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Supporting image for How Web Design Impacts Conversion Rates – Ross Davies
How Web Design Impacts Conversion Rates – Ross Davies
The Agents of Change

Creating websites that convert is about more than just aesthetics like colors and fonts – although they certainly play an important role. You can have the slickest looking site around, but if it isn’t easy to navigate or offers too many choices for the user, it’s going to hurt your conversion rate. UX-led design specialist Ross Davis shares his approach to what works when it comes to designing websites with a strategic approach.

Rich: My guest today is the owner of Strafe Creative, a digital design agency focused on conversion led design. Growing up alongside the web – that must’ve been a strange neighborhood – anyway, growing up alongside the web led him to be fascinated by technology and design, yet he started his career as an ergonomics engineer in the automotive industry. The culmination of both his experience and passions led to his realization that his skills were transferable, and thus Strafe Creative was born. Today, we’re going to be looking at how your web design impacts your conversion rate and how to improve it, with Ross Davies. Ross, welcome to the podcast.

Ross: Thank you. That’s quite interesting to live up to, but yeah, that sounded great. So thank you for that really again, thank you for having me on.

Rich: My pleasure. As I mentioned before, really looking forward to this conversation. So I am curious, how did you make the jump from ergonomics engineer to agency owner?

Ross: So when we first started up, so just to, I guess, let everyone understand this. When we first set up, I was very much doing product design and the economic side, and as you’ve mentioned already, a lot of cars and vans, and specialist vehicles is what we got involved in. And in the UK where I am, I think yours is called like Shark Tank, but our version of that was Dragon’s Den. And at the time when we said just before we set the business up, it was really big that people would come up with this cool product and then you would figure out how you could make it and go on Dragon’s Den, and you try get loans and investment and make a lot of money.

So me and a friend of mine decided he had expertise in like web and branding and graphics and stuff like that. And we had decided that our USP to be a little bit different was going to be that not only could you come to our agency, and we could design the item that you wanted, but also, we could brand it and we could do the web and we could give you the actual kind of full package. Which is most product design agencies at the time were very focused on just that one element, just design the product.

And then over time, what we realized is as we started to do some of this web and some of the brand work that was coming in, my skillset and I guess the way I viewed design, could be taken into account from a user journey on a digital aspect. And actually after about two years, we decided to stop with product design altogether. We became focused very much on that kind of digital platform and just realized over time that my skill set really lent itself to that sort of side. And that’s a quick overview of where we went from to how we got to where we are.

Rich: Awesome. And it’s my understanding that both your Dragon’s Den as well as my Shark Tank – which I absolutely love and actually just had a client on – but it’s actually, yours is more close to the original. Because the original is a Japanese show, same idea, and it was called something like Dragon’s Den, loosely translated. I guess they thought Americans would be more attuned with sharks than dragons. I don’t know. Because we don’t really have dragons in our history, where in the UK you do. And we have shark week, which is apparently a national holiday now in the U.S.

Ross: That’s a national holiday. I don’t really know a dragon. Honestly, it’s one of those things, since you just said out loud. It’s just I’ve just always accepted that it was the Dragon’s Den and they’re the dragons. And that I’ve always taken it in my head as it was scary to enter, and those were just the dragons that you had to speak to. But I don’t actually know. I’m gonna have to look that up after this call.

Rich: So back to what we were originally talking about. When I think about conversion rate optimization as an exercise, I often think about how can we remove friction from the experience. So I feel, and I guess you answered this already, but do you feel like there were lessons that you learned that you brought over from being an ergonomics engineer, or is that maybe just too big a stretch?

