In my previous blog posts on increasing increasing conversions, I’ve always stressed on the importance of design. Why is design so important? Well, because the first thing your prospects see when they land on your letter is NOT your compelling headline, it’s your design.
They first notice the overall feel of a copy.
And if you’ve made a bad first impression… you know what happens. In the bin it goes. Or in the case of a web copy, away they go in a click. That’s what happen for most flashy ads. We don’t even read their headlines anymore… heck, for most of the time, we don’t even notice them anymore!
Wait a minute Andre… those ads are designed by professional designers who went to design school for a few years, are you telling me you’re better at designing than they are?
Listen. You have to understand that designers have been trained to make things look pretty in design school… and so most of them have a tendency to make things look pretty. Most of them are trying to win design awards so as to boost their career.
But you’re in business to make your ads look pretty or to win awards, are you? You’re in business to make money. And pretty don’t necessarily mean more money.
So it doesn’t matter if you design your copy yourself… or you get a designer to do it for you: The basic principles of design to sell is a must-know for any entrepreneur. It’s only when you know it yourself that you can guide your designers.
6 Principles of Design To Sell?
So if design isn’t meant to make your ads look pretty, what is it for?
Take a look at the ad to the right. It’s an ad by David Ogilvy, the man who founded the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency. What makes that ad wildly successful other than the copy?
Principle #1: Designs that sell are invisible
If you weren’t a trained designer, you wouldn’t have seen the design doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. It looks just like an ordinary editorial yet nothing in the ad is an accident. That ad is the result of countless testing.
Principle #2: Designs that sell amplify the message, not fight for the attention of the readers
If it’s invisible, what’s great about it? I mean, if you can’t see it, what’s the point of it, right?
The point of the attention is to amplify the message. The copy. Pretty designs fight for attention of the customer. And guess what sells? It’s the message. So if your prospects looked at your ad and gasped, “This looks great!”, you’ve just failed.
If your prospects looked at your ad and gasped, “This looks great!”, you’ve just failed.
But what do I mean by “amplify”? That means your design have to make it so that your message is in their easiest form to be consumed by your prospects. In other words: it should increase the readability and scannability of your copy.
Principle #3: Designs that sell have clear visual hierarchy
The most crucial rule of readability, in my opinion, is hierarchy. That means your readers should be able to clearly see which element is the headline, which is the sub-headline and which is the body. There should be no two different elements that look exactly the same.
Again, look at the Rolls Royce ad. There’s a big image right at the top of the hierarchy to grab attention, followed by the headline, subhead then the body. It’s clear where he wants the eye to flow: Top-down.
Principle #4: Designs that sell have but one dominant visual element
For you to have a clear visual hierarchy you need an unquestionably dominant visual element. In the case of the Rolls Royce ad, which did your eyes go first when you first looked at it. The picture! It’s by far, the unquestionable dominant visual element.
There’s no confusion as to what the readers should look at first. If you look at most ads today, most of them would have multiple equally dominant visual element - and that confuses readers as to what they should look at first.
Principle #5: Designs that sell follow natural reading gravity
We’ve all been trained to read from top down and left to right. So remember not to position the most dominant visual element on the right or the bottom because it contradicts what people are already used to. The big image of the Rolls Royce ad is on the top of the ad, not the bottom.
I can’t believe how many advertisers like to place their headline above their huge image… it makes a reader first look at the image then go back up to read the headline and then skip the image down to the body. That takes a lot of subconscious work.
Principle #6: Designs that sell are results of extensive testing
These principles hold only if you’ve tested them. If your tests reveal breaking these “rules” results in greater conversion, then stick to them. Fact is, sometimes a radical design do convert better but make sure you track the results.
If you have a clear hierarchy, how long a reader stays on your copy could reveal problem areas you might previously have not discovered.
In the case of online conversion, I use Affiliate Prophet to test not only my web copy, I also use it to test my designs because Affiliate Prophet can not only perform multivariate testing, it also tracks how long a reader stays on your web copy. If you have a clear hierarchy, how long a reader stays on your copy could reveal problem areas you might previously have not discovered.
So there, 6 simple principles of designing to sell. If you do it right, you could skyrocket your conversion without changing a word in your copy. Do you have any other tips on designing? Care to share it in the comments section?
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