Every time Rand receives a marketing book, he puts in on my desk. I don't know if it's a gesture of "Here, you read stuff..." or if it's a more direct "Read this or you're fired" (which is clearly how Rand operates, for those of you who know him well), but I've got a stack of books at home that are one giant "Read these" list. During my flights to and from San Jose last week, I started reading Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads. Written by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, the book focuses on conversion-friendly web design, a topic that has interested me greatly since we now have a "product" to sell on our site (our PRO memberships). For the next few SEM Tuesdays, I'll share a couple chapters of the book with you all and give my opinions as they arise. (FYI, the book has a website, so check out Web Design for ROI's site for more information about the book and updated resources and links).

Chapter 1: A Novel Concept

This chapter begins with some intriguing stats:
  • 43% of retail sales are to either be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012
  • 83% of business use the Internet to research and find potential vendors
  • 75% of users admit to making judgments about the a company's credibility based on their website's design
Clearly folks are judging a book by its cover, and in this case the book is your website. It's becoming increasingly clear that a website is becoming a must-have if you're a business owner, big or small. Yet the fact that this book even exists proves that people are just plain clueless about web marketing.

The book delves into brick and mortar stores that did a little bit of optimization to improve the shopping experience and increase conversions. Simple yet effective changes like widening aisles, keeping store entrances clear, product placement, and other tweaks were made and proved to have a positive effect. Why not do the same with your online storefront, then? Too often a company's website is grossly overlooked because it's not deemed as important as tangible, physical locations. This mindset is erroneous and problematic, especially as the shift to online shopping continues to grow.

You have to think of your website as an investment, plain and simple. The book provides simple formulas and a nice chart that highlights how you can determine the ROI of your investment. It goes something like this:

Return - investment = net gain.
Net gain / investment = ROI

An efficient website typically yields an incredibly positive ROI compared to costs for other resources. No matter who you blame for a poorly structured or even nonexistent website (yourself, management, IT, designers, the design process, an outsourced agency, etc), it's time to stop playing the blame game and start working together to create actual, lasting results. The book cites a great chart showing that it's taken the Internet only 5 years to reach 50 million users, compared to cable (10), TV (13), and radio (38). The internet's incredibly quick adoption rate should be a wake up call to all businesses--lest you want to be left in the dust, you better jump on board sooner rather than later, because the longer you wait, the harder it'll be to compete in the sphere.

Chapter 2: Business Case

This chapter uses a funnel as an analogy. Which would you rather do, increase the number of prospects entering the funnel, or widen the the bottom of the funnel so more prospects are able to get through? Any salesman would rather convert more of the leads he has vs. making a bunch more sales calls. The book then provides a hypothetic scenario where a business has $100k to invest in either acquiring more traffic or improving their conversion rate. Investing in an improved conversion rate yielded a higher ROI over a longer period of time than would investing in a traffic increase. A no brainer, right? Yet I can't tell you how many clients have approached us with the task of "We need more traffic." Well, yes...and no. More traffic is always great, but if it's not the right type of traffic or if it's traffic that's hitting a wall because your site's conversion process sucks, well, that doesn't do you much good, does it?


I'll stop for now because I've only read the first couple chapters, but I'll post new chapters each week until I've finished the book. So far it's a simple read (a little too simple at times; the book actually defines terms like "easy money" and "rational person" in the sidebar) and briskly paced. I do enjoy all of the charts and graphs the authors have incorporated. I know that the first couple of chapters have been introductory, but I'm looking forward to getting deeper into the "meat" of the book, so to speak. Upcoming chapters will focus on the following:
  • Managing for ROI
  • Landing Pages
  • Home Pages
  • Category Pages
  • Detail Pages
  • Forms
  • Checkout Process
If you're interested in picking up the book or learning more, head over to WD4ROI.com and peruse some sample chapters; or, if you're lazy, let me do the work for you and simply report back every Tuesday to read my chapter summaries. ;)