Ross: I think the standard way that people do conversion rate optimization at the moment, not to say at the moment, but a lot of people do is you focus on lots of small individual things, right? So like let’s change the color of a button, and let’s change the text, and then let’s change some of these items here. Whereas I think coming from the background I had, a lot of it is more about doing the initial research, coming up with a theory, and then testing that theory. So that’s known as like a Bayesian approach, with the idea that you might come up with a particular, you might learn something from doing a lot of research and you go, oh, I never even considered that. Why don’t we add something onto the site to see if that basically answers someone’s potential objections, and then they’re more likely to get in touch or buy the thing or do the thing that we want them to do. So I think it’s that overall approach that we take right at the beginning with our research, what we call ‘objection hunting’ is what really defines us.

Rich: Awesome. All right. Now obviously everybody wants a high converting website. So where does conversion come into the conversation when it comes to web design?

Ross: For me, it should be one of the very first things that we ask. So one of our very first questions that we would always ask is like, what is the purpose? So, what is the purpose of the site? What do we want the user to do? And if we can really understand and define what that is, and really drill that down, too often, that’s a little bit muddy, it’s a little bit gray. And an example of that might be that you might have a service-based business, and someone might just say, “Oh, well, I just want them to get in touch.” And it’s like, well, they could pick up the phone, they could fill in the form, they could grab an email address, they could use live chat. All four of those are technically getting in touch. But for me, if we can define one exact way that we want that user to get in touch, we can design and push the user to always interact with the site in that particular way. So really understanding what that purpose is going to be is by far the most important thing that we would say all the design decisions should be made on.

And then the other part of that is having a set purpose. So yeah, it’d be great if everyone came on your site instantly and just went, “This is brilliant. I’m going to give them all my money.” But we know that’s not going to happen. So having something to fall back on, whether that’s a newsletter sign up or something, a download, or some form or way of raising their hand to share that as a potential bit of interest is going to be really key. Because even if a user is potentially interested in buying, there’s 101 reasons they can’t buy there and then on that day. So having that purpose and sole purpose for me, is critical before we really even consider what we’re going to do from a web point of view.

Rich: Okay. So having that primary purpose and then maybe a secondary purpose teed, getting those right out of the way. How much does our intended audience impact design, and how specific should we be about that audience as we start to think about design and conversion?

Ross: Yeah, really good question. I think it’s really important to know the target market, and these are sweeping statements, right? So like you have to do some of this with a pinch of salt, but then we’ll have different demographics and different countries that will use technology in different ways. And they’ll even navigate sites in different ways. So we generally find an older demographic. Well, we use a lot of the main menu, and they’ll navigate a site based on what they’ve grown up with. So they’re used to clicking, using a cursor clicking around. And even though there’ll be used to having a mobile or a tablet, that they’re ingrained in them to that they’re going to interact with the site. A slightly younger demographic is far more likely to scroll down the page, completely ignore a menu system, and is going to basically find their way through the site based on interacting with the elements of the page that appear to them. So there’s some, I guess, slightly sweeping statements there on that. But those two are some of the major elements.

And then you’ve just got to consider what is the demographic and where they come from. So are they mainly going to be on mobile or tablet or desktop and designing for that one first. I think when mobile first came along, I remember when it came in and actually it wasn’t that long ago, but you know, we always designed desktop first and then you just made it look okay on mobile. Whereas nowadays that’s just not a thing, right? Like we have to make the mobile version, if anything, the more prominent option. Depending obviously, some of these again, sweeping statements based on industry. But for some of them, that mobile experience is going to be far more important. So having a really thorough kind of persona nailed on what type of person that’s going to be, what their age is, how they interact with technology, what they do, how they work, is really key first to design so it’s going to be high converting. It obviously becomes more difficult when you have a huge audience of people coming to your site.

Rich: Absolutely. It is interesting you bring up this thing about mobile, because I think our agency work the same way. Where we would originally just dumb down a website enough for mobile, where now it is much more likely that we’re designing mobile first, and then figuring out how we might be able to enhance it for desktop if that’s the situation. I have seen certain things from mobile creep in to influence desktop design. Some of which I think is great, like more of a single column approach and not necessarily a fixed width but something that’s a little bit easier for the eye to scan. But at the same time, I’ve also noticed that some people on desktop are eschewing a traditional navigation in favor for three-lined hamburger menu. Which personally I can’t stand on a desktop, because we’ve got all that space why aren’t we using it. Just out of curiosity, do you have any thoughts on the hamburger menu on a desktop design?

