Hi guys, Kurt here from Convertica. Today, we’re going to go through and talk about trust badges, but namely how to build trust on your website. Now in 2021, it’s a lot more than just adding a few free shipping icons, safe checkout badges, and so on. That stuff will work, and we will talk about that a bit later, but at the foundation, you need a website that’s trustworthy. And how is it that some websites you can visit straight away, they instantly have your trust. Well, there’s a certain few things that they’ve done that enable that, just like in real life, you can instantly trust someone through a few indicators, through eye contact, through the way they’re talking, how they’re talking about things. The same thing is true with the internet. You just need to know what to focus on, but we’re going to show you sort of the 80/20 of what works.

Just going to go and show you some examples of credibility icons and trust icons so that you can see exactly what I mean in a real life scenario. So here’s our homepage and website. So instantly you can see our offer, and then a free audit. Straight below the offer and the lead magnet we have our first trust badge, which is from Trustpilot four point of five, we’re at an excellent, they can also click over straightaway. Then they can click over and see all of our reviews. So we’ve set up a system in house so that at the end of every campaign, we go through and ask the customers to leave a review. That means these are all legitimate, so it helps to further reinforce, and we have quite a few views of this. We track how many people click over to that. And we have it on a few other areas, like on our signature of our emails, you want to reinforce them and make them feel secure at every part of the process.

So we further go down the page, featured on further reinforced by a brand. So they’re all very relevant to customers that we work with. And then I’ve actually gone through and pulled off different reviews from Trustpilot, especially from people that are well known in our industry, so that helps legitimacy. So again, we’ve got our offer, trust icon, trust badges. We haven’t really got into too much of what we do. So we’ve split tested this page a lot, and this is what converts best.
And then if at any point they’re ready to claim their free audit. They can also click here and they can also go and click over and see the trust areas again. Case studies, so we’ve also case studies that we’ve done from client we’ll go through in detail and show exactly step-by-step what we did on each of these customer websites. And then a bit more about what we do and then where they can follow us on social. So from the feedback, from how many customers sign up with us without getting on the phone and just signing up with us directly over email, means that this is working, it means that the credibility of our website is coming across well to the audience.

So when I’m doing customer calls, the main question that comes up, especially for new businesses is, if I haven’t sold new products yet, how do I get reviews? Because reviews are the most powerful. Out of all the trust badges, nothing beats reviews from other people, especially real ones of course. You don’t want just to fall into the trap of buying reviews off Fiverr or something. You eventually will get found out, so you need to legitimately sell your product, provide your service, get real reviews, to reassure new customers that your service is legitimate and so on. So what do you do if you haven’t sold any products or services yet? What is the first step?

So what I did at Convertica was when I started the company, we didn’t have any customers that we’d worked with, but I needed to get a website set up ASAP. So I went out to three or four influences in my circles or three or four people that I knew that had established businesses, and I did conversion rate optimization for free for them. So we went out there, we ran AB tests, we optimized their funnels, we got conversion rates, and the agreement was we would do it for free if an exchange we were able to do a case study on their website. Now it’s very important that we did it on their website, because that further builds trust. You can put anything you like on your website.

So that’s step one, go out and reach out to businesses or influencers that you know that you can do work or provide a service or send a product for free in exchange for not only a guest post on their website or a review of the service, but you can also get a review off them. So there’s no point in just getting people to leave a review for you on your website, if they haven’t used their service. So legitimately get them to leave a review by providing the service.

So step two is obviously get reviews, but it’s not as simple as just going out there and asking people willy nilly for reviews your product, you need to set up a system in place. So how we do it is we go through at the end of every campaign with Convertica and we ask them to leave a review. We send them to our Trustpilot and they can jump over, leave a review. And we use Trustpilot because it’s a very trustworthy source. They have moderated reviews. So people who leave spammy reviews, like on Google reviews, they get them removed. So for instance, we had a illegitimate one-star review from a competitor sometime ago, I contacted Trustpilot and said, “Look, we don’t have any record of that customer.” They were asked to provide proof that they’d worked with us, and they couldn’t. So the one-star review was removed.

