You evolve over time, and so should your website. 

If you feel like your website doesn’t reflect your brand anymore, it’s time for a change. But with your never-ending to-do list, who has the time for a website overhaul? If you don’t want to wait a whole year to relaunch or update your website, do it in increments instead. Using either a growth driven design approach or conversion rate optimization propels your business forward. 

Let’s chat about these two strategies so you can decide which one is right for your company, and how to execute them. 

What is growth driven design?

Growth-Driven Design is a concept developed by HutSpot and involves the agile development or redesign of a website in intentional increments. These incremental changes are based on an ongoing analysis of your visitors’ needs and lead conversions. 

Unlike that of traditional redesigns that occur every 2-3 years and slowly go out of date, growth driven design happens every 3-5 months with small yet impactful enhancements over time. 

Growth driven design involves a three step approach: strategy, launchpad, and continuous improvements (we’ll come back to these later on). 

Growth driven web design vs conversion rate optimization

Both growth driven design and conversion rate optimization aim to improve user experience by relying on data regarding how users interact with a website. This includes analyzing heat maps, and sitemaps. Continuous iteration is also applied in both strategies. 

So doesn’t that make them the same thing?

Not entirely…

Growth driven web design aims to launch a website with core features and then improve and add features depending on how the audience interacts with it. 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves using data on a completed website to optimize for engagement, lead generation, and sales. This is similar to preventing sunburn with sunscreen verses treating it after the fact with aloe. 

Which one makes the most sense for you depends on your business. Every business is different, and has unique needs. So ask yourself: 

• What outcome would I like to achieve?
• What are my current business goals?
• How do I define sustainable growth?
• What resources can I invest into my website (financial and time-wise)?

In the meantime, let’s chew over why focusing on a growth-driven design strategy is a viable option. 

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Why is using a growth driven design a worthwhile strategy?

If we could go back to the future like Marty McFly, this is the strategy we’d go with.  

Consider this: it takes your team half a year to redesign your eCommerce website. Not even a year later, your website is already completely out of date, and needs some serious work. Think about how much you've already grown, expanded, and shifted your brand voice. 

Using a growth driven design strategy minimizes risk by focusing on a data-driven site launch or redesign. In return, you’ll save time, effort, and resources by building in a lean and agile manner (versus CRO where you do A/B tests to determine the better performing features). 

Growth-Driven Design (the brand who coined this) is a leading pioneer in this strategy and has discovered that companies who use this approach generally generate 16.9% more leads after 6 months, and 11.2% revenue compared to the traditional methods. 

In the long run, it’s highly worthwhile to collaborate with an agency who specializes in these methods in order to improve your website bit by bit instead of waiting for a redesign. 

CRO or GDD - what does your business need right now? Let’s talk strategy

What are the three stages of growth driven design?

There are three well-thought out stages to this progressive approach. Here’s how they work:

Stage 1: Strategy

First, get to know your buyer persona better. Conduct interviews, go through customer surveys, and lead market research sessions.

Do your research:

Start by answering these questions based on your research and the analytics from your website:

• What generation/age group are your buyers mostly from?
• How do they consume their content?
• Do they respond better to casual talk or authoritative conversations? 
• Where do they go to get their information?
• What are the values that matter to them? 

These questions help you brainstorm and narrow down what direction to go in, ultimately creating a blueprint to follow for the next step.

Review your website analytics and determine where to improve

Aside from diving deeper into buyer personas, observing how your audience interacts with your website, where they click, and the value they get from your site. These are all factors to take into consideration in order to distinguish what works from what doesn’t. 

After this, create a wish list of what your website needs. This wish list should include high impact actions from these four categories: site elements, sections/pages, features, and other. Then categorize the wish list into a “nice to have” and “must have”. 

Within the four categories select components like:

• Self hosted platform 
• Blog 
• Competitor comparisons 
• Sales chat 
• Support forum 
• Quoting calculator 

Did any of those give you a light bulb? 

If so, bookmark this page for later.

Finally, it's important to mention this is a wishlist, and only the most highly effective elements should be executed. Prioritize the top 20% website features that will have an actual, immediate impact and you’ll be well on your way to success.

Onward to phase two.

Stage 2: Launch Pad

The launchpad stage serves as a skeleton to optimize from, unlike with CRO where you’re only optimizing based on previous results. This stage begins when you launch your website or the redesign with the prioritized features and improvements. 

Essentially there are three types of launchpads: 

• The Refresh Method is exactly what it sounds like. Just like you refreshed your face with some ice cold water to get revitalized this morning, you do the same with your website. This method involves using your wishlist and incorporating the items with the most impact. 
• The Kick-Start Method is a step up. It's a quickie redesign with templates and curated content. This is a great option for businesses that had a relaunch within the last 6-7 months but are in need of a bit more than a refresh.
• The Expand Method is for the big dogs, those giant website relaunches. This type can be broken down even further into segments to ensure a smooth incremental progression.

Drumroll please for the last step… continuous improvement! 

Stage 3: Continuous Improvement

Remember the tale of the tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race. This is emulated in the growth-driven methodology where continuous improvement ensures you’re advancing continuously. The growth design process isn't just tweaking one element - it's observing, analyzing, and reinventing your copy, design elements, landing pages, and processes.

Chetana Deborah, the design director of growth at Netflix, said, “sustainable growth has two factors-- measurable impact and customer motivation.” To set your business up for long-term success, the growth driven approach is the key ingredient and it must involve continuous improvements. 

With that said, CRO is a small fish in a much bigger game. You can’t talk about growth driven design and not mention CRO, as they are both part of the process. 

So, whether you decide to start by using the CRO approach or the growth driven method, pick the plan that makes most sense for you and your business.

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