Ross: So we know, and I’m going to shoot myself in the foot here, so I’ll be there’s warnings instantly as I say this. But we know from a conversion point of view that desktops convert better when the menu is completely on show.

Rich: Maybe not a hamburger, but the whole traditional menu. Yeah. Okay.

Ross: Yeah. Like it’s just proven, and there’s loads of articles and stuff that you can read on it, but we’ve proven it time and time again that if someone’s got a burger menu and then they change it to that, that it makes a huge difference.

Now the reason I joke that I shoot myself in the foot with it is, our current site, we’re actually changing ours, but we made probably the wrong design decision because we wanted to keep the site super clean that we went with a burger menu on our desktop. And actually we’re just in the process of changing it back to a main one. But again, it’s one of those things that we’ve proven. And actually one of the first things we did as a quick fix, was we put in a call button right next to the burger menu so that people had a call to action to click on straight away if they needed to.

But yeah, it’s proven time and time again, that actually having the main menu there on the desktop, easy to interact with. And also sticky, scrolling down, always on show when you’re scrolling down the pages is pretty important to conversion rate because it’s a split-second decision for someone to go, okay, I want to change page, I want to go here, or actually I want to head to the contact page.

Rich: That’s good advice. We’ve been talking about, I think in my mind at least, a lot of lead gen websites. And I’m wondering if there’s a fundamental difference in designing for lead gen websites versus e-commerce websites when it comes to conversion?

Ross: Yeah. So e-commerce is far more transactional, right? So there’s going to be in theory, well there’s definitely gonna be a cost attached to this. Whereas potentially lead gen, it’s more of a case of you just need to do enough to convince them to get your email address off them. Now, interestingly, depending on the demographics, some people are far more likely to throw money at something and not think a second of it compared to potentially giving you my email address. But fundamentally from a transactional point of view in e-commerce, there’s normally more that needs to be done. So we normally need to potentially answer objections, whether that’s through social proofing, to show that lots of people that bought this, we might need to build some credibility. Having some basic competitor analysis to talk about why your product is better than another product, I think, is a really good thing, and a lot of people shy away from. I think people are too concerned with, well, we don’t just tell them who our competitors are. It’s almost better to go, here’s our competitors and this is why we’re better than them.

And then the other reasons are there’s going to be set reasons, especially with a product, why people might want to buy something. And this is what I spoke about with kind of that initial objection hunting. And I can give some examples later if you want me to, but really understanding the potential reasons why someone might not be quite ready to buy or what their concerns are in not buying, is a really important thing to answer on e-commerce.

Now lead gen, I think, is slightly different on the basis of you just need to build enough credibility for them to potentially give you their email address to have a follow-up. Now some of it from an e-commerce perspective is still going to be key, right? So if we can get any social proofing and not only just in the number of people bought from you, but the fact that you’ve been there and done that is going to be really key. And I guess when I’m referring to lead gen, I’m referring to you’ve got a free download that you might want to give someone in exchange for their email address. I will always show a little bit of the background of what people are potentially going to get the hands on. And if we can have any testimonials as well, that’s going to be really key.

And the really obvious one that gets usually overlooked is like, make the form easy to fill in. If you only need their email address, just ask them for their email address. We don’t need their first name, their second name, their phone number, their address. The more things we put in the form, the less likely they are to fill it in. So there’s a delicate balance between how much information we take off them, but you want to have something for your sales pipeline to follow them up with. But personally, the less that we can get away with asking the better.

