When hit by an episode of sugar cravings, would you ever buy a bar of chocolate that claims to be sweet but isn’t sweet at all? Probably not. This is because the chocolate does not serve its purpose of delighting your taste buds and satisfying your craving for something sweet. Web design works similarly.
It can boost your conversion rate, provided it is designed as a lead generation machine. A poorly-designed website, like bitter-tasting chocolate, doesn’t serve its purpose though. It fails in attracting people to your business.
If you look at it from this perspective, you will also understand why hiring a web design company without a conversion rate optimization (CRO) record is a bad idea. Let’s walk through to understand the role that website design plays in your business’ growth and why you need to work with a web designer that showcases a good CRO background.
How important is website design for your business?
Before deciding who to work with, it is crucial to understand why you need to work with them. In this case, you need to understand that a website is the face of a business. With the emergence of online marketing, it has increasingly become important to have this face too.
Therefore, your reason for hiring a web design company revolves around your need for a designer to give your business an identity in the online sphere. There’s a catch here though – just having a website for your venture is not enough.
This is because good web design plays a significant role in growing your customers. For instance, Venngage, a company that allows you to design infographics, decided to change the color of their ‘upgrade’ button from orange to green.
However, their conversation rate declined by approximately 30% within two days. The startup went back to using the color orange and the conversation rate upped. In fact, there was a slight increase in the blog traffic too. Unbounce explains the possible reason behind this by highlighting that orange is a clickable color.
What’s more, Netcraft Web Server Survey of Jan 2018 confirmed that there are over 1.8 billion websites on the internet. This sets the need for having a web design that stands out.
What is a conversion website?
Since it is clear now that you need a conversion website instead of a standard one, it is crucial to understand what a conversion website is. Picking up from what is discussed so far, it a website that converts well. In other words, it attracts and converts your leads into customers.
Digging deeper, a conversion website is the one that is built on a strategy, which is centered around users and the desired actions you want them to take. For example, if you want your visitors to request a demo, your website will be built around guiding the users towards this desired call-to-action.
This means that the designer takes into account everything from the size of the button to its color and also the angle of the background image. All this works to navigate the visitor towards the desired area or next page on the site.
This is possible only if the one who designs your website has a comprehensive understanding of user-focused web design. In other words, you need to work with a Website Design Service that has a background in conversion rate optimization.
What happens when you hire a company with no CRO background?
It is clear that a conversion-centered website plays a critical role in your business’s digital marketing. It can assist in increasing your leads, sales, upsells, sharing, customer experience, repeat customers as well as affiliate clicks if your site generates revenue by running ads.
At the same time, the seamless design can reduce customer churn, the lead nurturing time, the duration of the buying cycle and the acquisition costs. However, if you still end up working with a web design service that does not showcase a strong CRO record, then the following things can happen:
– You end up wasting your money
Most businesses start on a shoestring budget. This means each penny invested is precious. Also, it is only wise to look for a return on the investment you make. If you hire a web design company that creates standard websites though, then your ROI may not be substantial.
On the flip side, a company that delivers conversion websites is worth investing in as it designs a site that is geared towards attracting and converting customers.
– You do little to improve the customer experience
How well a webpage is designed also contributes to your customers’ experiences. For example, a website that loads slowly loses 25% of its potential visitors in four seconds. Surveys confirm that half of the users expect a site to load within two seconds.
Any delay means that they would leave your site. This gives an idea that the poor user experience on your website will be driving away audience instead of welcoming them.
– You will be losing customers
Where a site can drive in an audience and convert it, it can also drive it away from your business if it is not designed properly. Take page load speed as an example here again. Reports outline that 79% of the e-shoppers say that if they have difficulty with a site’s performance, then they won’t return to it to buy again.
At the same time, 44% of the web shoppers say that they would share the poor online shopping experience with their friends. This means that not only will the shopper not return to your business but he may also stop others from doing so. This sets an increased need for hiring a CRO-showcasing web design company.
Summing up
Web design is a critical aspect of setting up and running a business online. Undeniably, it also plays a role in converting leads into loyal customers. This is why you need to focus on working with a design service team that has a portfolio of designing websites that are conversion-oriented.
