How to Improve Conversions with Web Design

Posted on June 27, 2018April 4, 2019 by Shahin Miah

You’ve finally done it. You sit back, relax and mentally pat yourself on the back for hitting your traffic target, after months of SEO and optimisation projects.

Proud moment! And as you go to the analytics dashboard to check the monthly conversions, your heart stops as you see it has in fact gone down, even though you have flooded the site with more traffic! WTF!

Then, horror, an email headed ‘Conversions Decline’ from your manager pops up on screen and you wish the ground would swallow you up right then and there.

You panic, running through everything that you did over the past month…..you optimised the site content, improved the keyword targeting, got better product images, got the indexation issues sorted….how can you explain the decline of conversions in the face of such great traffic numbers?

Easy. Your site design is crap.

With 75% of UK web users saying that a company’s credibility is affected by their site design, can you afford to just let over half your site traffic bounce off your page as soon as they get there? No you certainly cannot, but what is it about your site that is turning potential customers away?

This is always a frustrating point, just as you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, it starts to go dark again as the prospect of converting all your new fancy traffic looms.

So what are the most effective design practices for conversion? There have to be some theories about layout sizes and colour palettes to go by right? Right indeed, and we’ll look at some of the theories that we can apply to your site in just a bit, but first we should look at why designmatters so much to websites. Afterall, if your site is found on page 1 in SERPs and the content is regularly accessed, why aren’t people sticking around and converting?

UX Web Design

Closely linked, in fact almost twinned you could say, User Experience (UX) and Design are instrumental to each other’s success. With poor design comes a terrible UX, and with greatdesign you get amazing UX!

A great way to quickly check your site is UX-ready is to tick off the following UX web design principles from the Semantic Studios team…

Download UX Checklist Infographics

The way your customers navigate, experience and interact with your site is heavily linked to your conversion success or failure, and should be top of your design team’s list when creating a new site design.

40% of users leave a site if they think the design is shabby or dated, and 70% of SME sites don’t employ valuable or visible CTA’s in their content. So with ugly, directionless websites, can you really expect your

target audience to buy from you? It’s the equivalent of asking your crush out to dinner wearing a dirty tracksuit. It will never happen, and so, in order to get that conversion / land that hot date, your site has to undergo a makeover, but not just a skin-deep update, you need to transform your site from the inside out, to find out what your audience needs from you, and how you can make it happen.

Design Upgrade = 79% Conversion Increase

Take the team at Truckers Report. They had a landing page that was dated, not very visually stimulating, and was only converting at a fraction of the rate they wanted. They decided to work with an agency in order to find a way to increase their conversions, and give them a more modern design reflective of their target audience.

(ConversionXL)

These design changes resulted in a 79% increase in conversions for the site, and throughout the process, the agency A/B tested all the changes they made, including copy optimisation, layout changes and CTA placement, to ensure that everything they were doing was going towards improving the conversion rate.

In depth audience research was essential to this process, but key to the success of the project were the design upgrades; focused on user habits on-site and using heat-maps to test page layouts, the changes to the visual aesthetic of the page impacted the conversion rate more than the changes to the copy, which after all remained relatively similar.

Like I said above, 40% of your users judge your brand by their first impression of your site design, so in order to keep their attention for longer, make sure your site is up to date with your audience usage habits and preferences. If you want to keep making money that is.

3 Web Design Principles

Great! So now you know how important Design is to your conversion rate, how about stepping your site’s game up a tad huh?

Yes we know it’s a daunting challenge for any company, but the rewards are more than worth it and more than just increased revenue and conversions, you’ll have a whole new understanding of your customers! These insights will enable you to interact and engage with your customers authentically and valuably, creating a loyal customer base for you, and providing an asset to them.

Now we’ll take a look at 3 design practices you can apply to your site to improve your conversions rate, but if you would like any further information on implementing these methods, our design team are here to help.

Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is something that although simple in theory, is overlooked on a lot of sites; defined by the Interaction Design Foundation as

“[...] the order in which a user processes information on a page” -IDF

So if we take the Bose homepage, we can see the order in which a user would process the page’s content:

(Bose)

With visual hierarchy, the larger or more prominent the image/visual asset, the more important the user will assume it to be. So here, as Bose wants their new headphones to fly off the shelves, they’ve placed an attractive, and on-brand product image as #1 on the page, with the product tagline and CTA as #2 to grab the user and shuffle them along that sweet little conversion funnel they’ve got going.

How to Apply This

Go through your site and look at what you’re saying/trying to get your users to do and compare that against your first impression of the page.

Is the product the focus? Is it prominent? Where is the CTA? Is it valuable enough?

By analysing your site in this manner, you can assign your team to manipulate image sizes and the value of the copy to encourage more conversions and engagement.