Rich: I absolutely agree with that, with one caveat. So years ago I said, oh, you know what? Get the contact forms like filled out even more easy. Let’s just put them on the bottom of every single page. And like you said, strip it down to only what I need to get back in touch with them. And the number of contact forms filled out we had was through the roof. But unfortunately, they were crap. So what we ended up doing is making it a little bit more difficult for them to fill out those contact forms to find that right level of friction. So like the people who were never going to be a good fit for us probably said like, eh, it’s not worth it. But people who would actually need our level of service, they would fill out the form. And so that’s just the only thing that I’d say. Because I agree, most websites, even on email newsletters, they require so many things. I’m like, you just want to send them free marketing material, why are you asking them so much information?

Ross: It is a really key one. Right? And just to continue on that, we used to get way more leads through our project partner, which is the main kind of purpose that we have in our site to fill in this form. But what we’ve now done is we’ve added in a budget option, and then we’ve assigned different budget options. Because the huge benefit of that is, yes, it reduces the number of people that come in. But as soon as you click that drop down, you can see where our budgets start from. Because we used to get loads of people who would come in, “I’ve got 500 pounds.”  

Rich: This phone call is worth more than 500 pounds.

Ross: So, and that sounds harsh, but you’ve got to really look after your own time. So yeah, just to continue to what you’re saying, that there’s definitely this balance between it. But generally what we find with current customers is they just go in with wanting to issue information, and there’s definitely, as you’ve mentioned, it’s all about balance.

Rich: And then not to spiral off in a completely different direction, but when you do things like you’ve got your prices in there, like is your range between – and I think like 1,000 pounds and 5,000 pounds or 5,000 pounds and 50,000 pounds – you can actually start to use anchoring. So all of a sudden you start to get them to realize, “Oh, this is actually a pretty big investment, I’m not ready to spend a hundred thousand pounds.” But sure. Now suddenly 10,000 pounds seems really affordable for this project. But that’s a conversation for another time.

Ross: Yeah, we’ve gone off now. We can do that another day.

Rich: Let’s come back, because I did want to ask you about objection hunting. You mentioned it a couple of times, give us a definition of what it is and then how you build it into your websites.

Ross: Yeah. So first off, I’ve got a blog on our site that actually just completely and utterly breaks down exactly how we do this. So I’ll make sure to send that over so that you can include that. But in a nutshell, it’s about researching and understanding the softer reasons why people aren’t ready to buy or not quite ready to buy from you. So, yeah, we automatically presume that the reason people won’t just buy from you is, there’s some of the reasons I’ve already mentioned, right. Which is like, oh, we’re not credible enough. Or we don’t have the right service. We’ve not got enough testimonials. But actually, there’ll be thousands of reasons why.

One of the examples I know we briefly mentioned before was we worked with a company that teaches people to become electricians. And these are like 10,000 pounds for you to learn to do this course over like a two- or three-month period. So originally on their site they’re very much focused on, okay, well, let’s just talk about how good we are, how many people go through the success rate, and let’s talk about how many people get the job, and let’s make sure we’ve got testimonials on that. And that’s all really important stuff. But one of the things we found when we were looking on electrician’s forums, it’s actually loads of people were asking things such as, “If I’m there every day for two months, it’s going to be expensive after I buy lunch every day. So is there a cafeteria or some fridges where I can take my food and put it in there?” “And actually if I’ve got to drive there every single day, that could also get quite expensive. So are there some really cheap hotels where I could just stay there?” Or, “How close is the train station? Is there parking that’s on site for me to get?” And it might be standard in the U.S. for that, but it’s pretty common that we won’t have any parking in the UK for certain things. So, how close to the parking, how much has the parking going to be?

Now, these are all softer reasons that really have absolutely nothing to do with how good this company is to teach people to become an electrician, but more than doubled the conversion rate when these got added into the site. And these are the sort of differences that once you start to look at, okay, well actually, yes, the user’s going to value the quality of how good you are, but what are the other potential reasons? And this is what I talk about with objection hunting. And this one goes back to, I guess, what my initial kind of work was all about was doing that initial research upfront allows us to plan our websites out so that we can answer those objections as the users navigate through the site.

