Peter Lessard

Award winning web sites are great for two reasons.  They help feed starving artists, and they give you something to justify the cost of your web site since it is making little in the way of sales.

I spend my days helping business owners make more money from the internet.  When they first contact me approximately 90% of those business owners firmly believe, that to make more money from the internet, they would need higher rankings and more traffic.  Increasing existing conversions of visitors to their site into paying customers is not even on the map.

In one form or another I ask them to ponder this scenario.  If they had a showroom for their widget and just on salesman named John, and one hundred potential customers showed up at the showroom, but failed to purchase anything,  would they focus their efforts on bringing in more prospects, or would they find out what was wrong with John?  Now imagine if John said, but I am wearing an award winning suit and my hair cut also won an award recently.  Do you see how this transfers to your web site?  Should you not be as concerned with conversions as you are with traffic?

You can bet the farm that if a web site has won an award for its aesthetics and art, that it is literally sucking the potential profits from your business.  Have you noticed that they do not give out awards for web site with highest conversions?  Or web site with the highest up sell ratio?  Once they start doing that, I will change my stance on award winning web sites.

This is nothing new.  There has always been a struggle in marketing between art and effective advertising.  David Ogilvy wrote in his 1963 seminal book, Confessions of an Advertising Man “I no longer enter my agency’s layouts in the contests by the art director’s societies, for fear that one of them might be disgraced by an award,”  He understood that winning prizes for design had nothing to do with winning sales and that if his ads won a prize it was a strong indicator that it would be a flop for sales conversion.

Do I believe a site cannot be attractive and make sales?  No.  I simply feel it is crucial to your bottom line to focus on conversions.  If you would like to explore increasing your profits please do submit the contact form on http://peterlessard.com

Tweet This Post 

Business Sites Fail To Generate Their Maximum Profits Because They Were Designed By Web Designers!

At face value that may sound like a ridiculous statement since you would automatically assume that web designers should be the ones designing web sites but in my decade of experience I can tell you that the #1 reason 99.9% of business web sites don’t generate the sales, leads and profits that they should is that they were designed, deployed and managed by a web site designer!

My name is Peter Lessard and I have been in online marketing for a decade.
I have advised large multinational corporations and every kind of small and medium business.
My small virtual team and I have managed 100k launches and competed in very aggressive niches.
I have spent thousands of hours analyzing sale conversion data so rest assured I point the finger with certainty when I expose the #1 cause of web sites failing to generate their maximum profits for business.

Consider the Web Site Designer as your lead:

• A site designer is viewing sites day in and day out and simply can no longer handle “boring design” – their focus is not if a site converts visitors to buyers or delivers return on investment, it needs to look cool!  Does Ebay, Amazon, Google or Itunes look cool?  Not really. Would you like to make money like they do?
• A web site designer will generally make important decisions that will greatly affect your profit margin based on a need to do something different.  Why?  Because they have built similar sites 23 times and need it to be different.
• The average web site designer lives on the internet and could not possibly identify with Joe Average using a site to buy a product or service.  This designer will not think twice about creating “new” “sexy” navigation and interfaces that will completely frustrate your Wife, Mother, Aunt or Grandmother.  Notice how all the big sites still use blue underlined links?  Think maybe they studied to death the ramifications of trying to be artsy with a million visitors per day and so much money at risk?

Now consider an Online Marketing Expert leading the project:

• When a designer suggests a change they will ask “On what proof of increased sales conversion and profits do you make this suggestion?
• An Online Marketing Expert will have spent years of their careers examining and fixing the fatal flaws of sites that hurt sales.  They will use study groups, numbers and return on investment to make their decisions.  They will be expert at split testing landing pages, at capturing leads into a sales funnel such as a newsletter for perpetual growth in marketing your company.  They will know the cost of not managing your reputation online and the average value of a visitor in dollars to your business.
• They have been called upon over and over again to fix what was “wrong” with similar business sites and can lead your project to a profitable conclusion because of experience in doing it again and again.

Let me also say that I employ some great designers and have nothing against them but I would not have them manage the entire effort of an online marketing initiative just as they would not likely let me make purely artistic choices.  For success you need a team effort with an experienced online marketer taking the lead.

Over and over again I have observed businesses that are almost identical in their offer.
One business will use the internet and have a “sexy” web site and barely profit from the experience.
Another will deploy a comprehensive online marketing plan that includes a web site and crush their competition, experience great profit margins and staggering growth.

What has really fascinated me over the years is sitting in on board meetings when design of a site is being considered.  If you try to change anything in a large company there is generally a study phase that will take six months to make sure that it is not a mistake!  But if a designer suggests a massive change to a web site just because it looks nice everybody applauds the idea.  “Why yes Mr. Designer that is so much more attractive than those ugly blue links.”  Never mind that if you studied the numbers, you just decreased sales conversion by about 40% to make things look pretty.

So what would you rather have?  An award winning site or a visit that turns into a paying client?  Ever notice that the big portfolios on a web designer’s site never say “increased sales by 30%” or “size of mailing list doubling monthly and propelling significant growth”.

Think twice in the future when considering your online presence and what should determine design changes.

For more expert online marketing tips like this by Peter Lessard visit http://peterlessard.com

Tweet This Post 

Just a quick review of a site and how conversions could easily be improved. I come across dozens of these daily and they drive me crazy

Tweet This Post