Unexpected ROI from a website redesign

These days, there’s really no question that the website is critical for B2B SaaS lead generation and revenue growth. The largest, most recognizable software brands consistently invest in website improvements and optimizations.

The upfront cost of a website redesign can be daunting, so naturally, you weigh the cost of the build against the value you expect. If you believe the redesign will help you achieve that outcome, you might be able to justify the price tag and secure the budget.

Food for thought: don’t get tunnel vision. The ROI from a website redesign is always much, much bigger than you think.

Treat your website like your defense attorney

If you were put on trial and had to hire a defense attorney, you’d probably do everything in your power to get a good one. There’s just too much at stake to cheap out. You aren’t just paying for the hours you sit next to them in the courtroom, you’re investing in freedom for the rest of your life.

View your website like your defense attorney — not a one-time expense, but an investment in a better future. It’s a dramatic analogy, but in the courtroom of marketing, your customer is the judge and jury. Your brand is on trial. And your website is your best defense. Your customers will vet and judge your brand based on their experience on your website.

But, the budget …

You know the problems, you’re ready to fix them. But, the budget … To see if the gain outweighs the pain, weigh the upfront cost of a website redesign against a few factors.

Consider the time (and equivalent cost) your team is spending to manage the website in its current state (Hint: if you’re constantly pinging IT to fix errors on the site, this number could be very high).

Assess the risk to the business if you don’t invest in your website. What’s at stake? If your leads are low and you aren’t meeting your monthly revenue targets, the risk of inaction may greatly outweigh the cost of a website redesign.

Finally, calculate the expected ROI if you achieve your measurable marketing objectives. Here are two quick scenarios that illustrate the payoff:

1. Marketing objective: Increase website conversion rate from 2% to 4%

Potential ROI: If a 2% conversion rate brings in 5 marketing qualified leads (MQLs) per month, 4% brings in 10. If your sales team has a 50% close rate, you will double your monthly revenue (attributed to the website) just by convincing 5 more visitors to take the next step.

2. Marketing objective: Reduce buying cycle from 6 months to 3 months

Potential ROI: Cutting the buying cycle in half sounds impressive. It’s even more impressive when you consider you’re bringing in revenue twice as fast. An effective website redesign can help you do this, simply by designing it to meet the needs of self-serve buyers who want to research your solution before reaching out to your sales team.

Reviewing the financial risks and rewards is an important part of the decision process. But in our experience, brands always get more value than they expect from a redesign. Not because the agency over-delivered (though we do aim for that), but because when you elevate your brand, you elevate your business.

Amplify the ROI from your website redesign

Get a fresh perspective on your business strategy

It’s hard to see your own blind spots. The website redesign process can be an excellent gut check. Your agency partner can offer a third-party perspective by identifying gaps in your brand positioning, value proposition, key messages, and even pricing model.

If you partner with Tiller, this type of collaboration typically happens during the discovery phase. We speak to key members of your marketing, product, and sales teams to get a holistic view of the business and each department’s pain points. We flag potential areas of misalignment (e.g. is your software a product, platform, or solution?) and get all stakeholders on board with the strategy moving forward. Cross-departmental alignment streamlines future decision-making and ensures everyone is talking about your offering in the same way.

Clarify your value proposition

Bringing clarity to what you do and why it matters makes it easier for customers to choose you. The process of writing new web copy naturally helps you clarify your product’s value, even without going through a dedicated brand development workshop.

During a web redesign, agency copywriters interview key stakeholders from your product, marketing, and sales teams to clarify your most compelling elevator pitch. Then, they help you translate that value prop into web copy, moving away from technical, feature-focused copy to clear and digestible value.

Make your brand more memorable

Your brand should always be elevated during a website redesign. At Tiller, we make sure of it — whether you need to apply a new brand to your website or are simply looking for ways to express your brand in a new way. A website redesign delivers fresh UI that is differentiated from competitors, and aligned with the latest web design best practices.