Rich: Do you find that some of your clients have already done this research and really understand their business, and other clients it feels like they’ve never thought about their business at all and you’re doing a lot of the research for them? We don’t have to name names.

Ross: Okay. Yeah. Not going to point fingers or anything. Yeah. It varies hugely. Some people know exactly what it is. And even some of the biggest companies weren’t necessarily thought of some of those potential softer reasons. We work with a very large conference center in London, and they’ve been going a very long time and have got some really big clients to work with there. But even just then it was doing some of that objection hunting, we were able to point out some of the things that they’d never even considered. So it does happen. But yeah, I would say it’s more common that people haven’t thought about any of those, and we have to do a lot of that research stage ourselves at the start of the project.

Rich: Yeah. Interestingly, or coincidentally, just the other day I went to Reddit because we had a client and they were trying to figure out, they hadn’t really addressed or talked about any of the pain points that their ideal customer had, just about why their product was so fantastic. I found a couple of groups in Reddit where people were really discussing how difficult this had been on them. And we ended up adding a lot of those elements to the landing pages. So it makes a lot of sense to do that research.

Ross: That’s a really great example.

Rich: So thinking about conversion, how does the site map and wire frame weigh in? And I’m just, I’d love to also get your definition of ‘site map’ and ‘wire frames’. Because I think sometimes it varies between agencies or between what we think and what a client thinks.

Ross: Yeah, I was going to say probably now, it’s just agencies I think we all do it slightly differently. So the way that we approach it is, site map for us is a flow chart about how people are going to navigate around the site. The way that we would normally do it is we would do a master one, which is just trying to figure out, let’s just say they’re coming from the homepage and just a basic version of how they’re going to flow around the entire site and move it into each area. So we would always do that to start with.

We would then normally break that down so if there’s any more slightly complex areas. So for example, if there’s going to be an onboarding process that will then also do a far more detailed version of those, and we’ll break those down so people can see. And those user flows, we’ll plan out okay, what happens if they don’t know they entered the wrong password? What happens if they don’t have their [inaudible] if they get blocked, what happens if they sign in with an older password they don’t have any more? So you try and think through all of those variations. And we would do that in user flow stage, but only for some of the really key areas.

And then wireframing actually, there’s a step between that for us. We then have a step called section breakdowns and that’s where we try to breakdown exactly what’s going to go into each individual page and that’s just in text, right. So we might figure out, for example, if you take one of our agency sites we might decide, okay, on the homepage is it more important to talk about the services quickly or is it more important to showcase our portfolio? So we would figure that out first as a section.

And then when we do a wireframe, there’s obviously different ways everyone does this. There’s what is called low, fine, like mid and high fidelity. And those are all down to how complex you flesh those wire frames outright. And I’d say as a standard we go somewhere between that mid to high. So we’re thinking through the overall layouts of the page and trying to make sure that the overall UX and experience on the site is really good. But we’re not going to be inserting any imagery and we’re just going to put like an icon to represent there’s going to be imagery in that place. And that is a really hard one. If a company has come along that’s never really had that before, they sometimes think that, oh, well, that’s how the site’s going to look. And you have this kind of. Just focus on the user experience, focus on how easy it is to navigate. Don’t focus on the aesthetics of it at the moment. And I think that’s a really key one. So that’s how we break it down. But you know, there’s lots of agencies and as do it completely differently and yeah, I bet yours is different as well.

Rich: So people don’t usually think about copy when it comes to design, but obviously it impacts conversion rate. How do you approach copy when it comes to the design?

