Your communications are the foundation of the relationship with your customers. When those communications are unclear, your customers are more likely to churn. Our research reveals that unclear communications are the first indicator of churn. Your customers are more likely to leave you because of unclear communications before you can measure any other indicator.
Part of clear communication is the way communications are laid out. Layout isn’t about aesthetics – it’s about delivering professional communications that foster trust and encourage engagement. Effective layouts make it easier for customers to understand what you’re trying to say.
Understanding how people read
When a person receives a communication, they don’t read it – they scan it. The brain wants to be efficient – it wants to put in as little work as possible to achieve a goal.
Heatmapping technology uses the science of visual attention to reveal how people interact with printed and digital information. This technology has uncovered popular scanning patterns. One of those patterns is shaped like the letter F.
When someone looks at a communication that’s a wall of text – no paragraph breaks, no headings, no graphics – their eyes typically travel to the text on the top and towards the left of the page more frequently than text to the right and at the bottom. So, if there’s information to the right and/or at the bottom of a page, the reader will miss it.
F-pattern scanning is bad news for organizations and customers. Customers could be missing out on useful information, and organizations have to spend more time, effort, and money reaching out to customers to encourage them to take action because that information wasn’t clear to the customer the first time.
Improving design for greater impact
You want your customers to find your communications valuable – you don’t want them to scan what you send them and throw it away.
Instead of having to reprint communications and spend the time and money to send them again, you can take some quick steps to design your communications for greater impact:
Break down walls of text into paragraphs and bullet points.
Include the most important information in the first paragraph.
Put important words and phrases in bold so they catch the reader’s eye.
If you have related content, group it together by surrounding it with a border and/or using a different background color.
Learn how a Computershare client used layout best practices to boost their communications' impact in the next section.
Case study: how a Computershare client transformed customer communications
A utilities provider realized its billing notices were difficult to interpret, leading to late payments, low awareness about financial assistance options, and unhelpful utility usage information that wasn't consistent with its brand. The organization also had trouble tracking and updating educational messages featured on bills.
Computershare: redesigning the billing experience for greater simplicity
Computershare helped the company redesign its billing notification to create bills that offered an improved user experience. Our design experts made calls-to-action clearer to highlight account balances and payment information, and they made utility usage information clearer and easier to understand, so customers could track and reduce their usage.
We also simplified switching out and tracking educational messages, so it was straightforward for our client to understand which messages resonated with our customers. Our design experts personalized bills for residential, commercial and other segments for an enhanced user experience, too. We validated everything we did with user testing.
The results
More customers used cost-effective digital channels to update information thanks to clearer calls-to-action. Fewer customers reached out to the call center (the most expensive customer service channel).
In addition, customers acted on invoices sooner. More customers paid bills on time thanks to clearer information about due dates, and the utilities provider sent fewer reminder notices, which saved the organization money. Customers also commented that it was easier to understand their utility usage.
Layout: a pillar of effective communication
Your communication design impacts your customers' behaviour and their relationship with you. When you design communications in a way that's easy to understand at first glance, you'll see an increase in positive behaviours (such as paying bills on time, switching to digital channels, and not contacting the call center).
For expert advice on communications design, reach out to Computershare.