For every 100 visitors that land on your website, only six will convert. Maybe seven. Depending on your industry, it could be even fewer.
The average conversion rate across all industries is 6.6% according to Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report 2024.
One of the reasons for this is that you’re not there to guide them through their discovery journey. They’re left to their own devices (quite literally) to explore your offering.
Good design, though, can guide their behavior in the direction you want them to take. From color choices to calls to action, this article explores the key principles that can nudge visitors smoothly toward action.
What Is Conversion-Centered Design?
Conversion-centered design (CCD) is a strategic marketing technique used when designing websites, user interfaces, and marketing campaigns. The goal is to guide visitors to complete a specific action. It does this by using design principles and techniques (which will be explored in detail later in this article) and user experience (UX) best practices to reduce distractions and improve the chances of conversion.
The Importance of Using Conversion Design
To understand the importance of conversion-centered design, you need to take a step back and first understand why conversion rate is one of the most important metrics. Even small increases in your conversion rate can boost your revenue. More importantly, it can do so without needing to increase your website traffic or ad spend.
In other words, you’ll have to spend less on other marketing techniques like search engine optimization (SEO) or advertising design to see increased sales. Instead, you first focus on ensuring that more of the visitors who land on your landing page or website end up buying products.
While website conversion is often associated with increased sales, that’s not the only way to increase your revenue. For example, getting more social media followers or email subscribers will also help your business to attract potential customers.
Perhaps the importance of using conversion for design is best understood by explaining what happens if you neglect this strategy. When your design is not optimized for conversion, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on other strategies like SEO or paid ads. Visitors will continue to drop off if your marketing design, whether that’s an email, website, or landing page, has issues with its navigation, content, or user experience.
Let’s say you have a bucket with holes. The only way that you’re ever going to fill it with enough water is by plugging those holes. Simply adding more and more water to the bucket will do little.
Essential Principles of Conversion-Centered Design
Build Trust with Social Proof
Hesitation at the point of conversion is common. To reduce doubt, you need to show prospective customers that your product or service is legit and valuable.
One of the easiest (and most effective) ways to do that is to include social proof like testimonials, reviews, and even survey results. These act as trust signals, reassuring new leads that they can take the next step.
It works because it’s in our nature to use others’ behavior as guidance. In other words, if others trust your product, new customers are more likely to trust you too.
To make your social proof more effective, select product reviews that explain how your product has solved a specific user pain point. It’s even better if you can tie it to specific results. Then, you can also highlight keywords related to value, speed, and customer support to highlight your value proposition further.
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Leverage Emotional Triggers
While a focused layout appeals to logic, design also needs to appeal to your target audience’s emotions. If your design, specifically your messaging, engages on an emotional level, it becomes more memorable and compelling.
For instance, if your goal is to push sales, you can add a countdown timer to create urgency. If you want to drive more webinar registrations, you can create anticipation and curiosity by sharing short teasers about the line-up.
Source: Figma
Use Visual Cues to Guide Attention
Creating focus is foundational to conversion-centered design. Whatever you design, whether that’s a landing page or an ad, should have a single goal. For example, the same landing page can’t drive email newsletter sign-ups and sales. Attention is limited and, as such, you should offer limited options to avoid decision paralysis.
To help show leads what they need to focus on (the most important parts of the design), you can use visual cues. It can be as obvious as an actual arrow pointing towards the “Subscribe” button or less direct like using a photo in which the subject looks in the direction of the button.
Source: Semrush
Put simply, it’s about creating a visual path.
Other ways to do that include:
- Using a high-contrast colour for your CTA
- Limiting the use of bold colours
- Placing the action they need to take in a box, circle, or shaded area
- Using interaction design to catch attention in a subtle way
When it’s easy for visitors to find their way around your website, it reduces cognitive load. The effort that they had to spend on figuring out what to do next, they can now use to engage with your design.
To achieve this, it’s best to limit the top-level navigation to about three to five items. You can also remove unnecessary links to your social media channels (unless the goal is to get more social media followers, of course).
Then, use descriptive labels that focus on an action. For example, instead of writing “learn more” use “download free guide”.
Use Clear and Visible CTAs
When it comes to calls to action, you need to look at the number and the wording.
It’s best practice to have one call-to-action button per goal (an attention ratio of 1:1). In other words, if you’re creating high-converting landing pages to drive software demo signups, you’ll limit the call to action to one button. Adding another CTA which will take them to an email newsletter sign-up page will only confuse visitors.
Leverage White Space Smartly
Good design should be easy to read. In some instances, the best way to improve readability is by saying nothing at all.
White space (also called negative space) avoids that your design becomes cluttered. It also gives your most important content – like your headline – extra breathing room. It also allows your readers to pause so that they can catch their breath and collect their thoughts.
