Design is something everyone has an opinion on but honestly maybe they shouldn’t. The only people that should be directing design decisions are not art directors, designers, project managers, vice presidents or CEOs. The only group of people that should ever be taken seriously when a design decision is in question are the customers of that website. After all those are the people that are buying your products or generating your sales leads not the vice president of widget operations.

All web design should be centered on your unique customers needs, tested and optimized over time.

Unfortunately most companies don’t operate this way and unconsciously decide to collectively argue and spend an unreasonable amount of time on designing their website home page, usually through a large committee with members from each product division. If this describes your company, you are in serious trouble.

If the self appointed web committee or even worse, company appointed web committee stop with their input on the home page design you can consider your company to not only be officially in severe trouble but also on it’s way down a slippery slope with no end in sight because it’s clear they just aren’t seeing the website as a marketing tool like sales or a vital pillar in their business like management.

It continues to make us upset that most companies never ask the simple question of, what are you trying to accomplish with your website? How can you use your website to achieve your organizational objectives? How can your site increase sales, generate leads, reduce support costs or increase the loyalty of your customers?

Most web design projects are prioritized around the home page as the main focus, then category pages followed by detail pages, landing pages and finally form and checkout pages. Generally the higher the page in the site hierarchy the more attention it gets. When you stop to think for a second this makes no sense and is actually very bad business. If you view any site from ROI potential the list of how web projects should be prioritized is completely flipped upside down. Your website form and checkout pages are actually the most important followed by landing pages, detail pages, category level pages and finally home pages. The deeper a visitor is into your web site the more return potential there is for the company. Why then do companies get caught up in ego and design input around the home page when the lesser thought about pages are really what defines success for the company?

Quite seriously the best book ever written on the science of persuasion. This book is essential for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing and selling both online and off.

I’d like to also share a great video that was posted on www.captology.tv showing how LinkedIn leveraged several persuasive principal outlined in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion on the web.

If you’re not using web analytics to continuously learn and improve your website’s marketing results you’re marketing with a bag over your head.

The problem with analytics in most companies is that they don’t know what to do with all the data they can pull from the plethora of robust web analytics vendors on the market.

Where should online marketers start? Page views, unique visitors, leads, top exit pages, etc. it can all be overwhelming and daunting just to stay on top of and report much less use all of that information to improve your marketing results and be the superstar of the next Monday morning meeting.

The data in and of itself is useless, unless you:

1. Establish Key Performance Indicators that are aligned with your unique business bottom line goals.
2. Have a plan to produce measurable results from your web analytics.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) allow you to see at a glance the current state of your web site as it relates to your specific business. Each business is different and requires a unique set of KPI’s that are relevant to achieving the business objectives you’re accountable for.

Your KPI’s are directly tied to a continuous improvement process. The measurement of your desired results against current conditions and changing the direction of ebbs and flows over time to increase your results is what the continuous improvement process is all about. Success in optimizing your web site is based on incremental and constant improvements. A website, unlike print collateral is never really finished. Web design is organic and flows back and forth constantly improving and learning from your unique visitors.

The combination of web analytics and persuasive web design is where measurable results are formed. Persuasive web design guides users, influences human behavior and motivates your visitors to take action that is measurable through web analytics.

Persuasive design is both visual and verbal. Visual persuasion successfully guides your visitors through your site by using persuasive principals to compel visitors to take more action more often. Some ways visual persuasion accomplishes this is by removing roadblocks, improving visual communication and enhancing the usability of your site resulting in a better user experience with your company brand and your website.
Verbal persuasion provides the right content at the right time in the right way to effectively encourage visitors to take action on your site. Content on your site designed around a persuasive path touches on a visual mental image within the imagination of your prospects. Compelling verbs, attention-grabbing nouns and spell binding adjectives will pull your readers through a persuasive pathway, at each step bringing them closer to closing the action that meets your business goals.

Debriefing as defined by Wikipedia is a one-time, semi-structured conversation with an individual who has just experienced a stressful or traumatic event. In most cases, the purpose of debriefing is to reduce any possibility of psychological harm by informing people about their experience or allowing them to talk about it.

What can Design and Marketing Learn from The Military?
OK. It’s obvious how that relates to the military but how can we as marketers use debriefing? Although most marketing campaigns and some work environments can certainly seem stressful and traumatic and after a long 9-5 workday, psychological harm is often reduced by telling our spouse about our rough day. Does debriefing really have a place anywhere else outside of the diner table?

With ROI on the tip of everyone’s mind and accountability at an all time high, debriefing needs to become standard practice at work not just at the diner table the over lunch with coworkers.
A debriefing evaluation needs to be a part of the design process. Design and Marketing is not a pass-fail event, we need to learn from success and failure. The military has know this for years and it’s time agencies and design firms stepped up and followed the same system.

