Why do they fail to convert? It’s mainly because they’re trying too hard to be “hip,” and it just doesn’t look right to the eye. You know a Web Fail.0 site when you see one. It looks like a cartoon with exaggerated images, rounded corners, gradients and 3-D text. It looks amateurish, and doesn’t come across as genuine to the reader. You lose credibility. So, naturally, conversion is poor.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Web 2.0 designs can be done well. However, it takes a gifted designer to pull it off. The key is subtle application of Web 2.0 elements so you don’t notice the design, only the content. But subtle seems so hard to do online. So, we tend to recommend people just stay away from these elements unless their designer is very, very good.

There’s a crisp and clean aspect to good Web 2.0, as well. In fact, that’s one hallmark of what we call Web 2.5, which is where the online world is quickly headed. But for now, here are some ways to save you time and money by avoiding a Web Fail.0 design.

Don’t try so hard.

Be yourself. Create a website that reflects you and your business, not the popular trends. Just because “everyone else” is doing something is sometimes enough reason to run the other way. It’s tempting to use every tool in Photoshop just because it’s easy.  And that’s when you can get into trouble. Just because you can make a gradient button easily doesn’t mean you can do it well. Or that it’s appropriate for your particular site. So, trust your instincts. Just because all the cool kids are using drop shadows, doesn’t mean you have to.

How can you recognize Web 2.0 design?

Here are some of the most blatantly overused elements:

• Rounded corners
• Overly shiny buttons
• Sharp gradient colors that don’t blend
• Big over-simplified icons
• Huge drop shadows creating sloppy 3-D effects
• Giant fonts without appropriate padding
• Diagonal lines in the background

Just get something up there.

All that being said, there is value in just getting it done. Does it seem like you’ve been going round after round with your designers and coders trying to get your site perfect? Stop. The fact is a website isn’t a permanent artifact. It’s fluid. It’s always changing. And you’re going to want to do conversion testing on each page anyway. So, just get it up there. It’s okay if it’s not perfect.

Remember, it’s a website, not your baby.

It’s easy to get emotionally attached to a site design and protect it with every fiber of your being. You vigorously defend everything from the giant goofy social media buttons to the confusing navigation just because you’re too attached to the site. So, take a step back. Why do you even have a website? What is the ultimate goal? It should be to serve your customer better – to make it easy for them to hand you money in return for products or services.

The only one who truly knows whether you should have a button or a link, a larger header or a sidebar is your customer. Testing is the only way to know for sure whether a page converts well or not. And testing is the only way to continually improve conversions.

So take the pressure off yourself. You have enough to worry about. Get some solid advice from a conversion rate expert, make the changes, and then test the results. Keep what works. Toss what doesn’t. There’s no need to get emotionally involved in the final outcome. That’s just added stress. The fact is good ideas fail all the time. Fortunately, there are always more good ideas.

The mindset for each discipline is very different, and it’s highly unusual to find professionals with experience in all three areas – marketing, graphic design and conversion rate optimization (CRO.) But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to find them. Here are a few ways you can tell whether a web designer has a good understanding of Internet marketing and how to build a successful website.

1. How does their design process work? If they explain that you will talk about color schemes and aesthetic details, and they don’t mention traffic generation, copywriters, analytics or they don’t ask questions about the effectiveness of your previous site, they probably don’t give those elements enough importance.  In this case, they are designing the site for you, not for your visitors. They are more concerned about making it pretty than making sales. That may be fine for a hobby blog, but for an ecommerce, lead generation or other business site, it’s not going to be good enough.

Lesson: You are not the client; your customers are. The designer should be asking about target audience, demographics, traffic sources, and your ultimate conversion goals and designing a site that matches what your visitors want to see.

2. Do they use Lorem Ipsum? Lorem ipsum is basically nonsense placeholder text to give you an idea of what the page will look like before the copywriting is finished. If a designer uses lorem ipsum for headlines or body text, they don’t fully understand the importance of words in conjunction with design. The copywriter should be a major part of the design process, both for conversion optimization and traffic generation (no matter if they’re using AdWords, SEO, social media, videos or any other traffic streams.)   The words describing the message are just as important as the visual cues that represent the offer.

Don’t forget the designer can’t work with the copy if they don’t have it. All too often, business owners hire the designer before they even think about the copywriting. It’s wise to make sure you have the copy well underway before you engage the services of a designer. That way there are no delays.

Lesson: Make sure your copywriter and designer are working together to create the best site possible.

3. Are they familiar with the term conversion rate optimization? If so, what is their experience with it? Ask them how they apply it to the design of landing pages and shopping cart checkout pages, especially. If they don’t mention split-testing pages, then they don’t understand true importance of converting random traffic into sales. Too many designers believe their final design is the “perfect” solution to your needs. But the fact is you should constantly be testing new pages against old ones to see which one works best. There’s always room for improvement. Just don’t expect a freelance graphic designer to keep revising your pages for free. Their rates don’t often include creating test pages. Once you have a page that works, you should expect to pay extra to build the new test pages.

Lesson: Split-testing is an integral part of conversion optimization. You can’t do CRO without testing.

4. What is their launch process? Ask them to explain how they launch a new website when there is an existing site already in place. If they don’t mention split-testing the old website vs. the new website, that’s a dead giveaway that they don’t understand conversion rate optimization. Just like testing individual pages, you also want to see which site leads to the best bottom line conversion rate.

Lesson: You should never launch a new site without testing it against the old one. Just because you think it looks better, doesn’t mean it will convert better.

The teams at ConversionCore and ClickCore work side-by-side to build our clients’ websites because we understand good design and good traffic conversion go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. So, before you hire the designer with the flashiest portfolio, make sure you’re getting a site that will perform the way you want it to.

