Affordable Website Design: 4 Case Studies That Prove It Can Get You A High-Converting Website

If you've ever planned a website design, you've asked the question: how much is this going to cost?

And depending on the kind of website you're building, the answers will vary. Some website design projects can cost up to $50,000 or even more, while some can be done for under $10,000. Heck, you can throw up a Wix.com website right now for under $100.

But if you want to invest in a website design that's going to be a strong foundation for your brand, you want to find something in the middle. And in my experience, a lot of brands have successfully implemented an affordable website design that resulted in a high-converting site.

4 Affordable Website Design Case Studies That Demonstrate ROI

At Lean Labs, we build buyer journey websites, which, you guessed it, are built to follow our ideal customer's start-to-finish experience. Price-wise, they typically range between $10k and $30k, depending on what the client needs:

10k is for brands that have already done their strategy and messaging, and are ready for a modular design, coding, polish, launch.

20k includes everything, such as the critical stages of strategy and messaging, which we do using rapid prototypes.

And 30k is a more highly polished version of complete, where we double the budget for messaging and design. These sites are often a good fit for sites with multiple solutions because there are more pages to write and design.

For brands with > 20,000 visits per month and 100+ leads per month, we also do premium work between $50k-$90k.

The lower priced websites are affordable because they’re lean, designed to grow over time. And they're high-converting because we invest so much in messaging and building a killer strategy.

While I’m certainly biased, a few of our case studies best demonstrate the ROI you can expect from a leaner buyer journey site.

Predictive Index

Since our redesign and launch of PredictiveIndex.com, lead generation has gone from 0.6% to 1.9%. But that didn’t happen from just a few design tweaks. To transform the Predictive Index experience, we had to create an entirely new website, so we went back to one critical component: the strategy.

Our strategy has a lot of steps, but two of the most important ones are redoing buyer personas (following our one-page template) and completing a value proposition map exercise.

My favorite aspect of the website strategy process is learning the trigger events and makeshift solutions of the customer through these exercises, which help us create a stronger buyer journey.

In the case of the Predictive Index, we built a buyer journey that transformed the customer experience and made it much easier to understand the value of the predictive index tool.

Integrate

Before the website redesign, Integrate had a pretty good-looking website. However, during the early stages of the design process, what the site was lacking became pretty clear.

"What do they do?" asked Giles, our lead graphic designer, after looking through the site.

The messaging of the site wasn’t clear enough for us to figure out. To create the right messaging, we had to go back and rediscover the customer’s primary problems and pain points. It may sound like generic advice, but it’s the truth.

The fluffy, solution-focused language that a lot of brands have on their websites is ineffective because it feels unnatural and pushy. By starting with pain points and challenges, however, you can create a flow that leads to their solution.

The proof? After launch, the lead conversion rate was up by 81%. And if you count their content campaign launch, lead generation was up 245%.

Atlantech

Now, Atlantech, who provides business-class fiber internet, phone service, and data center services, had a very common problem. They were getting a decent amount of website traffic, around 60% of total traffic, but not a lot of leads.

While this isn’t a website problem, a lot of companies confuse it as a website problem and jump into a redesign.

Instead, they should be investing in a blog content strategy. By producing regular, high-quality content, Atlantech fixed their lead generation problem, increasing their monthly organic traffic by over 1000%.

In just 12 months, they increased their monthly lead generation by 366%. All of this was without spending too much budget on ads.

77 Plastic Surgery

77 Plastic Surgery had the opposite problem then Atlantech. They were getting a steady amount of traffic and leads, but the brand experience left a lot to be desired. As a result, we would focus on getting the branding right with a new buyer journey. We would answer critical questions that customers had about whether or not they should get plastic surgery.

To do this, we built content and website pages to support every buyer journey stage. With a strong offer, a “Beauty for Life” eBook, as well as key pages, such as “Are You a Candidate” assessments, we didn’t focus on selling any website visitor plastic surgery.

We focused on educating incoming site visitors about plastic surgery, helping them decide whether or not they were a fit.

The Key To A High-Converting Website

When it comes to creating a high-converting website, exceptional content and a strong buyer journey are key. However, even if you have those two components, it will be difficult to measure your performance or provide a seamless experience without a great CMS. This is another point of bias since we use HubSpot religiously, but in my experience, it’s the best content management system out there.

If you don’t have HubSpot yet, and you want to learn more about how we use the various tiers to drive results, check out our HubSpot Savings Guide. With our tips, you can also save up to 60% OFF during your first year.