Simple Techniques to Build Trusted Website
Recent studies have shown that when people and potential customers visit a website, businesses and entrepreneurs have around 6 seconds to create a positive impression with them. Visitors only spend about 200 milliseconds checking the colors, layout of the site as well as its density, and decide if they think they can be comfortable on the site.
Visitors will only spend less than three seconds checking the website, which includes its grammar, assets, and the full content that they may find interesting about. Additional three seconds will be spent on checking for interactive links to see if there is anything useful on the website. This six-second process makes the visitors decide right away whether a website can be trustworthy or not.
The six-second process is an extreme short period of time to convince visitors that your website is trustworthy and worth purchasing from. Building trust with the users for only six seconds while increasing the marketing strategy as well as reliability is important. What are the factors that a business must have to promote reliability? What kind of value do the contents on your page have?
1. Testimonials
Consumers start to trust a business through recommendations from family, friends, and from experts. Testimonials are most trusted when endorsed by a real person, with a face, voice, and a name which creates a genuine source that potential customers can identify. Real recommendations and testimonials that are posted on your website can also become a basis across numerous marketing channels, such as email marketing and social media. These testimonials are powerful trust builders for any kind of business.
Tools on your webpage that allow customers to leave honest feedbacks are important to help potential customers have a glimpse of other customers’ experiences and encourage the undecided people to make a conversion.
With the recommendation and testimonials section on your webpage, it can lead to an increase in conversion rates as well as customer satisfaction. Example of this is a watch retailer, Express Watches. If the customers are posting their concerns about the price, security and quality of the watches, the company takes immediate steps to diminish the customers’ worries. By knowing the customers’ concerns, businesses can immediately take actions of what to do to and satisfy their customers.
Express Watches created a section for testimonials and recommendations on each product, which resulted to improved conversions by 58.39%. This shows that you can always diminish the fears of your customers on your own.
2. Design
Your first point of contact to many potential consumers is your website. This means that your website is responsible for creating positive impressions to all visitors about the credibility of your business. An organized design that is professional-looking allows all visitors to determine that your business is legal and will not disappear anytime. Your website design is another trust factor that helps in building trust with the visitors even before they make any interaction with your site. If your business does not make any investment to have a professional looking website, potential customers may look elsewhere for a similar service or product.
Experiences of users are dominant when trying to build credibility. If a visitor has to click many times when searching for a product or service information, they will surely get unsatisfied and will look for the same product or service in different sites. Creating a website with easy navigation can increase the satisfaction of users’ experience while on your website.
It is incredibly valuable to make sure that the website’s design is professional with easy navigation. An example is Daily Burn, a fitness site. Even when they had a professional website that builds the trust of many customers, the navigation was not created orderly and many people tend to get irritated while looking for information. To solve this problem, Daily Burn decreased the number of navigation options to make it easier for customers to navigate the website.
With the new variation, the sign up rate on the website increased by around 20.45% by just making the website easier to navigate while keeping the professional layout.
3. Business Information
Another great way of building trust with all users is providing the business information. Stating the contact information of the business like phone number and business address lets the visitors know that you have a legal office space with real employees. To allow visitors to contact you, simply list the business address, phone number and e-mail address on your contact page. Letting them know that you are really an actual human being that they can talk to in case they faced any issues and fears can help in building trust with them.
Showing that you are actively hiring to make your business grow is another business information asset. Searching continuously for the highest quality employees builds credibility and proves that you are a business that will exist for a long period of time.
Investing time on creating the “About Us” page is one of the best ways to provide business information. This page describes the business and shows names of the employees, and if possible, faces as well. Showing the employees’ names and describing your company allows the visitors to have an idea about how the business runs. Being honest with your visitors and customers will increase your trustworthiness, which will make them navigate from your “About Us” page to purchase the product or service page.
An example that shows the importance of providing business information is Tomedes, a translation service company. The Tomedes team exerted enough time and effort to check their site reports and noticed that many visitors abandoned their “About Us” page. This helped them focus on improving their credibility in “About Us” page.
Their “About Us” page was transformed into a more attention grabbing page and truthful information is provided. The transparency and information of the business helped the company to increase their overall conversion rates by 13%. People are able to trust the company after knowing the background or history of the business as well as its employees.
