Best Practices : A-Z customers – examples of cool our customers page

The very common A-Z Customer List is outdated ! You need to drop it. Unless you are expecting that your prospects will be using your customers list similar to their phone books – which is searching for their friends by name. And the chances are Nil.

(Source: Just as an example)

This is a bad idea for the following 4 reasons

1. The top down presentation approach ( inverted pyramid) with the attitude saying we have so many customers, and you can look for what you want does not work. In this age of Internet Marketing, you need to drive your visitors to the relevant stories. Else it is not relevant to them, and very few people will care to search through ‘your’ haystack to find ‘your’ needle.

2. Our Customers page is typically one of the main pages that a prospect visits, which means it is a very high value piece of real estate on your website. A bland list of 100’s of names is not my idea of engagement. Especially when there are other 100 interesting things competing for my attention as a visitor.

3.What are the chances that someone will go through everything to find something that is of interest to them? Nil. what are the chances that someone will click on even 1 of them. very low. Remember the attention span of an average visitor on the net is a few seconds, not hours.

4. It is a wasted opportunity big time given that you are sitting on a goldmine of content.  Content is King/Queen. Hiding all the interesting stories inside is a waste of valuable “priceless” content. Not using it is not just waste of your content $, but plain stupidity in terms of lost opportunities.

A better way of doing this would be to push this list all the way to the bottom of the pyramid, and you have your most interesting and relevant stories showcased at the top. Not as a list again but in a more engaging format with all the details and grandeur – logos, interesting photos, names, titles, compelling quotes, etc, etc  retaining all its character and uniqueness, thus making it interesting. I mean to say don’t start your customers page with the A-Z list since it is a major put off. It is OK to push it to the bottom of the pyramid, since now you can afford for no-one to read it. Even if it ends up as a list, you must categorize it based on the likely profile of the prospects. Eg. Industry, Use Cases, Demographics, Size of Business, etc. just in case someone finds them ! 🙂

Our Customers page of Salesforce is a very good example.

(Disclaimer – I am in no way connected with Salesforce (SFDC) in any form. Neither am i getting paid by them for using their name as a best practice )

The page is organized as a 3 Tier pyramid. The top stories in the slider. Next the featured stories and finally the rest of everything at the bottom.

Tier 1 – Top x Stories

(Source: http://www.Salesforce.com  23-Jan-2014)

Tier 2 – Featured Stories

(Source: http://www.Salesforce.com  23-Jan-2014)

Tier 3 – Rest of the Stories

(Source: http://www.Salesforce.com  23-Jan-2014)

It is visually engaging and entices you to click to read the stories. And every customer has a picture, even if it is just the logo in some cases. It makes it much more interesting to browse through compared to a A-Z list with bland text. 

Summarizing: Please do yourself a favor by not hiding your customer stories inside an A-Z list. there are 100’s of ways you can use them better, but not in an A-Z list.

Do you agree ? Please share your opinions and experiences via comments below. thanks

by Anupam Bonanthaya

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Anupam Bonanthaya is an experienced Customer Success Marketer and the Founder of CustomerRivet – The Social Proof Marketing Experts

Rivet.ly – Hosted Our-Customers Page

Get More Leads and More Conversions by Optimizing the use of Testimonials, Success Stories, Case Studies, Videos, Reviews, Customer Photos, Tweets, or any other Social Proof, in your Marketing.

Ask for a Demo today to see how it can help “Transform Your Customer Success Marketing”. OR Contact Anupam Bonanthaya via LinkedIn

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