The Incredible ROI of a Good Design
I presented on one of the Elite Retreat mastermind calls a few weeks ago, and someone asked a question along the lines of what kinds of sites I buy or what I look for in a site. Maybe counter-intuitively, my answer was that I like ugly sites — but ugly sites where the ugly is only skin deep. That’s because you can see a stunning amount of improvement when you put a better face on a site that is otherwise fairly sound fundamentally. It works every time, so it’s an easy way to make money.
I just recently completed another redesign with outstanding results, so I thought it would be a good time not only to talk about how important good design is but to show some real-world stats on what kind of ROI I’m talking about.
Post-Redesign Metrics
The first stat that was important to me was Visits per Registration — that is, how many visits did it take for the site to get a user to register. You can see from this graph that the ratio sometimes approached 400 visits for 1 registration before the redesign rolled out in late March. Then it suddenly plummeted below 100 before leveling off around the 110 range — a huge improvement.
Conversions per Week was the other stat that was critical. A conversion is worth quite a bit for this site, so I wanted to know just how much the redesign was able to move the needle. You can see that the change was significant and immediate. The site went from averaging less than 20 per week to more than 40.
Total ROI
I spent well less than $2,000 on 99designs and have so far reaped improvements approaching $100,000. Nothing else changed other than the design, so that’s a 5,000% ROI — and it gets better every day.
There are few things that will give you a better ROI than giving an ugly site a good facelift.
Matt Ander
July 13, 2009
at 3:31 pm
Great post. I’d love to see the change. So let’s see screenshots on the before and then a link to the after.
Jeremy Zongker
July 13, 2009
at 3:33 pm
Shhh!
Shane
July 13, 2009
at 3:39 pm
I can’t talk about specifics on this particular site yet, but suffice it to say for now that the change was very comparable to when I took Nursing Jobs.org from this to this — though the improvement was probably a little more extreme.
Garrett
July 14, 2009
at 1:44 pm
Good post Shane. I think it’s also worth clarifying that “good design” doesn’t simply mean that the site is merely aesthetically pleasing. You can have an “ugly” site that’s optimized for conversion and it will outperform the “prettier” version w/ poor calls-to-action (for example). I’m guessing that you not only improved the aesthetics of your site, but you probably took a hard look at the conversion funnel and made some important tweaks there as well.
Shane
July 14, 2009
at 2:12 pm
Absolutely, Garrett, and that’s a very important clarification. Great points.
Jeremy L. Knauff
July 15, 2009
at 8:46 am
A good/great design will definitely help by making the site more look appealing and trustworthy, but equally important is solid usability and a call to action.
The 3 Reasons Your Traffic Is Struggling » Ask Shane.org
July 15, 2009
at 9:06 am
[...] Ok, your content is great. Now what? Your site has to look good too. The Craigslists of the world aside, you’re crippling yourself unnecessarily if your site isn’t easy on the eyes and easy to use. Most people won’t hang around to see your inner beauty — your outer appearance has to match or they’ll just click away. Good design can have a stunning ROI. [...]