We’ve Got to Work Together for Improved Results
Debriefing is nothing more than evaluating and testing our creative and the results generated. The secret to any successful marketing effort is test, test, test. If we keep switching agencies and chief marketing officers we create an environment where everyone becomes afraid of making a mistake much less learning from our mistakes and improving. Creativity and success thrives in a culture where mistakes are not seen as a bad thing but as an opportunity to learn and grow.

In order for a debriefing environment to work agencies need to partner with clients and clients need to work cooperatively and creatively with their agencies. Both the client and the agency needs to accept responsibility for improvement and continuous learning.

There was an article recently in USA today about value based pricing structures for agencies. The article talks about several potential solutions, from flat fee pricing to performance based pricing. It reminded me of a discussion that was started in the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast by Mitch Joel a few months ago.

There is no question that the current pricing structure between client and agency is broken. A time based price structure and a 30 percent markup is a disservice to both agencies and clients. 30 percent markups make agencies no more than retail middlemen. Fees based on hours puts creative, both design and strategy on the same level as a mechanic. The current state of the industry pricing structure downplays creativity and ideas. Ideas are what clients are going to agencies for, why then do agencies give them away for free and charge based on markups and time? Is a an idea that took forty hours to come up with any more valuable than one that took only 10 hours?

I believe a performance based price structure that is based on value would be best for both client and agency. However, to accomplish this type of pricing a true partnership based on trust and common goals would need to be established. I’m not quite sure if clients or agencies are ready for that level of commitment and trust although I believe that is where the industry needs to go to elevate ideas and creative strategy to where they deserve to be. Giving away ideas for free and just charging based on time and markups devalues the big idea and the industry as a whole.

Do all customers have the same value? Sure everyone’s money may be good inside of an ecommerce shopping cart but are some customers more equal than others?
It would certainly seem every customer is equal on the web right? After all we’re all hiding behind a few mouse clicks. Just imagine what it would be like if marketers knew that some customers were more valuable than others. Now of course we all know that it takes less marketing dollars and less effort to increase sales for existing customers than it does to get new customers but what if the value of each customer was dynamic and it changed all the time.

Well actually it does if you think of it in terms of a buying funnel.
1. Need - the process by which a need is determined and identified.
2. Awareness - determining what solution will satisfy the need.
3. Research / Consideration - gathering of information to proceed with a purchase. Determining which solution will best meet the requirements and satisfy the need.
4. Decision - finalizing the details, including pricing and solution support.
5. Rationalization - qualifying the purchase after the fact. Was the correct choice made in the selection process?

The further a customer goes down the funnel the more valuable they become because they are getting closer and closer to a purchase. The size of a market segment further down the funnel is much smaller however but the value is much greater. Media buyers have always based campaigns on the size of the segment, how many eyeballs see an ad, and online media has been guilty of this as well. There is been a marketing allure to 435,000 views but what does that really mean to marketers? If only 100 people walked through your door and all them bought, signed up, converted, etc. isn’t that better than 1000 people showing up and 999 of those people leaving after hearing your offer? If this is the case it’s just a matter of finding the right people or attracting them.

Before a potential customer enters the funnel they are not interested or they don’t even know they need for your product. Marketing has handled this in a traditional approaching through mass media. At this stage the value of the customer to the retailer is at it’s weakest yet this is where most of the marketing effort is, i.e the 30 second spot, etc.

An interested buyer at the research / consideration level, obviously has a greater value than someone at the top of the funnel. Just ask any car salesman who pounces on some poor schlep that just finished a test drive.

Online it is possible to orchestrate a users pathway and optimize it for persuasion. Think of your website as the buying funnel. The further a user gets into the site the more valuable they become which means you have an opportunity to market to them differently the further along they are.

A website provides the potential to focus on different messages to different segments of your market in many different ways, for example.

• Customer database email lists – different messages to different groups, one to one marketing approach.
• Product selector tools – lead a visitor down paths based on what is important to that individual visitor with a unique message at the end and along the way of that path which speaks directly to that segment. (being able to talk differently to people who are at different stages of the buying process.
• Customer segmentation based on type of customer.

Persuasive design combines with performance metrics tracked across different customer segments allow for rapid adjustments and continuous improvements which maximize the value of each individual group, by increasing the value across each segment more value is brought to the consumer and also the business profit and brand, the costs of efficiently targeting each segment online are minimal at best after all there are no print costs, or distribution costs associated with a web page. Therefore the size of the customer segment is of less importance producing a long tail effect for the marketer.

The Internet more than any other medium lends itself to measure ability, perhaps because of the availability of immediate information one can get on web site visitors with products like click tracks, google analytics and webtrends in the form of analytics. In this fast paced world it is increasingly important to generate results in less time, and there is no better method for doing that that to leverage design and analytics.

