If you were to ask a successful 21st century entrepreneur about the biggest reasons for their business’ success, you would get a range of different answers. From great business development to a strong sales team, first-class marketing, venturing into new markets, knowing their target audience and many others. However, few of them attribute success to design.
While considered by many business owners as something that’s nice to have rather than a crucial part of their marketing strategy, great design matters now more than ever. Here’s how design can directly influence your business growth and improve or damage your bottom line.
Great design impacts growth – rapidly
In today’s web-driven world, most of us look for brands and products online. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, consumers will do some online research before committing to a purchase, giving a chance for companies to make a great first impression.
Depending on your industry, there could be a number of factors you cannot influence, such as Yelp reviews for restaurants or Amazon reviews for products. However, once a potential customer lands on your website, it’s your job to sweep them off their feet.
The good (or bad) news is that design is the first element that will strike your visitors and create a first impression. It’s not the quality of your products or services, your marketing efforts, your content – it’s the design.
In fact, it’s so important that 75% of your users will judge your company’s credibility based on your website design alone. While all the marketers out there know that a 75% conversion rate is science fiction, it’s important to know that design has a huge impact on the actions your website visitors will take.
Check out: How Great Design Powers the Buyer’s Journey
Moreover, great design has instant effects. According to the research, it takes around 50 milliseconds for visitors to decide whether they like your website or not and whether they will bounce immediately or dig deeper into your pages.
As can be seen, a well-designed website can have a rapid impact on how users perceive your brand and what actions they will take once they land on your pages. In a world where many business interactions happen online, this will only become more relevant in the years to come. However, note that design is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your marketing issues.
Check out: All-In-One Website Redesign Guide Beyond 2019
Design = user experience
Great design means a lot more than a website that’s pretty to look at. Remember the days of Flash technology, when websites were easy on the eye, but were slow to load, hard to navigate and completely useless for SEO? More than just a selection of great images, fonts and design elements such as a SEO-optimized WordPress Theme for your website, quality design means great user experience and that translates to business growth. In other words, if your website is easy to navigate, visitors are more likely to go down the path you want them to. By the way, if you still don’t use WordPress for the web-project, move your current website to WordPress in an automated way.
Check out: The Bunch Of Free Web Design Resources
If there’s one thing you don’t want happening, it’s people leaving your website, and user experience is one of the main culprits. According to research, if they can’t find what they were looking for on one site, 79% of visitors will go back to search and visit another website – perhaps of your competitor. Even if your site does offer what they were looking for, if it’s hidden behind poor design, three layers of popups, social media plugins or an unreadable font, you can expect a bounce.
Check out: Best Google Fonts for Blogs
We can’t stress it enough, but mobile is no longer an option when it comes to design and user experience, it’s a necessity. First off, Google has recently rolled out an addition to their algorithm which penalizes websites that are not optimized for mobile. If you’re not mobile-friendly, you won’t be visible in search engines either.
Up until recently, Google only preferred mobile-friendly websites, but the latest changes make this a prerequisite for having any success driving organic visits, since the majority of traffic on Google is coming from mobile nowadays, with tendencies for growth.
It’s not just search engines that love mobile design, humans need mobile design too. The global average for internet traffic from phones comes in at 48.2%, with figures going well over 70% for areas such as the US and Europe.
How bad is it really? Research says that 48% of visitors will feel annoyed if your site is poorly optimized for mobile. Annoyance doesn’t translate that well into cash, so here’s another bit of information: 52% of visitors say that poor mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with your company.
In other words, if your company website is not optimized, you’re missing out on visitors, conversions and ultimately profit – about half of it.
On the other hand, if you’re doing great with your design, visitors will let you know. At Chanty, design is something we’re especially proud of. We’ve been listed as a web design inspiration before, and we’ve gotten emails from visitors praising our homepage and overall design.
Check out: Top 31 Principles of Mobile Website Design
Design can help SEO
No matter your industry or niche, you probably know that SEO should be a major part of your company’s digital marketing approach. While there are a range of factors such as content, links, anchors, site structure (and the aforementioned mobile optimization), design is also a significant factor in your search engine ranking.
Check out: 60+ SEO Statistics to Help You Rank #1 in 2019
Sure, search engines cannot tell whether your site is pretty and make you rank on page 1 based purely on the account of great design. However, they can get lots of insight from things that stem from great design.
First off, there is page load speed as one of the major ranking factors. The average visitor will spend about 15 seconds on your website, and if the majority of that time is spent loading, search engines can tell and knock down your search engine rankings. By using appropriate design elements, you can decrease your site load speed and have lower bounce rates.
Second, there is search intent as the major element in SEO – what the visitor is looking for on Google and whether they will find it easily on your website. For example, someone googling “b2b sales cycle length“ will want to find exactly how long a typical sales cycle is in B2B sales. Great design can help place this information somewhere that’s easy to find, so that your page matches the visitors’ search intent – ultimately helping you rank better.
Finally, there are popups. Love them or hate them, they’ve been proven to work and increase conversions. However, not all popups are created the same, and some may actually hurt your SEO. Although they can be beautifully designed, intrusive pop ups can increase your bounce rates and decrease time spent on page, ultimately hurting your SEO.
Conclusion
Great design is more than an afterthought – it’s a key element of a company’s online presence and marketing. A well-designed website can attract more visitors to your site, encourage them to stay longer, make your brand more trustworthy and convert those visitors into customers.
Olga Mykhoparkina
Chief Marketing Officer
Olga Mykhoparkina is a Chief Marketing Officer at Chanty a simple AI-powered team chat. This powerful and free Slack alternative is aimed to increase team productivity and improve communication at work. Having a 9-year experience in digital marketing field, Olga is responsible for Chanty’s online presence strategy, managing an amazing team of marketing experts and getting things done to change the way teams communicate and collaborate.