Designers versus data more than ever deserves its place in the pantheon of great conflicts: the Hatfields vs. McCoys, Android vs. iOS, Social Media Marketing vs. Results, Athens vs. Sparta, the Doctor vs. Daleks, Auburn vs. Alabama, and Fox News vs. reality.
We make this out to be some great collision of disciplines when in fact they are not opposites and they can and should work together.
Your conversion rate is not what it could be – and you know you need to do something about it. Should you redesign the whole website? Maybe. Probably not though. It depends. But if you are going to do it, you need to tread very lightly. Website redesigns only work if they are carefully managed and data-driven.
Normally, I dig into massive amounts of data, but today, I think we should talk about something that’s a little bit more subjective & open to interpretation – design.
Specifically, your design’s first impression, how long it takes to make that impression, and whether or not that impression is communicating the right things (or anything for that matter) about your brand.
In a 2013 study by eConsultancy & RedEye, surveying almost 1,000 client-side & agency marketers, it was found that 60% found A/B testing to be “quite valuable” to their business.
Yet, only just over a quarter (28%) report being satisfied with their conversion rates.
With product pages, it’s often way too easy to lose sight that the goal is to actually persuade people, and instead, at least from what I can tell on 99% of the eCommerce sites I see, the pages are treated with a very clinical approach.
“Here’s the product sir, I sure do hope you buy it.”
A couple weeks ago, we dug into internal site search & found that in some cases, searches performed by only 10% of the site’s total traffic made up nearly 40% of the companies overall revenue.
Then we went into my 3 favorite methods for increasing conversions by improving the search experience.
But we’ve only just scratched the surface.
Conversions are mostly about being relevant to your customers. If what you offer and the way you present it is relevant to your visitors they will convert to buying customers.
There is one variable that data is not very good at deciphering – the human.
It’s easy to forget when analyzing the data for conversion purposes is that the end-user is a real human with feelings. Data tells us a lot of things, but it is really bad at anything that involves understanding the human condition.
In an ideal world, designers and conversion optimizers can strike the perfect balance between the logical & emotional sides of the human brain & design experiences that engage potential customers and “activate” visitors to take action.
If you’re selling in a competitive market, you must live & die by the little things that make you uniquely different from your competition.
Could you imagine a situation where 72% of your customers think that the content on your site was completely disconnected from what they really wanted?
What if you discovered that only a measly 14% of your customers actually valued a relationship with you and your brand?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but according to recent research done by CEB Marketing, this might just be the case. What’s even more frightening, is how highly marketers (that is you and me) think of themselves.
In the study, marketers believed that 44% of customers valued relationships with brands, and that the majority of their customers wanted to get content that showed how Their products fit into Customers lives.