DMN3 Blog

What are you doing to create initial trust with online visitors to your website? Remember that without a certain level of trust, your visitors will leave without taking any actions. One way to instill trust is to minimize the perceived risk in the minds of your users. Here are some specific things you can do to calm their fears…

Perceived Risk: How do you mitigate risk on a website of an unknown company and brand?  An assessment of risk is taking place in the minds of browsers as they contemplate your Call to Actions (CTAs). Remember - it is in the minds of the consumer where you must focus your efforts. Perception, whether real or imagined, is reality to the consumer. Unless you take steps to mitigate it, visitors are unlikely to take the actions you want, i,e., convert. Establishing online trust is important to a good conversion rate. Taking specific steps to reduce the perceived risk of online users will result in higher conversion rates for your website.

Here are a few tactics you can use on your website:

Privacy Statement: Every website should have a privacy statement that informs visitors about what information will be collected and what will be done with it. Easy to read privacy policies give consumers peace of mind about sharing their personal information. Over time, as users become more secure with giving personal information online, there has been a decline in the overall importance of this issue relative to others. That does not mean it is still not important and that consumers expect it.

Reassurance Elements Adjacent to CTAs: Anytime you ask a visitor to take an action, "risk" is created in their minds. If asking for information, you should reassure them that you will protect their privacy. This reassurance information should be directly adjacent to the CTA so that it is in front of their eyes as they make that click of their mouse.

Request Only Essential Information: The more information you seek from a visitor, the greater the perceived risk. With that in mind, you should only seek the absolute minimum information necessary from the consumer for your marketing needs. Remember it is all about perception. Minimize the number of fields in forms and use design to minimize its perceived length. Use a horizontal format, which is putting fields across the form to shorten the length of the form. You might also consider collecting information in two stages. Acquire their e-mail address as the first stage before sending them to a page with a longer form. That way, if the visitor exits the longer form, you still have their e-mail address to do relationship marketing and establish trust over time.

Testimonials of Others That Took the Requested Action: I will address this in more detail in my next post dealing with reputation as a factor in establishing trust. The point here is to utilize testimonials to reassure consumers about the specific action they are about to take. If you are asking them for their e-mail address to subscribe to a newsletter, include a testimonial that addresses the value of the newsletter and the fact that the sign-up action resulted in valuable information and no spam. The key is to match the testimonial to the action you are asking them to take.

Show the Value First: Before you ask consumers to take action, explain the value associated with the action. How many times have you gone to a website, only to be told that you must give them information BEFORE you can look at a demo, talk to someone, see the product specs, etc.? How dumb is that? They are asking you for your information before they have demonstrated that the information related to the product or service may or may not be relevant or of value to you. Such a strategy only exaggerates the perceived risk rather than minimize it. Don't do it unless all you care about are only the most highly motivated visitors who think your product or service is the potential answer to their need. Do it only if you have a highly sought after brand or a monopoly on the product or service.

Use Third Party Security/Privacy Indicators: If you utilize third party services or applications to protect the information requested as part of your CTAs, then using the names and logos of these service providers will help reassure the consumer that you're serious about protecting their privacy. A VeriSign endorsement and seal is an example of a third party privacy credibility indicator.

If you do these things, you will have a head start in mitigating perceived risk and establishing trust with those Internet browsers who visit your site.

In my upcoming posts, I will discuss how Reputation and Site Quality increase trust, plus strategies on designing your website to increase initial trust levels needed for visitors to take the actions we want.