro templates, a faster level of technical support and the ability to brand the platform with their logo.
- 80% said they have published a site on the platform. The remaining 20% are evenly split between the answers "I'm still building my site" and "the hosting cost is too high."
- Pro / Enterprise members are incredibly important to our business, and we need to grow this segment by adding additional services and tools into these membership tiers.
- Our marketing efforts should focus on informing designers of these popular Pro features and how they can add value to your business.
- We need to publish information and comparisons explaining the benefits of our hosting / platform vs. other options on the web. Users frequently compare our hosting to low-cost bargain service providers even though our speed, reliability and infrastructure are far superior and lead to better performing sites.
- We could explore pricing incentives for new Pro members, such as a reduced cost on the first site hosted or a discount on the Pro membership cost based on the number of sites hosted.
Section 3 – Customer Acquisition and Competitive Advantages
What we asked: We were interested in how you found Without Code originally, what our advantages are over other website builders and which other platforms you're using. Lastly what we could do to encourage you to increase the volume of sites built on the platform.
The results:
- 85% of our users initially heard of us through our original business, MuseThemes. The remainder came via referral from a designer / friend or found us through Google Search.
- Users overwhelmingly voted that our biggest advantage is the reduced time it takes to build a website (speed of builder), and the ease of use / low learning curve.
- The remainder of votes split between powerful widgets and functionality, a large template / section library and the reliability and simplicity of our built-in hosting.
- Users voted our biggest weakness as hosting portability (lack of export) and lack of domain / email hosting built directly into the platform.
- The main alternative platform used outside of Without Code was no surprise – Adobe Muse – followed next by WordPress and Wix.
- Users would be most encouraged to move all of their sites to our platform if we offered an "all-in-one" solution for website creation, hosting, email, domains, etc.
- Muse designers are gradually transitioning away from Muse and to alternative platforms. This process could take several years – which is why we did not abandon Muse immediately like all other template / widget vendors.
- Without Code will benefit from this Muse transition for a long time; however, it’s important for us to establish an alternative source of customer acquisition outside of MuseThemes. We have lots of ideas here.
- Lack of site export continues to be a hot topic; however, it's definitely misunderstood and would benefit from more explanation from our team about the technical challenges and limitations designers would face with site portability.
- A clear opportunity for our company (and major benefit to our customers) is to integrate third party services such as a domains, emails and other key tools into the platform, creating a one stop shop for designers.
Section 4 – Product and Feature Requests
What we asked:
What features / templates / widgets do you need most? How can we make your life easier? How can we help YOU make more money and grow your business?
The results:
The most popular feature requests include:
- A more refined typography menu that includes options for line-height and layout formatting. Coming soon!
- Improved color management system, with the ability to save colors and create reusable palettes. Coming soon!
- Email / domain integration. A top priority for us in 2020.
- Tools or integrations with services focused on ADA compliance, GDPR, SEO, mass emailing, etc. A top priority for us in 2020.
- Additional training on ecommerce, dynamic pages, SEO and GDPR compliance. A top priority for us in 2020.
- White label billing (for designers who want their clients to pay). Planned exploration in 2020.
- Self-hosted video / widgets. Planned exploration in 2020.
- Membership site functionality (individual logins and secure areas). Complicated, but planned exploration in 2020
- A variety of smaller functionality-focused widgets or style-specific improvements such as hover transitions / effects, parallax improvements, 100% rows, live chat, etc. Most of these are already in development for 2020.
Our takeaways:
- There is no shortage of opportunities to improve the platform, and we will continue to prioritize feature requests based on the volume of requests received.
- TONS of the feature requests we received are already available in the platform; users just couldn't find them. We need to figure out a way to ensure users are regularly informed of new and existing features (webinars, tutorials, blog posts, etc.).
- We often discard functionality that we feel may be too complex or difficult for users to set up. Perhaps we should reevaluate this approach, as users indicated powerful functionality is more important than set up simplicity. We'll provide detailed instructions as usual!
Final Thoughts:
I could write forever about the goals we have planned and functionality I want to see in the platform, but I think I'd better stop here – if you made it this far, I'm very impressed!
Some of the key messages we often remind ourselves of are, "How can we make our users more successful? Grow their businesses? Build better websites?" I believe as long as we stay true to this core mentality, we can grow along with our customers and build great businesses together.
The website builder market is incredibly competitive, and we're very appreciative that you chose Without Code to build your business on. Our team will continue to monitor incoming requests closely and if there is something missing in the platform that you need, please do send us a note – it just might exist already.
Happy holidays from the whole team at Without Code and be sure to rest up over the holidays...we've got a big year (decade) ahead!
Cheers,
Steve Harris
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