Ross: Right at the start we try and force issue of it should always be involved. If we can get them involved nice and early, that’s going to make life much easier. Especially if once we’ve done the wire frames, at that point of wire frame, we’re also planning out how much content is going to be in each individual block. So we need to know that’s going to be enough for them to write about what they want to write about. And if they’ve got any thoughts on how that should be done, we need to consider that. For example, they might be like, well, it’d be much better to have bullet points to get these features across rather than large blocks of text. So that’s the earlier the better for me.

And then normally once the wire frame is done, it’s at that point where we normally want the copywriter to start getting really heavily involved in interviewing the client and any of their staff and trying to call some of that text. So that as we’re working through and we’re going to drop that into our design, we’ve already got a good idea of what that’s going to be.

So for me, copy is really important. And unfortunately, it does get overlooked. Because we all think that we can write, so we go, well, I can save a little bit of money there and actually a four- or five-line header that’s written by a copywriter could make a huge difference to somebody that you just written. And I think it sometimes gets overlooked unfortunately.

Rich: Well not only that, the conversation I will often have with people is like, “Hey, you’re a lawyer and you charge $450 an hour, and you’re going to need to take a week to write 10 pages of copy. So that’s like, do the math. And then $3,000 for a copywriter to write all your copy for you. And they’re professional at this. Like, does it even make sense?” Like why are we even having this discussion kind of a thing? Absolutely.

Well, talk to me about copy segueing into fonts. Do you have any philosophy about fonts that we should be using, or size of fonts, or anything else when it comes to just the idea of conversion rate and just making this as frictionless as possible?

Ross: So I guess font is going to be down to the overall brand, right? So we want the overall brand, I would be tempted to, I don’t mean to purposely word this into branding a little bit more, but it’s the overall aesthetic and feel that someone gets when they land on the site. And font is a really key part of that. So if we’re starting to use typography that doesn’t necessarily tie in with your appearance, so there’s cheaper looking fonts and there’s more expensive feeling funds as well. And if your brand is very expensive and you’re not using the right type of font, that can make a huge difference. There are fonts that I guess, just as a standard, we try to avoid using just because they’re horrible.

Rich: Comic Sans, perhaps?

Ross: There you go. That’s one. Right. And actually there’s like a common joke around that. Whenever it’s the designer’s birthdays, there’s always a comic sans-based birthday card that goes round. So yeah, there’s things like that. And those, in theory, have that place. But I’ve never personally come across a point where those fonts work better than another well-thought-through fonts that you might include instead. But I think a lot of it comes down to the overall aesthetic and brand of how you’re trying to come across. Because you need to make sure that everything on your site does take that into account.

Now, the last part of that is, it depends on the country that you’re working with and their internet connections. Because if you’re going with a country or an area which has naturally a much lower speed, you probably want to use a more standard font that’s already installed on people’s computers, because they didn’t have to download that. So something like an Arial or Times New Roman just naturally means that they’re going to be loaded in much quicker. And if you do have any of those people they’re trying to hit, that is something to consider.

You also sometimes have to consider that, I don’t know how it works necessarily in America, but the NHS that we have here, the computers that they’re running, they’re probably 10 years old and they’re probably really very old iOS systems. So when we’ve designed for those in the past, because we know they’re going to be used heavily internally, you end up having to hugely simplify on options and even just how you design.

Rich: All right. And obviously color is a big branding issue, too. But outside of branding, do you have any thoughts about using one color for all of your buttons and all of your links, or is it a little bit more flexible than that?

Ross: Yeah. So color theory and color hierarchy is really important, and there’s two different parts of that. So for us, we would normally have two or three variations on the button. So we might have one major button, which we would refer to as like the ‘call to action’, the thing that we want to interact with. as in the most important thing on our page to interact, where it’s probably going to have a defined color that should only be used for that starter button.

And then you’d want to have a secondary and the tertiary option because we might just need some internal links, and that’s where the secondary one comes in. And you might just have a tertiary so that we’ve got some slight variety. But we probably don’t want any more of that. So any more than three, personally anyway, button hierarchy options, and that makes it really clear to the user that for example, the green button is the main one that we want to use it to push, the blue button is the other one. And the tertiary is a, I don’t know, a white button with a blue outline on it to see that you’ve got some slight variety to your design, depending on the background color that you’ve got. So from that point of view, that’s how we would normally do that.

