Is your solu­tion to increas­ing your sales based on attract­ing more vis­i­tors to your site rather than get­ting more sales from the vis­i­tors you do attract? Brands and busi­ness­es spend tens of thou­sands of dol­lars each month on SEO, PPC, etc., all to get more peo­ple to their site. Yet, they only make a token effort to con­vert those vis­i­tors into buy­ers. What if you could spend 10X your month­ly spend, once, instead of 5X each month to make your busi­ness 5 times more suc­cess­ful?

Here are three rea­sons why you should invest in UX design now.

1. Higher Conversions

An aver­age site real­izes con­ver­sion rates around 2 per­cent. The top con­vert­ing sites clock in at well over 10 per­cent.

If vis­i­tors are com­ing to your site, some­thing appealed to them that drove them there. They are a warm lead. If you can’t con­vert 1 in 10 warm leads, then some­thing is seri­ous­ly wrong with your site design.

The most cru­cial step in the con­ver­sion process occurs once the user actu­al­ly vis­its your site. Sites live and die on the UX design’s abil­i­ty to affect con­ver­sions. So, why is that the part of the design process where com­pa­nies try to cut cor­ners? Of all the places to cut costs, the most crit­i­cal point of the user’s jour­ney is not a good place.

Web­sites need more than a token UX design effort. UX design, just like of mar­ket­ing and devel­op­ment is a high­ly spe­cial­ized field that relies on trained and skill prac­ti­tion­ers.

Avoid mak­ing the com­mon mis­take of hir­ing the cheap­est UX design­er or the one that shows you pret­ty pic­tures. Find a true UX pro­fes­sion­al. Yes it will cost you more, but you’ll make more, too.

2. More Revenue

Even with a scant 2 per­cent con­ver­sion rate, you can achieve suc­cess when you bring in enough vis­i­tors.

For the sake of argu­ment, let’s say that invest­ing $10,000/month in PPC mar­ket­ing brings in 1 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors that con­vert to 20,000 sales. You would have to quin­tu­ple your spend ($50,000/month) to earn 100,000 sales/month. More­over, you would have to con­tin­u­al­ly feed that mon­ster just to main­tain that 100,000 month­ly sales quo­ta.

No mat­ter what you spend, your mar­gin remains the same. Is that sus­tain­able?

How­ev­er, if you approach the prob­lem from anoth­er per­spec­tive, say by increas­ing your con­ver­sion rate to 10 per­cent, then you can achieve your goal of 100,000 con­ver­sions with­out mak­ing any oth­er changes in spend­ing. This just requires a one-time expense for a top notch UX design that con­verts at 10 per­cent. Not only is this a sus­tain­able rev­enue mod­el, but it dra­mat­i­cal­ly increas­es your prof­it mar­gins, as well.

Doing the math, if you com­mit­ted $100,000 to a more suc­cess­ful UX design that achieved 10 per­cent con­ver­sions, you would make up that cost in just over 2 months vers­es a 5X month­ly spend. Let’s not dis­re­gard the high­er prof­it mar­gin and the effect a bet­ter UX has on cus­tomer reten­tion, either.

3. Brand Loyalty

Cus­tomer per­cep­tions of the ease of use of a web­site col­ors their per­cep­tion of the val­ue of the busi­ness and it’s prod­ucts. Good usabil­i­ty and UX design trans­lates into cus­tomer loy­al­ty. Apple is a prime exam­ple.

It is well-known that cus­tomers are will­ing to spend more for the same prod­uct if they trust that brand more than oth­er ones. It’s not always about get­ting more fea­tures or a cheap­er price; it’s about risk man­age­ment. Cus­tomers don’t want to make a mis­take.

Any dif­fi­cul­ty a cus­tomer expe­ri­ences in their inter­ac­tion with the brand erodes their con­fi­dence in that brand.

The Big Difference

So, what are top per­form­ing sites doing dif­fer­ent­ly than most oth­ers to achieve con­ver­sion rates at 10 per­cent or high­er, increased rev­enue, and greater brand loy­al­ty?

I can’t speak for all of them, but I do know that most of those top sites have a more mature UX process than the mediocre sites. To them, UX is more of a com­mit­ment than mere­ly an after­thought. These top sites real­ize that web­site con­ver­sion is the crit­i­cal step in the sales process and, there­fore, don’t cut cor­ners on that most crit­i­cal step.

In poor­er per­form­ing com­pa­nies, UX design­ers typ­i­cal­ly start work­ing on a site after the devel­op­ers or graph­ic artists have designed it. This leaves lit­tle time or oppor­tu­ni­ty for the UX design­ers to apply mean­ing­ful changes.

The right process isn’t dis­rup­tive, but it does require mov­ing UX design clos­er to mar­ket­ing than to devel­op­ment. UX design should lead your design and devel­op­ment, not fol­low it.

UX Is An Investment

Focus on a real UX effort, not the more com­mon lip­stick-on-a-pig approach. Don’t leave this most crit­i­cal aspect of your site design to graph­ic artists and web devel­op­ers who claim to be UX design­ers just to save a few dol­lars. It will end up cost­ing more in the long-term than you save now.

To achieve 10 per­cent con­ver­sions, you need to invest in an expe­ri­enced UX team to help devel­op the right process for your com­pa­ny, solve the imme­di­ate design prob­lems, and help find good UX design­ers for the longer term. This won’t come cheap, but suc­cess is rarely cheap or easy.

The soon­er you com­mit to this invest­ment, the soon­er you reap the rewards.