Is Your Website Design Killing Your Conversion Rate?

Considering how important the digital space has become to the world, it is obviously crucial for every business to have a functioning website. That said, many businesses usually throw up a website that will cost little to no money just so they can have a web presence. A lot of the time, no form of analytics tracking is added, and no thought is given to how well the site will convert. This leads to the obvious “I don’t know where traffic is coming from, I have no idea how many leads come from the site” issues, and business owners may get put off from investing anything further into online marketing because in their experience, “it doesn’t work”.

When starting out to build a web presence, it’s always best to consult an expert. Work with people who know the importance of having a website with great user experience that will give you a strong chance of converting from day one. Once you have a site that is delivering a good conversion rate, your next steps from there should be about A/B testing to give you gradual improvements to your sites conversion rate.

So, just how big of an impact can a poor website design have on conversion rate? Let’s have a look at an example of one of our clients. We were approached by a business in the finance industry that was trying to generate leads through adwords. When they approached us, they had a very old website with a contact form as their conversion goal. When assessing the site, we took three things into consideration:

1. How clear are we about what we want the visitor to do on our site?
2. How trust worthy does the site appear?
3. Are we outlining what the benefits of doing business with them are?

Upon closer inspection, we realised that their original site was not achieving any of these three objectives.

The client had already been advertising on adwords for around three months, and was able to achieve a conversion rate of 2.5%. This sounds okay at first, until we realised the target keywords were costing the company approximately $9 per click, and was hurting the campaign’s Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

How Did Flight Digital Media Approach This Project?

To alleviate these campaign issues, we went through the three key areas we always approach (as mentioned above):

1. How trustworthy/credible is the site?
   Over the years, we’ve found that people want to business with sites that look credible and established. We all have a deep seeded fear that we’ll make a purchase or submit our personal details to a site that will rip us off- or, even worse- steal our identity. A site with a strong brand design, works well on all devices, is quick to load, and is easy to navigate should always convert well. So, step one was to create a site that was trust worthy and could stack up against other larger finance company websites.
2. How clear is the site objective to the client?
   We’ve all heard about the customer buying cycle: first awareness, then consideration, and finally, purchase. What we don’t know, however, is what stage a buyer is at when they reach your site. Therefore, if you’re not clear about what action you want them to take on your site, you could fail to convert users even if they are at the purchase stage. If this is the case you definitely won’t turn people lurking in the awareness or consideration stages into buyers. We believe that there should be big, bold, calls-to-action on a site. We need to guide users into converting on our site, or the likely hood of them bouncing increases.
3. Why should visitors do business with you?
   A lot of business owners can confuse the answer to this question with telling their own personal story. While this is an important part of your branding, it doesn’t always hold the same value when we’re talking about conversions. A study by Nielsen Norman Group states that On the average web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. That’s not a lot of engagement on a site. So, it’s up to you tell users what’s important. Using checklists to outline benefits, using Headings to summarise benefits, and using things like videos are great ways to engage users.

So, this is what we ended up using for our client:

We used obvious call to actions “Talk to Us Today,” and “Contact Us Now,” with a large phone number displayed in the header of the site. We also outlined the benefits of doing business with our client in small chunks of text to ensure that large headings, images with benefits, and checklists outlining the core benefits, are the things that users read.

So, how did this new design strategy perform against the old site?

The month that we launched the new site, the conversion rate improved by 213%, going from 2.29% to 7.17%. As the months went on, we continued to test the landing page by including “brands they work with,” different calls to action, different placement of the contact form, and other small changes. This ended up with the site converting at 11.72% – a 412% improvement.

If you’re finding that your conversion rate is poor and hasn’t been improving no matter what you do, maybe it’s time to review the design of your site.