Web analytics is the analysis of how visitors use a web site. Once visitor data has been collected, analyzed and measured over time against clearly defined goals for your specific web site, design can be used to convert analytics into actionable results through a continual improvement process. Design can then become empowered through analysis and user testing; metrics can provide insight on the success of an online strategy.

Several factors including design and usability to name a few impact a users experience with your site, product, message and brand. By minimizing the guess work and combining analysis of visitor behavior over time design improvements can continually advance specific key metrics that are important to your business model and your success.

The true value of design is in it’s effectiveness in meeting the desired business goals. Improving communication as a result of better design means a web user can be impelled to act more often ensuing higher returns to your bottom line.

For design to have an impact on a business goal, it must revolve around a guiding strategy. To simply design something without an underlying strategy that supports a specific objective will not utilize design as a competitive advantage.

Although the design may be aesthetically pleasing, it may not generate as large an impact on results that you are striving for and may be developed subjectively as opposed to what will have the highest impact. Additionally, there are usually several business goals to meet and the likely hood of intuitively or subjectively maximizing all of them can be difficult, which is where design strategy should be leveraged.

Design strategy is not a particular color, or graphic image, or a logo, or a design concept or any other design element.

A design strategy is an approach to how a particular objective will be accomplished with design or any of design’s core competencies. The design strategy should always be joined to a particular business objective and its purpose is to provide a clear starting point for the team to develop solutions. It provides a measurement against which to analyze the solution. An example would be:

Business Objective:
Improve market share and the bottom line.

Design Strategy:
Develop design concepts that improve the recognizability of the brand across all product groups. Reinforce the brand promise and strengthen the relationship with the customer.

Using a design strategy liberates the creative mind to think out of the box for business solutions and provides you with an advantage over your competition.

Let me begin my making a clear distinction, design is not art.

Simply stated art is created for the artist and the artist alone. The artist paints a picture solely for the purpose of self-expression of how he or she sees the world. Anyone can look a piece of art and like it or dislike it. Art is subjective, either you like Van Gogh’s sunflowers or you don’t.

Design on the other hand is not created for self-expression but for a client with a particular goal in mind. If a design accomplishes the desired goal, for example to increase the response rate of a particular message by 63%, then it has satisfied it’s objective and purpose for being created. If subjectivity is added to the process of design approval the purpose of design has been completely removed and has become subjective.

So someone’s opinion may be that they don’t like a particular color or that the empty white space can be filled with something, but that is not design, that is an opinion.

Design is the accumulation of principals and elements that perform on many levels with several different parts all contributing to a desired influence. Every element in design has been placed or chosen for a reason and to change something that may seem trivial like color or white space just because of an opinion could result in a negative desired outcome.

Truth be told, no designer or copywriter or art director or even you can know beyond any doubt what the best design will be, until it’s test. Design is a process that must constantly evolve and grow.

Design has a tremendous impact on marketing results, it can make the difference between achieving your business goals and often surpassing them or driving your customers as far away from your objective as possible. Design is far more than simply look and feel and certainly more than an add-on service at the midpoint or end of the development phase. Design is as much scientific as it is instinctual and should never be done without a specific reason. Fundamentally design communicates in a visual way and taps into a subconscious decision making process which words alone cannot achieve.

A simple design element like the position and color of a call to action button or the amount of white space on a web page, if used as part of the design strategy, can enhance or reduce the power of your marketing.

It is no secret that perception is dependent on presentation, which contributes to the response to your marketing message or lack there of. On the web the effect of design is amplified because all any prospective consumer has to go on is your web presence. The visual look, usability and design of your site is your company or product. Your web site is the interface with your potential customer at the time of purchase, when they are considering starting or continuing a relationship with you.

Design has too much of an impact on performance to be reduced to a subjective opinion of whether someone or some committee likes it or dislikes it. Because of this impact on communication it is important to measure and test design just like any other part of your marketing mix. It is also important to note that design testing is not the same as usability testing, which is also vitally important and should not be ignored.

Design testing measures your customers’ behavior in relationship to your brand and can combined with good design can improve your site’s conversion rates. Under the lens of a properly conducted design test there will be no question that design B increases some business metric by x% vs. design C which decreases the same metric.

Measuring design and other web analytics are ultimately good for the business intention. However, there is some backlash within the industry that believes it creates too much of a focus on the short-term. The Creative Thirst solution is to combine design testing with usability testing, along with qualitative data and observation of visitor behavior over time. This combination is the key to developing deeper insights into your customers and is the basis of the continual improvement process that will ensure greater gains to your bottom line through the design in situations where you cannot afford to guess.