So the next time we go to a restaurant together please don’t ever ask me to order the bottle of wine, I definitely rely on my wife to provide that expertise, I just have no idea about you know what goes with what, what’s a value proposition and versus a crap wine, or which region I should choose, all of that sort of thing, I just have no idea about, so thank you Di for that. But when she does sends me to the bottle shop to buy bottle wine, then she’s putting her taste buds at risk! I use two methods to choose wine, one is price and the other is the label. So what am I looking for in the label? Well it’s got to be a quality design obviously a bit of a design head, But second is the number of medals that are on the wine bottle it’s subconsciously telling me that hey the more medals the better the wine so I’m looking at the more medals and a pretty good price! Is that going to make sense? It might, but it may not, but from a visual perspective I’m engaged same thing applies on your website.
There are elements in your design, and elements within the page of our websites that you need to think about to instil trust, we’ve only got 2 to 5 seconds to really embed that in the mind of the user, so let’s have a look at some of those elements. The first one is “brand”. So is the site professional? Is that logo quality? Is there a match between the quality of the business you’re trying to present matching to the audience that they’re coming to it? What is that design proposition and is there a good match there. Sometimes you know if you’ve gone really budget you’ve going to miss some quality buyers. There’ll be a price mismatch between other design elements of the product and the user’s expectations of the site.
The second is speed, so speed is really really important a recent study by the Ponemon Institute suggest that 78% of users distrusted a site that was slow to load. So really investigate your site speed and you’ll find that if people have a nice experience on the side and moving around the site efficiently there’s not too many delays, yeah it’s might be choppy occasionally but you know get those images serving quickly get people being able to move through at a reasonable speed and that will make a difference in the trust-building component.
The third is security. So in the URL (that’s a lock!). In the URL on your side you’ll see a little lock green lock and you know it’s an indication of an SSL certificate being on your website this is again a subconscious thing knowing that there’s an identity check with this site that is now transferring data in our secure environments in encrypted way. so it’s an easy way to instill trust without too much hassle.
The fourth one is “client logos”. So here’s a client logo. It’s real easy when you turn up to a side if you’ve got case studies org and and logo is related to that match the prospect coming to the site. So get those in alignment get those logos on your site and you’ll find that there’s a real connection there it’s again it’s subtle it’s design element, it doesn’t take a lot of work but there’s a connection there with ‘hey you’ve worked with X, therefore I would really want to work with you as well”. So make the effort to gather those logos and get them on your site.
The fifth component is “Awards”. Little trophy here. So awards again you can display an award of on above the fold in your homepage when it loads the first time. Don’t bury them down in your footer get them above the site. “Oh yeah these these guys have won an award they must be good!”. It builds that connection, other logos you can use are warranties and guarantee logos, stamps, ISO Accreditations, anything related that has a logo attached to it that you can embed in the site as people scroll down will make a difference. One of the key ones in recent research stated that users were 34 percent more likely to opt in for a free consult if there was a photo of a real person on the site… the person offering the consult was the person in the image offering the consult.That seems really realistic to me but there’s a huge trend to you stock imagery instead of real real imagery of the business. So invest the time, get a good photo shoot done, get real people on your site. Make it real! You know, real contact details, real people on the site that people can connect with, you’re doing business with people people connect with people, build that trust with real imagery.
And last but not least, it is really important is Awards, five star reviews, I’m sorry, not awards… “five star reviews and testimonials”. So we don’t want one star! We want five stars, don’t we! but we could use Google reviews or third-party sites like Trustpilot to display reviews that you know you’ve don’t you’ve done the work people have been happy with your work, they’re willing to write a review on Google or these third-party tools that people love to hear someone else telling you that you’re good so if you’re just telling people hey we’re really good, we’re really good there’s no trust there. If someone else says it…then there’s a recommendation there that you were more likely to engage with, so don’t ignore reviews and testimonials make the effort to collect them and then give permission to use them on your site and other elements of your business that’ll make a huge difference.
So here’s here’s your trust wheel. All of these elements go in to building that trust within a very short space of time and you’ll engage more users and reduce your bounce rate. So we’d love to hear any more ideas about what elements you use to build trust on your site, please put them in the comments below and start the conversation!