How Growth-Driven Design Generates 16.9% More Leads Than Traditional Web Design

Taking a static approach to web design can spell disaster for modern brands. Like most other areas of digital operations, successful web design relies on being dynamic, adaptable, and continuously learning. And that’s the essence of growth-driven design, the topic we’ll cover in-depth in this post. Here you’ll learn what growth-driven design is, the methodology behind it, and how you can use it to generate 16.9% more leads. 

What is Growth-Driven Design?

Simply put, it’s an iterative web design approach that focuses on working in short sprints rather than doing everything all at once. Instead of launching a site, letting it sit for a couple of years and then doing a major redesign, growth-driven design involves making continuous improvements over time as new data becomes available. 

It’s a highly adaptive process where you make ongoing adjustments based on visitor behavior, which is what enables you to perpetually optimize your website to increase engagement, conversions, and other KPIs that are integral to success. 

How Does Growth-Driven Design Differ From Traditional Web Design?

To fully grasp what growth-driven design is, it’s helpful to understand how it differs from traditional web design. With the latter, you’ll launch a site — a process that may take six to 12 months — and it will basically sit stagnant for a couple of years. During that time, no major changes will be made. 

While your website will likely be effective initially, it will start to atrophy over time, becoming less and less effective due to technology updates, content changes, and changes in user expectations. Once that time has passed, your site will likely have become stale and may no longer align with your brand’s goals and objectives. To fix that, a redesign will then be necessary to get your site back on track, something that requires a significant investment. 

You can see traditional web design illustrated in this graph in gray where a redesign is initiated at 1.5 – 2 year intervals. Notice there’s the initial site launch, which is followed by two redesigns with not much taking place in between. 

Growth-driven design, however, takes an iterative approach where ongoing improvements are made based on continuously analyzing user behavior. With it, you assess how well your site is performing and then make a hypothesis of what would happen if you changed something. You then implement the proposed change and assess the performance again, repeating the process over and over for perpetual refinement. 

You can see growth-driven design illustrated here in orange, indicating continual iterations are always being made. 

And that’s important given that all websites are built on a series of assumptions based on previous experience (how do we label things, how do we structure things, how should our messaging be). No matter how adept you are, you don’t truly know what’s going to work well until you try. Growth-driven design provides you with the perfect framework for not only getting your website where it needs to be initially, but maintaining it so you can sustain those results. 

Beyond that, growth-driven design has some other distinct benefits over traditional web design, including what’s highlighted here.

An Example

Let’s say you choose to prioritize something differently on your homepage. Maybe before you were prioritizing your services, placing them front and center. But instead, you decide to prioritize your case studies. After examining the data, you find that people stay on your site longer and engage with the case studies section a lot more than they did with the services section. 

In turn, you’re able to tell this is important for your customers and that they find case studies valuable. You would then continue to make case studies the focal point of your homepage and place your services in a less prominent area. 

Not only would this influence your homepage design, it could also change your entire marketing campaign. You could, for example, incorporate that approach into your email marketing campaign and sales follow-ups, where instead of providing a one-pager about your services, you could send case studies instead. 

Not only can growth-driven design make your website more effective, you can share the information you obtain with the rest of your organization to help them make better decisions. So when you look at the big picture, growth-driven design is an all-encompassing approach that can make an organization more successful as a whole.

What’s the Quantifiable Impact?

At this point, we know what growth-driven design is, the methodology behind it, and how it differs from traditional web design. But what exactly is its true impact? If you were to implement today, what type of results could you realistically expect?

[bctt tweet=”According to a reputable study, brands that used growth-driven design generated 16.9% more leads after six months.”]

According to a reputable study, brands that used growth-driven design generated 16.9% more leads after six months. By making this fundamental shift in your web design approach, you can expect to bring in nearly 17% more leads in a fairly short time frame. And as long as you continue to make smart iterations as more data becomes available, this is a positive trend that’s likely to continue over time. 

In terms of revenue growth, research found that brands brought in 11.2% more revenue after six months. So as you can see, the impact is quite significant. Results will vary somewhat, but these stats show what brands can expect across the board. 

How Can I Implement Growth-Driven Design?

While the exact approach can differ slightly from brand to brand, there’s a basic three-step process. First, you develop a strategy to gain a deep understanding of your audience, including their pain points, what information they’re looking for, and what the overall customer journey looks like. 

Next, you quickly build a new version of your website that’s better designed and more user-friendly than the one you currently have. This, however, won’t be considered the final product but the foundation of what will be continually optimized over time. 

Third, you accumulate visitor data, which you then analyze and form a hypothesis of what would happen if you made a change. From there, you execute the change and analyze the results. 

Some questions you may ask could include:

• Are we getting more leads? 
• Are visitors engaging more?
• Are visitors spending more time on our site?
• Are we getting more conversions?

As you gain more insights, you can make ongoing improvements to ensure your website hits its mark and fully aligns with user expectations. If you’d like help from a professional to guide you through the process, you may want to consider partnering with a web design company who understands the ins and outs of growth-driven design. 

At 3.7 Designs, we take a results-driven approach to design and marketing rather than a “one-and-done” approach. We focus on a long-term vision where we’ll work with you to create, monitor, analyze, and continually improve your web design to maximize leads and grow your digital presence. 

Final Thoughts

Web design has evolved dramatically in recent years, and it’s clear that the traditional approach of launching a site, letting it sit, then doing a redesign is ineffective for most companies. While it often works initially, the results tend to fall off over time as technology, trends, and user expectations change. 

But by using growth-driven design — an inherently iterative approach — you can make ongoing improvements to your website so that it never gets stale. This, in turn, naturally facilitates continual optimization so that you get the absolute most from your site. 

Want to learn more about how a professional partner can transform your website with growth-driven design? Reach out to 3.7 Designs today.