What Is Growth-Driven Web Design, and How Can It Improve Your Relationship With Customers?

An attractive, compelling and customer-friendly website is the foundation of your online presence. A recent article from Business 2 Community emphasizes how important it is for people to enjoy visiting and interacting with your site. If the site doesn’t draw them in, speak to them, and let them quickly find what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to abandon it without making a purchase or providing you with their contact information for a follow-up.

But how can you keep your website responsive to your customers’ needs? The typical approach to website redesign isn’t helpful in this respect. After businesses initially launch their site, they usually reevaluate, revamp and relaunch it once every few years, or sometimes go for longer before making any significant alterations. In the meantime, their business evolves, and their customers’ expectations and needs change.

How can companies maintain a site that evolves with their business? One key approach is growth-driven web design.

What is growth-driven web design?

Instead of evaluating and redesigning your site once every three years, picture yourself continuously reviewing it and improving it. Imagine that these continuous improvements aren’t based on what you assume your customers will like. They’re based on solid data. You analyze what people do when they visit your site – what they click on, what pages they linger on, and what they purchase – and you refine your site in response to their behavior and demands.

This is growth-driven web design.

What are some of the key qualities of growth-driven web design?

• It demands a continuous effort. After you initially launch your site, you continue focusing your efforts on analyzing it and improving its performance as a tool for attracting customers and boosting sales. Although this approach requires a greater ongoing investment in your site, it can lead to significantly more sales, because your site is performing optimally.
• It’s data-driven. Let’s say you want to add a few landing pages or change the site’s call-to-action (CTA). You’ll make these decisions based on data you’ve gathered about how visitors engage with your site. You’ll estimate the value of each proposed change – for example, whether it will improve retention and conversion. Instead of guessing where your CTA should go, and how it should get worded, you’ll make refinements based on what customers are actually responding to. Once you’ve made a change, you’ll continue gathering data on it to check if it has met your expectations and genuinely improved your site. You’re much less likely to inflict an unattractive or unwieldy feature on your website visitors.
• It’s collaborative. Growth-driven web design requires an ongoing conversation between your web designers and your sales and marketing teams. The data you gather from your site can help your sales and marketing team refine their general strategies; in turn, they’ll offer insights that contribute to website improvements. Your website is always integral to your overall marketing strategy.
• It reflects ongoing business developments and changes in your relationship with your customers. The typical approach to web design can leave you with a site that’s out-of-step with your existing and potential customers and with your business development. In contrast, growth-driven design is much more of a real-time process. You’re always considering how to make your site better, and optimizing it through incremental changes.

One challenging aspect to growth-driven design is how to measure the value of a proposed change and gauge its effect once it’s implemented. What metrics will you use? For example, you can look at overall web traffic, bounce rate, the flow of traffic through your site, the features customers engage with most, and changes in lead generation and sales.

Be sure to reach out to web design and online marketing professionals who can help you determine the best ways to improve your site. When you contact us, we’ll discuss how you can significantly boost your web presence and make sure that any changes reflect your customers’ demands and your company’s needs.