Building Trust with your Site Visitors: Digital Psychology and Persuasion Review
Why is the conversion rate of Amazon better than your E-commerce store? You are also selling almost the same products at the same or even lower prices. Still, people go to Amazon instead of just shopping from your site. The answer to all of these questions is “Trust”. They trust Amazon, they have shopped at Amazon multiple times and never ran into a problem. In this article, we will look at different factors that can help you build trust on your site as discussed in CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion mini-degree.
Relevant Design:
You see I have mentioned Relevant design not great design or creative design or something like that. This is one of the most common mistakes by businesses out there. They will look at a very creative website and they will start pestering their development team that I want a website same as that website. Without realizing the relevance of that design to their business.
Amazon has a great website, Bank of America has a great website and salesforce also has a great website but if Amazon was to get their website redesigned as Bank of America, it would be a total disaster because that design is irrelevant to their business.
Verifiable Information:
Make sure that any kind of information you give on your website is verifiable. I have seen this too many times that a business has a section on their website titled “We have been featured in” and logos of different publications without linking to the article or review.
Users come to the site and think that maybe they are using fake logos and they are not featured on this website.
Show them that you are real:
People want to know that they are dealing with humans and a simple founders story page can pass that message to your users. You can also have a page with pictures of your team with short stories about your employees, this can help you pass a simple yet very effective message to your customers that we are real humans and they are not being treated by bots and automated processes.
You can provide custom stories about your employees too. You can talk about their hobbies, their experiences, what they like to do in their free time, etc.
Prove your expertise:
Simple certification logos can go a long way. A simple HIPAA compliance logo has proven an increase in conversion rates of medical websites up to 30%. Try to get different certifications for your business and then show those logos on your website. This will make your customer trust your website more because now they know that these certification bodies trust this business and so should the customer.
Ease of contact:
Whenever I am buying services from a business, ease of contact is one of the topmost priorities for me and the same is for many customers of yours. You have to pass your message to your customers that you can buy from us with full trust and if anything goes wrong, you can easily contact us through this contact form or live chat or email, or a phone call.
One of the biggest mistakes you will see with businesses is that they will just have a contact form and that’s it. Customers have a mindset about contact forms that when you submit a request using the contact form, It can take a lot of time to get resolved. That’s why mentioning other ways of contact is very important.
Ease of use:
You need to show your customers that they can avail of your service easily and whatever task they are performing can be easily performed. If you are increasing the cognitive load of a customer, He will trust your site less.
Ease of use is the most important factor in building trust and just making small changes to your processes can get you huge changes in conversion rates.
Updated Information on Website:
If people see that the last activity on your website was 2 years ago. They will think that this business is not active and they will not be able to provide me the adequate service promptly.
You need to have updated information on your site, You can achieve this by
- Updating your articles to the current year (People are not interested in Best Tools for 2013, They want listings for 2021)
- Publish new content daily
- You can add the section of a recent blog on your website
- Publish new content on your social media channels
- Make sure any kind of research references in your content are up to date
Limit Ads on your website:
If you are a publication that earns by ads. Take care of your ad real estate and have a close look at the behavior of people on your website. I have seen many websites where ads are spamming their visitors and making the user experience very irritating.
Another problem with ads is mostly ads use flashy images, contrast, and other techniques to get people’s attention and in doing so they increase the cognitive load of the users and the user ends up closing the site or start looking for the information elsewhere.
Even some big names in the industry like Forbes suffers from this problem. Sometimes ads on their website are covering the content which makes it very hard for users to read that article.
Avoid Errors:
Simple errors on a website can have a huge impact on the trust factor. The most common problems in websites are
- Broken Images
- Images covering text
- Broken Links
- Technical Errors
- Security Errors
- Missing SSL Certificate
When the user encounters these problems it increases their cognitive load which in turn reduces the chances of users trusting you.
Conclusion:
You need the streamline the experience of the user on your website, A user should be able to easily perform the desired action on your website. As we already discussed in our previous articles, your goal should be to not let a user think. When he starts thinking, it will increase the cognitive load which in turn decreases the trust, which results in a decrease in conversion rates.