Hick’s Law

A basic design principle that is often ignored, Hick’s Law looks at the element of choice:

“Hick’s Law predicts that the time and the effort it takes to make a decision, increases with the number of options.”- UXPlanet

Take Argos for instance, they are going to rely heavily on filters to make sure their users can find exactly what they’re looking for in the fastest time possible:

(Argos)

Without these various filters, covering price range, colourand brand, users would spend too much time endlessly scrolling through the products, and would leave before converting.

So if you have lots of products like Argos, keep the number of filters as low as possible, because having a million filters is just as annoying for the customer!

How to Apply This

Your CMS manager, like Magento or Shopify, should have categories already in use for your site products. In order for your products to show up in filtered searches however, they must be categorised correctly to fulfill your user experience.

Task your team with checking each of your site categories, and ensure that product categorisation is a key part of your inventory uploading process.

Clean Design

If your website is busy, crammed full of graphics, GIFs, ads and banners, you will lose users like nobody’s business. Google actually released research proving that sites with busy and cluttered designs lost more views than cleaner, simpler sites with less visual stimulation, which goes on to prove that less in fact is way more when it comes to the Web.

SkinnyTies experienced an awesome 14% increase in revenue thanks to a site design ‘clean-up’, turning their dark, dated and dull homepage into a clean, fresh and functional conversion machine.

(ConversionXL)

The redesign not only made it apparent that this was in fact a retail store, not a Wikipedia page on the history of ties, but lightened the page with white space to give the user metaphorical ‘breathing room’. Claustrophobia can occur on the internet too, so lighten up and let your users relax!

How to Apply This

Go through your site and take stock of your page layouts:

Is it cluttered and busy?

Is it dark and moody looking?

Are you inclined to stick around on this page? If not, make a note of why.

Using this information, your team should go through the problem areas and prepare wireframes to propose a new design, with a focus on white-space, freshness, navigation and customer value.

A new site design gives you the opportunity to really create something valuable for your customers. Keep them coming back to your business for your beautiful aesthetic, your valuable service and your personable and authentic brand.

Design is a huge part of your success, as you now know, but it’s definitely not all of it, as if your design isn’t user friendly then it isn’t serving you as it should be. It’s not just about colour palettes and typeface, it’s about how the flow of your site design works with your user’s habits, and when it’s done right, it creates an effective and beautiful site that consistently converts and engages your motivated and highly engaged target audience.

Don’t panic though! Not everyone is equipped with years of expertise and success in the Web Design industry, but luckily iNS is. It’s crucial for you to have a tailored, flexible and high-converting site, and our team will work alongside you to redesign your site to produce consistent conversion levels of engagement that you never thought you’d see.

Success is always possible, you just need to right team around you, so give iNS a call and start seeing the results you want today.

Why SMEs Need Social Media, & How to Develop Yours Effectively

Posted on April 22, 2018February 1, 2019 by Shahin Miah

People need to connect, it’s just human nature. We all yearn to feel a connection to someone, and Social Media is the 21st century’s way of connecting us to the World.

Connections build relationships that span lifetimes, and not just between people, but between brands as well. And social media is the melting pot where brands use their personality to build strong relationships with their customers, creating lasting customer loyalty and powerful advocacy to build not only brand awareness, but revenue and repute.

With so much competition out there, and such an opinionated and diverse audience to cater to, businesses can often feel overwhelmed by the scale of what they’re looking to achieve. With an average of 30 million daily users in the UK on Facebook alone, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine why companies often give up after a few months of struggling to engage an over-exposed and highly-critical online audience.

Social Media is Hard, We Get It

Don’t get it twisted, social media marketing may seem simple enough to tackle, afterall we all have a Facebook account! But it is deceptively strategic, by no means an easy feat or quick fix, and is also paramount to creating lasting success for your business, and a creative and thriving knowledge base for you to develop your brand with unique audience insights.

….and this is where most people run off saying ‘eureka! That’s it! All we need to do is create some social

profiles, see what’s popular with our customers and get posting! 3 times a day should do it!’

These people will fail.

Inevitably they will post unstructured, boring promotional materials, product images, company event pictures and monthly competitions, but there will little to no audience engagement past a few likes here and there, a comment complaining about customer service and pages of photos with nothing but products and price tags.

The whole point of Social Media is being lost on these guys, so don’t be one of those guys!

Just like you use facebook to send hilarious meme’s to your workmates, post a cool picture you took in the city or share news pieces that affect you, so too should your brand. This air of authenticity, of humanising your brand to create real connections with your customers is the key to social media success and long lasting brand advocacy for your business. Just take Forever 21 and their instagram game which boasts over 14 million followers; it’s relevant, posting images and comments about their audience’s celebrity faves, customer post regrams encouraging engagement and product inspo, along with fun quotes and audience relevant phrases that keep the brand up to date and trending. This type of consumer-centric social marketing has rocketed their online and offline reputation, and their ever-so-cool ex-Social Media Manager Mario Moreno said that when the brand was promoting their new plus size range on their social platforms;

‘[we] immediately recognized our followers didn’t want campaign/model images, they wanted to see product on real customers, so we listened and threw away our strategy and developed a new one. The customers/followers appreciated it and engaged more.’

