The mere suggestion of a website redesign sends business owners and marketing strategists into terrifying thoughts of excruciatingly long development times. Not again!
Apart from taking months to develop, a traditional website redesign can cost you anywhere from $15K to $100K. Not to mention that the updates and tweaks in traditional revamp are not anchored on ongoing analytics but rather based on unrealistic assumptions and outdated data. You also have to deal with the frustration over bugs who emerge out of nowhere and cause trouble a couple of weeks post-launch.
The Benefits of Growth Driven Design
Before you could even finish reading this sentence, your newly-polished website is killing conversion rates rather than resuscitating your dying marketing campaign. In fact, 94 percent of users cited web design as the reason they mistrusted or rejected a website.
Luckily, growth-driven design saves the day!
Growth-Driven Design Demystified
In a nutshell, Growth-driven design (GDD) takes on a more proactive approach to website redesign. It's like giving a flat a makeover based on the existing needs and preferences of the new homeowners instead of what worked before for its former residents.
The beauty of GDD lies in its ability to adapt to your brand's evolving needs and customer preferences, two vital components that traditional web design ignores. Put simply, GDD is the agile alternative to a typical website revamp.
Growth Driven Design: What's In It For My Business?
The Lean Labs team outlines the following game-changing benefits if you adapt to GDD the next time you're considering a website makeover:
Creative and Marketing Team on Demand
Designers are the ones best situated to figure out how a kit of parts can become something more -- they're the ones who can figure out the human interface for a vast chain. With GDD, you have designers, developers, and the rest of our reliable, creative crew for critical updates. Bugs could stealthily appear, or a plugin may scream for an update.
Instead of tweeting that you need help because you're clueless about what's going on, GDD provides continued value through our team who'll back you up after the website launch. This game-changing benefit is heaven sent to a third of marketers who were not satisfied with their last website redesign.
Early Launch with Quick, Hassle-Free Updates
The launchpad website, or the strategic phase of your GDD tactic, will be up in 4 to 8 weeks! In contrast to it's older (and, unfortunately, less results-driven) sibling, GDD builds a system of continuous refinement through quick, hassle-free updates.
Good riddance to days of trying to get in touch with the developer or agency who walked away with hefty cash after the supposedly spankin' new site was handed to you. Nor you have to hire someone for a contract role every time there's something too technical that needs to be done. Once you've shifted into GDD mode, you are now one of the elite and clever 11 percent of business owners who update their website once or twice a week. Or stagnate with the rest who constantly wonder why their flashy website is not doing anything with their conversion rates.
From a Static Online Flyer to a Dynamic Sales Asset
Speaking of conversion rates, the robust and experimental-driven ways of GDD are tools to help skyrocket your customer engagement and conversion. Since you're always testing and adjusting the elements of your website -- from landing pages to your content campaign, the evolving customer needs are taken cared of as well. Buttons that do not deliver are eliminated while a highly successful call-to-action are retained and possibly improved.
GDD could also act as one of the driving force behind your company's growth as you incorporate new products and features. This is a far cry from traditional sites that remain static and resistant to change. Generally, Growth-Driven Design is a traditional website redesign who went to marketing school and learned a new skill: a test-as-you-go mentality! The result is website conversion optimization in real time.
Measurable Results and a Scalable Project Methodology
Standard website redesigns are heavily tied to guesswork. Often, the design team is forced to create a website based on previous outcomes and predictions of what might work in the months ahead. This explains why nearly 4 in 10 businesses that went the traditional web redesign route in the last 18 months did not track nor measure any form of metrics.
On the other hand, GDD measures everything, down to the tiniest detail, through analytics such as user testing, journey maps, and buyer personas.
A great example of this would be converting a piece of text into a clickable link if your findings demonstrate that it leads to more traffic. Why not redirect your users to a link offering more valuable content? The more value you offer, the sooner you can convert your prospects to customers. You track the results and find out if it worked after a couple of weeks. If it's not converting, move on to experiment with another approach. Rinse and repeat!
Cost-Efficiency
As earlier mentioned, a traditional website revamp will cost you $15K to $100K within 3-4 months of development. And there's the additional costs of backups, hosting, and maintenance. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that it will deliver what you expect it to perform. It's like your tossing money out into the void!
A GDD approach, however, doesn't end after the website launch. Your monthly retainer gives you access to developers, copywriters, designers, and branding strategists. First, it cuts down the work that your team are supposed to shoulder. Second, it provides high-priced talent that is more cost-efficient that hiring your own.
If you opt for GDD, the vast majority of launch pad websites take between 4-8 weeks to launch, and will likely cost between $15K to $20K. The cost for the remaining months of fine-tuning your new site will depend on how much effort is required to reach peak site performance and optimize user experience at the same time. By doing so, you have full rein of both the outcomes and costs.
Playing Catch Up is Obsolete
Playing catch up every two, three, or five years with traditional website redesign is outdated; a foolish leap to the unknown. At Lean Labs, the ongoing process of attentive data collection, tweaking, and refinements of GDD is working on our favor as well as for our clients.
Perhaps it's about time you see your website as a valuable marketing asset instead of just another static online platform. For a brand to make it in 2015 and beyond, GDD's test-as-you-go mentality is critical.