And then from a color point of view, from contrast, there’s no hard and set rules. So, some of the stuff that you might read is they go, oh, well use a green button because it’s a positive color so it’s more likely to be clicked. And I personally don’t have any agreement with that. And if you read websites like the Baymont Institute, which is a big conversion based Institute that does reports on conversion rates for e-commerce, it’s generally kind of disproven that it’s not necessarily the color, it’s more the contrast level and how it stands out on the page compared to the rest of it.

Now that doesn’t mean that you just want to put up red or a bright yellow button on it. You still have to make sure that it is in keeping with the rest of the site and the brands, so it doesn’t look horrible. But there’s a definite way that you can just take into account that, if there’s something that you want to draw attention to, we do want to make sure that stands out a bit. And as long as it’s on brand and it’s not too garish, then happy days. But it’s a really delicate balance because if you don’t add enough contrast, your eye isn’t drawn to it at all.

Rich: All right. Many business owners will be disappointed to hear this, but often we launch a website and it’s not perfect. It doesn’t have the highest possible conversion rates of all times. So what kind of after launch testing can we do, and then what kind of changes might we run to continually improve the conversion rates?

Ross: It’s the easiest ones to start with, right. If I’m the user and I don’t want to go back to my agency so I want to try do some of these myself is, I probably want to be monitoring what pages are coming in at, and maybe looking at some of that initial messaging to see if we’re losing them.

It might be that they’re not getting to the area of the side that we want to get into. So do we need to change some of the buttons to push through to those areas a little bit quicker? So the overall kind of content, I would say, it’s not a case of just, oh well, let’s just tweak the content on the homepage because we might find that’s not where people are starting. So having an understanding of that I think is going to be really key.

And then another simple one is just tweaking that menu. You’ll be able to do that in most content management systems. Is it something that isn’t standing out? Is it down to the language in the menu? Do we need to remove some of the options? And again, I’m sure you have this where clients want every single menu option and see you’ve got like 20 different things, which you’re trying to argue the point of why you don’t need those. So either removing or tweaking the menu is a fairly simple one to start with. And it might just be that you’ve launched the site thinking that the thing that you are offering as a lead magnet is really good, is actually pretty rubbish. So do we need to change that, and do we need to change the offering that was done on that? And that might be as simple as actually to start with, you just change the ways it’s advertised. And then you might need to do a rewrite on it afterwards. But I think probably anything outside of that, you’d probably want to go to agency normally, but those are definitely some quick wins that you’d be able to do fairly quickly.

And then the last thing I would just highlight, and that is you need that traffic to be coming to the site. So if you’ve only got 50 people coming to your website every day lets say, and then you’re worried that the site hasn’t got sales after two weeks, you probably need to leave it a little bit longer before you start tweaking and changing stuff. Because you just don’t have enough people coming to your site to know if it’s right yet.

Rich: All right. So get more data points. Ross, this has been excellent. Very informative. If people want to learn more about Strafe Creative, more about you, where can we send them?

Ross: Yeah. So if you come to strafecreative.co.uk that’s probably our main site. If you head to our project planner and fill that in and reference that you’ve heard of us from this podcast and you want a free conversion audit, we will get one of the guys to do like a quick video explaining some ideas that we might be tempted to look on your own sites. So that’s there as an option. And then probably the next best one is @Ross_Davis on Twitter. And that’s what I’m under.

Rich: Excellent. We’ll have of all those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise today.

Ross: Thank you so much for having me, it’s been a joy. So, have a great day.

Show Notes: 

Ross Davies and his team at Strafe Creative make it their mission to design and build not just websites, but digital experiences, that also convert for their clients.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 20+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.