Listening to your audience allows you to cater your brand around them, encouraging loyalty, advocacy and great returns in both brand awareness and revenue.

Bloom’in Success for Social SMEs

Don’t be thinking that this social media game is just for the giants either, SME’s and startups can achieve great success with social media too, just with less of a budget of course. Take Bloom & Wild for example, the London flower delivery service that has used social media to explode their audience and brand awareness, and have cultivated a strong brand personality that is perfect for social sharing. Their Instagram profile has a curated, visually beautiful and natural appeal that their customers love, and doesn’t come across as salesly or pushy which nurtures the brand-customer relationship building process.

Reflecting their audience’s love of styled flora, afternoon tea and elegant colour, Bloom&Wild showcase their relevance, ‘trendiness’, accessibility and expertise to their audience. This makes them highly attractive to a visually stimulated audience, and easy for them to engage with and follow on social.

They translate this across their other social platforms, using each platform for its strength with FB for conversations, Twitter for customer service and Pinterest for major home style decor inspiration.

With just over 5 years since they first opened shop, Bloom&Wild have over 100,000 engaged and valuable social followers, which has elevated them to London’s #1 floral delivery service at lightning speed.

With this has come media attention, magazine interviews, huge revenue increases and nationwide brand awareness thanks to popular high-street publications like Vogue and The Guardian, but it has taken them years of trial and error, budget changes and precious time to get to the level they have today.

Well earned indeed, but you don’t have the time to spend researching the latest social practices and theories. And don’t even get me started on getting the team together to strategise on the topics and posting schedule to cover the brand for the next 6 months. Let alone the mountain of audience insight research that you’ll need to inform this strategy to make sure you’re still relevant.

It takes a village that is true, and over the years that we’ve worked in social media, we know that business-owners don’t always want to know the technicalities of social posting, they just want a quick and actionable list of things they can check off to make sure they are covering their bases in the meantime.

We’ve put together the SME’s 4-Point Guide to Hacking Social Media Success to make sure that while the main company social media plan is being expertly put together, your brand is still socially developing, visible, relevant and talking to the right people.

SME’s 4-Point Guide to Hacking Social Media Success

Hashtag Audit
A quick way to get in front of the right social audience is to check your competitors’ hashtags in their posts. You want to be putting your content in front of a highly motivated audience, and by mimicking your competitors hashtags, you can slide into your potential customer’s social feeds that bit easier and without half the research usually needed.

Influencer Marketing
You’d probably be surprised by how many social influencers are already in your circle of friends, and these guys and gals are a sorely under-and-misused resource that young brands and SME’s should make the most of. They already have a large social presence, they have a recognisable voice and persona that (should) resonate with your brand, and they will easily send tonnes of traffic your way thanks to their reach. But it’s key to remember that 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a service/product if it’s been recommended by a non-celebrity blogger, which is testament to the true power of authentic marketing.

User-Generated Content
Customers will always trust each other, they won’t necessarily always trust the brand, especially not at first. This is where using your customer’s social posts as promotional material gives an authentic, real-feel to your marketing and encourages customer engagement. Tint report that user generated content creates an increase in conversions of up to 29%, making it a crucial step to engaging a loyal audience.

Collaboration
Working in tandem with a business that provides a complimentary service to yours is a simple and highly effective way of reaching a new, relevant audience and massively increasing your site traffic. Look at the Red Bull and GoPro partnership that I am sure you’ve heard of; both companies compliment each other’s adrenaline-junkie core, and provide each other with the brand reach and audience to really engage and convert new customers. This partnership works so well because it makes sense, so make sure that you follow their lead and work with a business that provides your audience with a service that you don’t provide, but compliments those that you do.

These 4 points, though they may seem disconnected from each other, if done properly they will provide you with consistently-generated, relevant and inspirational social content that will provide ongoing traffic to your website.

With the four points above, we’ve given you a solid starting point to start hacking your social channels, to rapidly grow your audience and brand awareness, but it’s not a social strategy to take you through the year. Your team can handle the above points for now, which will give you a great starting point, but in order to really turn your social channels into highly effective revenue streams, you need a well-researched and thorough strategy to cover all aspects of business and social activity.

When you work with an agency, you usually get the standardised yearly-quarter social strategy template, but after working with so many different businesses and industries, we have figured out the best way to create lasting social media success is to create fully flexible and bespoke social media plans that work solely towards your company goals.

It’s not rocket-science, it’s thinking outside of the box, and it’s what we do best. So we encourage you to be the master of your own social media success, and work with iNS to build the social media empire of your dreams.