After the web launch, your brand guide should be updated to reflect brand decisions made during the web redesign process. These equip your team to keep the momentum going long after launch.

Improve the user experience

An effective website redesign begins with a deep dive into your business strategy and target audience. A good agency partner will strike the balance between web analytics and user needs. If you have three product pages with high web traffic, but few web conversions, there’s an opportunity for improvement.

Your web agency will analyze your user journey and sitemap to identify opportunities to remove friction and confusion:

• SEO performance
• Page labels
• Content hierarchy and flow
• Internal linking
• Call to action language and button placement
• Scroll length
• Directional design and visual cues
• And more

Improve lead quality

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using lead volume as the measurement of success. But we all know you can have all the leads in the world, but if none are qualified, you’re in trouble.

A website redesign is an opportunity to clarify who your software is for. If it’s for enterprise, not SMB, say so. Create audience-specific pages to help your customers see themselves in your solution. Use the words your customers use. Present use cases and case studies that will resonate with the businesses you are trying to attract. And reevaluate your forms to help website visitors disqualify themselves if they aren’t the right fit (your sales team will thank you for this).

Benchmarketing your lead quality before a website redesign and regularly reassessing post-launch will help you accurately measure the impact of the redesign.

Simplify and scale content management

For teams constantly frustrated with how long it takes to edit or add web content, a website redesign is a game-changer.

We work with many SaaS companies that struggle with the back-end user experience. Here are just a few of the scenarios we see often:

• The website is integrated with Webflow CMS and the team can’t make global site changes
• The website was built with off-the-shelf WordPress templates that limit design, ability to scale, and performance
• The website was built with Elementor (WordPress block editor plugin) and pages are breaking left and right
• The website resource center has been edited by many different marketing teams over the years; the resource taxonomies are a mess and it’s hard for users to find the content most relevant to them

And that’s just scratching the surface. To make content management simpler, faster, and more flexible for marketing teams and their users, we implement component-based development. Instead of coding by page, we code by component. For example, a testimonial block is designed and developed so that it can be added anywhere on the website without redesigning the whole page.

Component-based development makes it easier for marketing teams to edit web content without requiring their agency to make every little change for them. This allows the agency to focus on high-value, high-urgency projects that further support your business objectives, ultimately optimizing your marketing spend.

Resource center cleanup is a big win too. Clearly structured and labeled taxonomies and intuitive filtering allow you to post valuable blog articles, white papers, guides, etc., and have confidence your users will find them.

Build the foundation for sales enablement and marketing collateral

If each member of your sales team is building their own assets, you may find that they stray from your brand visually or in messaging. It’s the brand edition of the game Telephone.

Identify brand updates made during the website redesign. Then apply them to your sales enablement toolkit and marketing collateral and create a consistent brand experience across every customer touchpoint.

Refine your brand personality

Brand personality and brand voice play a key role in differentiating your brand from your competitors. Brand voice is hard to define and even more challenging to consistently execute (especially if multiple writers are involved). A website redesign gives you the opportunity to work with copywriters to explore and express your unique brand voice on your website and create guidelines for all writers on your team.

Strengthen your employer brand

If your company is growing (or has high employee turnover), you can strengthen your employer brand on the website. Your Careers page (and in some cases, Team or Culture) gives potential new hires a window into what it’s like to work at your company. A compelling Careers page is incredibly important for scaling software companies that need to attract high-quality talent to support company growth.

Get bigger results, faster, with a website redesign

Remember that your website is an investment, not a one-time expense. The value generated from improvements to your business strategy, value proposition, lead volume and quality, content management, and more will continue to grow long after launch.

As you consider diving into a website redesign project, weigh the upfront cost against the expected and unexpected ROI:

• Refined business strategy
• Clear value proposition
• Memorable branding
• Streamlined user journey
• More qualified leads
• Scalable content management
• Consistent sales enablement and marketing collateral
• Differentiated brand personality
• Stronger employer brand

It’s tempting to chip away at website improvements over time. Instead, invest in building a website that sets you up to focus on optimizing results and maximizing ROI.