How Duda Helps Design Agencies Deliver More Value to Clients

When you’re running a web design agency, it’s important to always be mindful of the way prospective (and existing) clients perceive your business and the services you offer.

On the one hand, you want to to offer a constantly-widening array of services and growing your stable of clients. On the other hand, diversifying your services or offering enhanced experiences while growing your business can be difficult. 

Typically, this involves hiring more people and putting new processes into place, which can add to organizational bloat and result in decreased efficiency. The question is, with growing amounts of work on your plate, how do you manage to deliver these high-value experiences at scale?

Enter Duda – a website builder for professionals that’s equipped to handle the needs of growing and growth-minded web design agencies. In this article, we’ll take a look at how Duda enables design agencies to deliver more value to their clients and help them increase their perceived value in a cost-effective and scalable way.

Why Creative Design Agencies Need to Diversify Services for More Value

As an agency manager, you already know that marketing your services, selling to prospects and onboarding new clients takes a considerable amount of investment, so your projects that have longer durations are the ones that are most profitable. When you work on a limited scope, you don’t have enough of a chance to reach that “smooth sailing” phase of ongoing projects, where the top-heavy investment tapers off and the revenues are mostly profit.

It follows logically, then, that the wider the scope of your work engagements, the higher your profit margins. And it’s how your clients perceive your services that determines whether they’ll continue working with you or not.

Here are some of the main reasons why design agencies should diversify their offering to deliver more value to clients:

• Lets you grow your business. Offering additional services enables you to grow your business and makes it easier to attract more clients. Many prospective clients want full-service instead of having to source different tactics from multiple agencies.
• Increase customer retention and lifetime value. It‘s easier to retain existing clients than acquire new customers. Offering additional services to existing clients means you can work with them longer, taking pressure off of your sales channels to constantly bring in new clientele. Additionally, it helps you boost the lifetime value (LTV) of your clients.
• Extend your services post-launch. Thinking about web design as something that happens up to, but not beyond, a site launch, is basically leaving money on the table. There are many additional services that your clients will need once their website launches, such as hosting, traffic reporting and conversion rate optimization (CRO). Offering these services in a neat package can help you increase client LTV.
• Justify charging higher rates. Jacking up your prices without delivering more value creates a gap between promised value and delivered value. However, when you’re in a position to deliver more actual value, you can justify charging clients higher rates in exchange for full service. This way, you’ll also build long-term client relationships and secure more lucrative retainer agreements.

What’s more, the all-too-common orientation of agencies to sprint to launch, with the idea that they’ll likely never need to please the client again, isn’t necessarily the best way to motivate team members to deliver their best work. 

That said, design agencies typically don’t offer services like conversion rate optimization (CRO), site-wide analytics, or reliable website infrastructure, in-house. They partner with independent contractors, enlist third-party service providers, or sign up with third-party tools, which is a lot of management overhead.

But with Duda, agencies get a complete, fully white label-able solution that lets you do all these things from a single platform. Let’s dig deeper to see how Duda can help you boost your agency’s perceived value.

Share Automated Analytics Reports

Sharing analytics reports with clients enables them to make better business decisions. They’re able to understand how much traffic their site is getting from what sources and to what pages, driving what types of engagement and conversions. This enables them to stay up to date about the performance of their marketing efforts.

Here’s how Duda helps you share analytics reports with clients:

• Share segmented site stats with clients. You can share website stats like how many visits were made to individual pages, how visitors interact with their site, where they came from, the web browser and operating system they used, as well as their geolocation.
• Make it easy for clients to gain insight by setting up info at a glance and event tracking. Duda lets you give your clients a quick overview of the key information they need to learn about their site’s conversion performance.
• Send clients stats summaries via email. Your clients can directly access all website stats from the Duda dashboard or sign up to receive stats summaries via email. You can even set both reporting channels up to be completely white labeled with your branding, reinforcing your agency’s value with every visit to the backend and every weekly email open.

Build Progressive Web Apps

Building a PWA is also a great way to increase your agency’s perceived value. PWAs bring enhanced content experiences to the table, and compared to native apps, they use up less data, can work offline, but still deliver an app-like user experience.