Like visual cues, white space can also guide attention. It acts like a spotlight, drawing attention to the content that matters. For example, by increasing the margins around your CTAs, they become more noticeable, and, more importantly, clickable.
In addition to these functional purposes, white space also serves an aesthetic role. It adds a level of sophistication to your brand design that suggests professionalism.
Apply Consistent Text Hierarchy
To help you create an intuitive structure, create an information hierarchy. It will require that you mix your copywriting and design expertise to find a logical order in which to share the information.
The easiest way to do that is to list the information you need to achieve your goal, for example features, benefits, testimonials, etc. Then, to arrange the text so that visitors can tell which parts carry the most importance, you can use:
- Font weight and size
- Colour
- Capitalization
- Spacing and placement
Applying your style consistently will also help to create a text hierarchy. For instance, you’ll typically use larger font sizes in bold for main headlines that communicate the main message. Then, you’ll use slightly smaller text to introduce sections, while medium-sized text will be used for all the other content.
Source: Unbounce
Text alignment and button styles are two more areas that call for consistency. For example, if one CTA is centered, all the others should follow the same style. If one button has sharp corners, all the other buttons should look the same.
Use Color Psychology Strategically
Different colors have a different impact on human behavior and emotion. For instance, red creates urgency, while black suggests sophistication. So, if you want to leverage emotional triggers, you can use color psychology to have an even greater impact. Think of the effect a red countdown timer will have as opposed to one in black.
Aside from its emotional impact, it can also be used to guide user behavior. As mentioned earlier, high-contrast colors are ideal for elements like buttons that need to stand out.
While color psychology is undeniably important, whatever color choices you make should align with your branding. It builds brand recognition which you need if you expect customers to click on links when they land on another page other than your official business website.
Test and Adapt Design Based on User Behavior
Actual user behaviour instead of assumptions or personal preferences should drive all of your design decisions. To gain insight into how users engage with your digital products, you can, for example, use click heatmaps, A/B testing and a website audit to reveal where on the page you’re losing visitors.
What’s important is that these tools and processes should be used at different stages of the design process. As user behavior evolves, devices change, and trends fizzle out, testing can’t be treated as a one-time event.
Testing and iteration are especially important to ensure you have accessible website design. You might think that your webinar registration form is easy to complete, but have you actually done so yourself? How long before you get annoyed by all the compulsory form fields?
What about those buttons? Sure, the extra white space and high-contrast color mean that you can clearly see them, but have you tried clicking on one when browsing on your mobile device?
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Best Examples of Conversion-Centered Design in Action
These key principles are best explained with a conversion-centered design example. Here are two examples of how Duck.Design designed websites with conversion in mind.
1. Poke23 – Website Design
Poke23, a catering business located in Belgium, needed an intuitive interface for their website that clearly communicated their focus area—delicious poke bowls.
We kicked off the project by first creating wireframes and mockups to visualize the customer journey and website’s structure. This also involved user research and usability testing to improve the design iteratively.
Armed with this user feedback, we set out to combine branding with our UX/UI design capabilities. We simplified the decision-making process by:
- Using a single, clear goal (“Order Now”) which is repeated in the hero area and menu section
- Creating a visual hierarchy through big, bold headings and high-contrast colours
- Using visual cues like arrows and intuitive navigation to guide them through the ordering process
And, visitors didn’t just briefly poke around their newly designed website. Their number of monthly active users grew by 30% post-launch.
2. Lush Stonez – Website Design
The online jewelry store Lush Stonez needed a robust e-commerce platform that could support secure purchases. Our approach was to leverage user-centered design and create an intuitive, stunning website that matched the visual appeal of their designs.
Then, we added conversion design principles like:
- We used color psychology and identified that chocolate tones with gold accents will symbolize the luxurious qualities of their jewelry range.
- To build on that premium feel, we decided to use a modern serif font and adjusted the font size to highlight key headings.
- We showed verified reviews on product pages and highlighted their 30-day returns and 12-month guarantee to build further trust.
They didn’t have to wait long to see results. Within the first quarter, they managed to increase sales by 25% already.
Designing for Results: Duck.Design’s Conversion-Centered Approach That Drive Conversions
Like effective conversion design is all about focus, Duck.Design centers its offering on design. Whether it’s a lead generation website or motion graphics needed to make the most important elements pop, our team can design just about anything.
As design for conversion is all about driving measurable results, we’ve structured our web design services similarly. All our packages come with a seven-day money-back guarantee.
Not only are our packages risk-free, but they’re also convenient. We’ve included related services like UI/UX design, email graphics, mobile app design, and brand guides so that you have all the assets you need to convince and convert. Plus, if your goal is to grow your email subscriber list, we can also create downloadable resources to which your CTA will redirect them.
While designing for conversion effectively means giving your customer base limited options, we don’t want to limit our offering to businesses. As such, each plan includes unlimited design requests and revisions.