Business information has to be considered in your website. Maybe you have well-written information in your “About Us” page, but the provision of contact details also need to be showed in other pages.
4. Certifications / Awards
Certificate and Awards is another effective factor for building credibility to visitors, which proves that you are a reputable business with outstanding achievements in your industry. This helps the visitors and potential consumers to feel more secure when visiting your website and filling out their personal and contact information.
We as LeadVy company conducted an experiment for our “Request a Quote” form, which consumers see when they contact us for a quote about our services. The original form had a picture stating that: “Your information will not be shared with any 3rd parties under any circumstances.” To make a change, we replaced the message in the same location with a VeriSign Trusted business seal.
There was a huge difference after the changes. There was an increase by 81% in form fills from organic and non-branded search traffic. The logo that is certified helped the webpage build trust with consumers instead of saying “trust us”. This is important to make new visitors who were not willing to make a purchase to make a conversion.
5. Case Studies
Another great way to attract your potential consumers is case studies. Your case studies with quantifiable results can attract more potential consumers instead of telling them how good your services and products are. This is useful for businesses that are offering services because it clearly shows the potential customers how your work has been valuable to your clients.
You help your service or product appear more reliable to potential consumers by showing that your service has done positive outcomes for others in the past. This builds trust between you and the users who will trust the service enough to convert.
6. Social Media
One of the best trust building gears for businesses is the social media. You can talk directly to your customers and show potential customers that you are a responsive business that responds promptly to the needs and other concerns of your customers. Having a social media platform lets you share articles, which can be shared by the users. When they share the articles, more potential consumers will trust your business and may engage with you.
How valuable it is to be active on various social media? It increases the conversion rate on your site up to 400%. It helps the people and potential customers to feel secure knowing that your business is legitimate.
7. Guarantees
Guarantees are one of the techniques to convince people to purchase a product or service. When done correctly, delivery, return and satisfaction guarantees can be long-term trusting relationship with you and your consumers. Your promises will make them feel confident on making a purchase from you.
Giving users a free trial of the product is another way to give them a satisfaction guarantee. It may seem like a bad idea because it could diminish the number of people who would actually buy the whole product, but these free trials are actually a great way to introduce your product or service and spread the brand awareness. This increases your customer base.
One example is from GetResponse, which is an email marketing platform. They offered a free trial service that was purposely hidden from their front page. Instead of displaying the free trial, only “Buy Now” is displayed for the concern that the free trials may make a negative impact on the amount of signups for the paid version.
Then, the front page was change and added the Free Trial next to Buy Now. Adding a free trial button next to the “Buy Now” option increased the number of free accounts by an overwhelming 156.60%.
Adding the free trial option next to the buy now option had no negative impact on the number of paid accounts made on the homepage. This case study shows that adding a satisfaction guarantee is another great way to build trust with potential customers.
8. External Links
Building trust with customers through the third party relationships is the same as with using trust certifications. The customers are not only concerned about being verified by another bigger business, but they also need a proof that your business is working with recognizable brands. This means that providing external links to other websites like trusted news sources and articles that write their working experiences with you will be a good action. This lets the potential customers see that even those businesses who are not essentially affiliated with your business still have positive things to say about you.
External links that are pointing at your website are significant as it builds trust. If you have posts that are linked to scam websites, your website’s credibility will be ruined as well as the chances of any potential conversion. When including external links, make sure that they are reliable sources that you want your business to be associated with.
Sharing external links with third party relationships can also increase the sales of your business. In the example of Bag Servant, an online retailer, they replaced the homepage’s Twitter button with a badge awarded to them by another business. This increased their rate of conversion by 72.05% and the engagement is increasing continuously by 10.27%. The customers’ exploration increased by 60.42%.
Many websites know that they need to have these trust factors. They are overlooked by potential customers because sometimes the webpages do not seem to provide enough for customers’ satisfaction and trust building. The examples given above clearly show that implementing the assets on your website with the best strategies can increase the brand’s credibility and results to higher conversions. Lacking any of the valuable trust factors on your website may cause your potential customers to slip out of your grasp.
Utilize these trust factors to gain trust from your visitors and potential consumers.