There are several cases where your clients might be better off with a PWA rather than a native mobile app. For example, your clients can:

• Stay clear of app marketplace approval processes, code restrictions and fees with PWAs, and let users install the app directly from the web browser.
• Deliver mobile-friendly user experiences without having to spend a lot of money on app development.
• Try out traditionally app-only features (like push notifications) without committing to a native mobile app.

Here’s how Duda helps you build a PWA for clients, at no additional cost:

• Build client websites using Duda and simply enable the PWA version. With Duda, you can instantly build a PWA simply by activating the one-click PWA feature from your site’s settings tab. The key benefit of PWAs is that visitors won’t need to install the app in order to launch it from their homescreens and can instead access your site even if they aren’t connected to the internet.
• Configure PWA settings. Once you’ve enabled the PWA, Duda lets you configure its name, short name, icon, and splash screen background color. That’s it – you’re all set, and your client now has a PWA.

Implement Lazy Loading to Speed Up Websites

Another way to increase your agency’s perceived value is by speeding up client websites. Your clients need fast-loading websites to improve user experience and increase their search engine rankings. It also saves them from having to hire third-party developers or technical onsite SEO specialists to optimize their sites for speed post-launch.

Here are some of the ways that Duda’s platform speeds up websites by leveraging lazy loading:

• Lazy load all images below the fold. When a user lands on a webpage, only the images located on the top of a web page are loaded, while the rest are set to load either once the rest of the page has finished loading or once each one comes into view as the audience member scrolls downward.
• Lazy load CSS and widgets. Duda loads CSS stylesheets once a page has finished loading. This way, the web browser can better prioritize new styles and decide when they should be loaded and displayed on a page.

Every website build with Duda is automatically optimized for Google PageSpeed, according to the latest Lighthouse 3.0 standards, when it’s published. But lazy loading is just one of the reasons Duda-powered websites averaged a ten-point Lighthouse score boost once the company rolled out lazy loading last summer. The next section below includes more details.

Provide Reliable (and Fast) Website Infrastructure

Offering a robust and reliable website infrastructure is a great way to amplify your offering at arm’s length without having to worry about a lot of management overhead. 

Your clients won’t have to pay extra for website infrastructure such as hosting, as you can include these services in your design package and charge a higher rate.

Here are some reasons why Duda-powered websites have superior infrastructure:

• Duda sites are hosted on AWS. Every Duda website is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is one of the most secure and highly-trusted cloud-based services. Plus, it doesn’t have any limits on storage or bandwidth.
• Duda sites come with free SSL and global CDN. All Duda websites come with SSL certificates that can be installed with a single click. This allows you to build sites on https, as opposed to the less trusted and less SEO-friendly http. The platform’s CDN stores heavier media files on servers around the world, so that audience members can see them render with minimal lag time.

Duda also gives you all the tools required to make your websites GDPR compliant, including customizable cookie notifications, a privacy policy template, and opt-in confirmation checkboxes for lead capture forms. 

It also enables you to create site backups of an existing website version before making any changes to a client’s site, allowing you to restore a previous version any time you want.

Offer Ongoing Conversion Rate Optimization Services

Another way you can deliver more value to customers and retain them in the long term is by offering on-going CRO services.

For example, you can offer regular website personalization and A/B testing services while charging each client a higher rate.

Duda allows you to offer dynamic web content personalization as a service to your clients. You can set a number of triggers (e.g. visitor’s geolocation or number of visits) and actions (e.g. pop-ups or notifications) to deliver a personalized browsing experience to each visitor based on their interactions and other data signals.

Duda also brings a number of e-commerce capabilities to your arsenal, enabling you to further increase the total value of your offering. These include setting a maximum and minimum purchase for checkout, coupons for individual products or an entire order, more than 30 payment options (e.g. Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net), tracking codes for reporting marketing performance, display discounts to boost conversions, and an integrated design that implements the same color schemes and font styles as the rest of the website.

Conclusion

We looked at some of the different ways design agency managers can boost their business’s perceived value using Duda. The all-in-one platform offers designers access to a suite of powerful tools that can help them build better sites faster and increase customer retention and lifetime value.