Now, I know people have had some issues with Google reviews and other providers, but because we have a paid corporate account with Trustpilot, they were able to do that for us. So it further legitimizes the review on one of these platforms. Someone is finding your website, they’re doing research. They’re going to go out and look at 3, 4, 5, even up to 10 different providers of the same service you provide and decide which one’s best based off a few factors like price. But trust is one of the most important parts of this process, because they’re about to exchange money with you for someone they’ve never met from behind the screen. So doing these tactics, like getting reviews, or offering your service or product for free to people who are well-known in the circles that you hang around in, even if you don’t know them, you can reach out to them and offer your product or service for free in exchange for our review and see how that goes too, but they have to legitimately use it.

So the last one that I want to talk about is trust badges in themselves. So we’ve gone through and written a large article on our blog, which I’ll link below about actual specific badges on your website that you can share to further reduce anxiety, I guess. Someone’s coming through, for example, an e-commerce website and they’re going to put their credit card details into your website without knowing anything about you.

So after the reviews and the case studies and building legitimacy around your business, they’ve gone, “Okay, these guys are the ones I want to work with. You don’t want to lose them at that last stage because you’ve won them over. You’ve won them over with trust and legitimacy. You don’t want to lose them because, A, your site’s slow or it doesn’t feel safe, or you don’t want to raise that anxiety level where they leave and go with someone else. So, here is a list of things that we like to use that have proven to work well on client’s website.

So go on over to Google and type in trust badges into Google images. And just to show you a few examples of what I mean. So having these near the add-to-cart button or the buy-now button further reinforces, subconsciously mainly, maybe not low pixelated ones like this, but if you can even make your own, it helps a lot, but further reinforces and makes the customer secure without them even realizing it. So these work really well, we’ve tested these a lot on big e-commerce websites, and they can sometimes have 10%, 15% increase just from testing these, obviously before, they didn’t have them, and then having reviews near the add-to-cart button also works really well.

So how we like to do it on e-commerce websites is three or four features and benefits about the product, and a add-to-cart button with these credibility indicators just below it.

And then a small review. It doesn’t even have to be the whole review. So it doesn’t take up too much room, but a review about the product directly below the add-to-cart button works really well. And you can do the more in-depth product description way below, but you want to hit all these things. Because a lot of the time, people don’t want to go and read a huge sales letter about your product. They just want to know that it’s right for them and they’ll go ahead and buy.
So yeah, you can just find all these different types of credibility indicators. Obviously you don’t want to use ones that aren’t valid on your website, like authorized.net if you’re not using them, but these PayPal verified work fine, Stripe icons and so on work really well.

People in 2021 are much more trusting of buying online than they were say 10, 15 years ago, but you still need to give them some sort of security. A lot of time they won’t even see the trust badges, but in their subconscious, they’re like, “This feels safer.” I’m sure you’ve had that before where you jump on a website and go, “Yeah, these guys are legitimate. Let’s buy with them,” but you don’t actually know why. So number one is have your HTTP secure. So make sure that you have a SSL installed, and your developer can help you with this or hire a developer to do it, but you need to make sure you have that little padlock next to your website, because a lot of browsers these days are actually setting off alarm, so that would be the first one. And the great thing is a lot of the hosting comes with this out of the box. You might just need a little bit of configuration.

The next one is if you’ve got a product page or a place where someone can buy your service, near where the user has to add-to-cart or buy your service have a few credibility icons to help further reassure them they’re going to have a safe journey. So MasterCard, PayPal icons, secure checkout lock icons. You can find these with just a quick Google, very easy to install. And even if you have an extra third party security like Norton SSL or Comodos, another one, these work really well too. And some other things that work really well is if you’ve got a returns policy or a quick shipping or free shipping, further reinforces too.

When that person’s at the point where they’re like, “Okay,” they’re going to, “I’m going to buy your product. I want to add it to cart,” you want to make them feel safe and secure, and that’s what these icons do. So the next step is they’ve decided to add it to cart and buy your product, the checkout page and the add-to-cart on an e-commerce website need to also have these credibility badges to further reinforce.

The worst thing you want to do is lose the person at the add-to-cart stage, where they’re already decided to buy, and you make it too confusing, or there’s too many call to action buttons. Make sure you have one call to action button that goes through, that’s nice and evident. Sometimes you see three or four buttons, choose different shipping. They can go back to the shop page. There’s a bunch of different modes. Just have continue or next or check out as the only option, if you can to go to the checkout page. Now another one on the checkout page, have all of these things … we even like to leave reviews on the checkout page too, to reinforce and reiterate to the person how good our product or service is so that they don’t bounce and leave.