Is your website a funnel or a sieve?

The problem is most websites are more like sieves than funnels, full of tiny holes where traffic can leak out before making it to the final conversion point. So, we continually tweak and optimize every page so that more traffic makes it all the way through the conversion process.

If your website is set up like a funnel, it collects traffic and directs it to a sales page where you hope they convert into a customer. Most e-commerce sites leave it at that. They get the sale and they’re happy. In this scenario, you might get 100 anonymous visitors where 10 of them buy right away and the rest never come back.

But what if you could sell 10 right away and also collect contact information on another 20 and convert them later with follow-up marketing? That’s the beauty of a technique I call the Double Funnel – because if one funnel is good, two is better. What is a double funnel, exactly?

A double funnel is the combination of lead capture and sales.

Imagine two funnels – one on top of the other. The first funnel is designed only for lead capture. You offer the visitor something valuable for free (or very low-cost) in return for their name, email address, and possibly a phone number or mailing address. It could be a webinar, an ebook, a free evaluation, or video series – there’s a whole science to creating an enticing offer for lead generation.

Once they make it through this funnel, you’ve provided value *before* trying to sell them anything. And you’ve captured their contact information. You no longer have random traffic; you have qualified leads.

Then all those leads are directed into a second funnel. That could be a web page, an email autoresponder series, or even a direct mail campaign. This time the conversion goal is probably a sale. But because you have leads, not just nameless traffic, you have two major advantages.

Advantage #1: Increase conversions

People need to know, like and trust you before they will buy from you. And by putting your traffic through the lead funnel first, you’ve had a chance to introduce yourself and provide some value. They are already starting to know, like and trust   you before you make any sales pitches at all. Because of this, you are more likely to convert a higher percentage of your traffic.

Advantage #2: Increase lifetime customer value

You’ve probably heard the saying it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than to get a brand new one.  This is the second advantage to using a Double Funnel. Because you went through the extra effort to collect a lead before trying to sell them, you are able to sell to them over and over again through the months and years to come. They become a loyal customer instead of a one-off visitor to your website.

You increase the lifetime value of each and every customer because you can keep in contact with them and offer them many opportunities to buy from you.

Multiply your ROI

Using a double funnel multiplies your return on investment for any form of advertising you use to send traffic to a landing page, especially pay-per-click advertising. The more you’re paying, the more important it is to capture that person as a lead because your odds of making a sale aren’t limited to a single visit to your site.

If you’re a huge commerce site like Amazon.com, maybe you don’t need to worry about capturing leads and maximizing each visitor. But the large majority of businesses I’ve come across can benefit from using and optimizing the Double Funnel technique in some way.

What is conversion

Conversion is simply the act of moving from one state of being to another. You can have a conversion when you move from wife to mother or student to worker or amateur to professional. In the online marketing world, we’re talking about customers or prospects and their behaviors in relation to your company.

Everyone comes to your site the same – as an anonymous visitor. Then they go through a series of actions (like reading articles, clicking links, watching videos, learning more, etc.) and hopefully a conversion happens. What that conversion is depends on the goal of the page or the site. A conversion happens when the visitor reaches the goal. That could mean

• buying something
• signing up for your list
• calling your office
• downloading a PDF
• clicking through to another page

What is your conversion rate?

Ideally, you want as many visitors as possible to convert. But that rarely happens. Your conversion rate is simply a ratio of how often visitors convert to whatever your goal is – expressed as a percentage.

One page on your site or step in your sales process might have a 1% conversion rate (1 of 100 people reached did what you wanted them to do) and another page might have a 12% conversion rate (12 out of 100 people did what you wanted).  Only you can really judge whether your conversion rate is “good enough.” But in my experience with years of conversion optimization, there’s almost always room for improvement. Most of the time, there’s a lot of room for improvement! And that means you’re leaving money on the table.

Why should you care?

It’s not just data you’re looking at. Your conversion rate is one measure of how successful your business is. How healthy it is, and whether it’s growing or shrinking. You should care about your conversion rates because when you improve it by even 1%, that can mean thousands of dollars in increased revenue without doing any additional marketing or spending extra advertising dollars. It means more money in your pocket.

How can you improve your conversion rate?

It’s simple, in theory. You take an existing web page with a goal. Measure the current conversion rate. Then start making changes to the page you think will boost that conversion rate. Test your theories against the current page using optimization software. If your tweaks convert better – keep them. If they don’t – scrap ‘em.  Then start again.

There are thousands of different variations to test on any particular webpage. Everything is fair game for tweaking – pictures, text, font, design, layout, concept, linking structure – it goes on and on. You could literally tweak and test a single page on your website forever on a never-ending quest for one more percentage point.

But here’s the thing – it’s not the data itself that matters…

It’s the story behind the data that’s most important.

Yes, you can tweak your web pages and test them to see if you get an improvement.  But most do-it-yourselfers (and even a lot of consultants) are just guessing at which elements need to be changed. It’s a crapshoot – and you could wind up hurting more than you’re helping. One wrong step can mean disaster if you’re not interpreting it correctly.

That’s why we take a holistic approach to conversion rate optimization.

Unlike many consultants in the field, ConversionCore looks at your entire business structure, your offline efforts, your traffic generation schemes, your overall marketing strategy – all of it. We get a complete picture behind the data and combine that with our years of experience in testing to bring truly meaningful results.

So, aim for conversion increases that really matter; continued growth that’s sustainable over the long run. You’re going to look so smart. And your competition will have no idea how you’re beating the pants off them month in and month out.

Conversion rate optimization – it’s a beautiful thing!