Your website is one of your organization’s most valuable assets. In fact, your website can be worth up to 36 times the monthly revenue it brings your company. Like any of your other marketing collateral, websites aren’t meant to be stagnant. They change over time, evolving alongside consumer needs and business trends and, as a result, increasing in worth and increasing your company’s revenue.
Because of this, it’s important to make sure you protect your website and grow it. Think of your website as an investment. How will you spend your company’s resources ensuring your website delivers the results you’re seeking? Prioritizing website design is one way to ensure you build a relationship with your target audience, since a staggering 94 percent of web users cite web design as the primary reason they mistrust a website.
If you have spent any time rethinking how your website can yield maximum benefits for your company, you’ve probably wondered whether your focus should be on growth-driven design or conversion rate optimization. Fortunately, when it comes to profitable web design, it’s not just growth driven design (GDD) versus conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO is simply one component of a larger growth-driven design strategy, but GDD has much more to offer than boosting the number of conversions.
CRO: Just One Piece of the Puzzle
Conversion rate optimization is frequently touted as one of the primary benefits of growth-driven design—and for good reason. The truth is, CRO should be a major motivator to rethink your web design strategy. Because GDD allows you to incrementally improve your website based on data analysis and measurement, this approach can ensure your strategies align with your organization’s long-term goals. Through ongoing testing and streamlining user experience, you have a unique opportunity to connect with users in an authentic way. But GDD can yield a number of other big-picture benefits for your organization.
1. GDD sparks momentum
Unlike traditional web design, which can take a long time and endure rounds and rounds of edits before launch, GDD is all about being responsive, which results in momentum for both your site and your business. “With continuous updates, a GDD site is always moving in the right direction and therefore has a much lower chance of becoming stagnant than with traditional design,” says Richard Howe of Colour Rich Creative Web Design. Whether you overhaul the original design after launching or make some small tweaks, GDD gives you the opportunity to be sure your strategies align with your long-term goals at all phases of the website’s life cycle.
2. GDD reduces risk
The ongoing testing involved with GDD may sound burdensome or micromanage-y, but it actually protects your organization from spending money and time on an asset that won’t pay off. “As the approach involves several phases of design and analysis, a less-than-perfect site can be launched initially, and then refined without undoing expensive and time-consuming code,” Howe says. “With each cycle being analyzed before moving into the next phase of work, GDD allows businesses to develop a site that is both manageable and flexible.”
3. GDD is cost-efficient
Let’s face it: Traditional website design is expensive. “A traditional website revamp can cost your company an average of $50-100K at least,” says Cristian Renella from Argentina-based El Mejor Trato. “And then there’s the additional costs of backups, hosting, and maintenance … [and] there’s no guarantee that it will deliver what you expect it to perform. It’s like you’re tossing money out into the void!”
At the end of the process, GDD may not end up being cheaper than a traditional website buildout, but it’s a smarter choice because you’re making data-driven decisions and tweaking a little bit at a time. “A GDD approach does not end after the initial launch. Your monthly retainer gives you ongoing access to talent like copywriters, designers, and developers,” Renella adds.
4. GDD saves time
With a multi-month website buildout and no guarantee of success on the first try, you’re looking at the potential of many more months of cleanup and redesign with traditional web design. On the other hand, most GDD websites take only 60-90 days from the point of initial strategy to building the launchpad website, which will serve as a foundation you build on incrementally. Though you’ll obviously be making ongoing improvements from that point on, you’ll have the peace of mind that your website is always getting better so you can focus your time and energy on other valuable parts of your job.
Why Choose GDD?
When you understand the big-picture benefits of growth-driven design, the “GDD vs. CRO” conundrum becomes a thing of the past. Yes, using growth-driven design to strategically respond to your users’ wants and needs can certainly increase your conversion rate, but there’s far more to this design method than just conversion rate optimization.
GDD is all about strategy—it’s about making sure your website always stays in line with your long-term goals so no time or money is wasted. Growth-driven web design helps ensure you’re always responding to the right problems with the right solutions, which will only benefit your organization in the long haul.
Now that you’ve got a firm grasp on the myriad benefits of GDD, you’re probably thinking about how much it actually costs. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our recent blog post: How Much Does A Website Cost? Rethink Your Budget With Growth-Driven Design.
