Читать книгу The Conversion Code - Крис Смит - Страница 14

There is a good chance that you have heard (possibly even a nauseating number of times) that “content is king.” What isn't talked about enough, though, is who the queen is. Design is queen.

If you want to attract high-quality leads that are easy to convert, obsess about design.

A design-first mindset is a must when building your website and landing pages (or improving the ones you already have). Why is design so important? Great design builds trust. Trust is why people choose you. Trust is why people send you referrals. Zig Ziglar once said, “If people like you, they'll listen to you. But if they trust you, they'll do business with you.”

Here's what the research tells us about the importance of web design:

 Judgments on a company's credibility are 75% based on the company's website design.¹

 First impressions are 94% design-related.²

 You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression.³

 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.⁴

Years ago, I experienced the immediate impact of better design firsthand. I had spent hours and hours obsessing and working on a website called Tech Savvy Agent. There were many sleepless nights designing, building, and customizing it.

It was terrible. My idea of being creative was going completely against common sense and web standards, like using a black background with teal text. Thank God my content was great, and the web design bar was still so low back then, or no one would have put up with the gaudiness.

Things exploded when I finally swallowed my pride and hired a professional website designer. I paid for a custom WordPress site that cost $5,000. I launched my first professionally designed site in May 2010. Up to that point, I'd never achieved more than 1,000 page views in one day.

The site was beautiful, and the results were instant and dramatic.

On the first day, the new site got three times as many page views as I had ever gotten in a single day. As soon as I saw that 3,000 page views in a day were possible, I immediately set my sights on a bigger goal: 100,000 page views in one month. I knew I had a real shot at it, and I believed I could do it in the first 12 months with the new, professionally designed site.

Imagine my surprise when I achieved that goal in the first 30 days. Once I surrounded my great content with great design, I was on track for over a million page views a year. The ugly duckling had become a swan.

Don't underestimate the value of hiring a professional who does excellent design when building your website and landing pages. When my company (Curaytor) made the Inc. list as the 303rd fastest-growing company in America, I wrote about the seven reasons we made it. Design was on the list.

So, in this chapter I cover the best ways to design websites to capture high-quality leads. In the real world, before you invite family or friends over for a get-together, you clean your house vigorously. Do the same for your website. Before we can send traffic to our website, we need to make sure it will convert.

Sadly, I still see far too many companies that have a website so poorly designed that they are willing to admit they wouldn't even hire themselves based on it.

Almost every business already has a website, so I will start with that. But not before I mention, a critical component of cracking the conversion code is to understand that landing pages perform much better than websites for lead generation.

Ideally, a company will be using both. But if you are reading this and need leads as quickly as possible, landing pages are the better choice. That's why I will cover them in detail in the next chapter.