How to increase conversions by reducing your visitors perceived risk
Dec.19.2009 
One of marketing’s most important functions is to reduce the level of perceived risk a potential customer may have about your service or product. Weighing up ‘risk’ is a big part of the consumer’s decision making process, sometimes it can happen in an instant (e.g. low cost or regularly purchased items such as baked beans) or sometimes it can take months or years (e.g. one off high value items such as buying a house), and everything else in between.
There are 6 different types of risk:
- Physical risk (Will it physically hurt them or anyone else?)
- Functional risk (Will it work how they want it to?)
- Social risk (Is it socially acceptable within their circle?)
- Psychological risk (How does the product fit in with their perception of themselves?)
- Financial risk (Can they afford it?)
- Time risk (Is the time it takes to buy the product worth the effort?)
Your aim should be to use your website to provide visitors with the information they need to overcome their perceived risk.
Contact us, find us & about us pages
No one likes to spend money with a faceless company with no clear way of getting in touch if there are any problems. Easy to find ‘contact us’ and if you have offices, ‘find us’ pages show people there is someone on the other side. Equally ‘about us’ pages help to put you and your website in to context along with adding a personal touch, especially if you use photos of yourself.
Money back guarantee
The inability to see a product or touch it is one of the major hurdles people have to get over when purchasing online and a product can look very different in the real world to the image on the website. You can help reduce the financial risk by allowing them to return it and get their money back. This also goes for services.
Demo of product
In a similar vein to the point above, screen shots are not always enough for some visitors. Being able to ‘test drive’ the service before they commit to a purchase is a major plus for many visitors and will increase your conversion rate.
3rd party endorsements
Having your product endorsed by a business or personality well regarded in your field will reduce psychological and social risk by creating a sense of trust through your association with them. This can be as simple as listing your blue chip suppliers (e.g. Microsoft) all the way up to getting a celebrity on board (e.g. a football apparel website hiring a footballer)
Testimonials, case studies & customer comments
Being able to see there are existing (happy) customers is important to potential customers because they don’t want to feel they are alone. You can help to Increase the credibility of any comments and/ or testimonials with the person’s names, links to follow and putting the date of their comment to show how fresh they are.
Heritage
The knowledge you are dealing with an established and stable brand is important to customers because they associate that with being trustworthy. Few website owners can claim “Since 1908” but because the internet is so new and sites come and go so quickly, a web site as recent as “since 2004” can feel like an old horse!
Search Engine Tips – Protect your SERP
Whenever someone searches for your brand name using a search engine, they are also being shown 9 organic results on the search engine results page (SERP) that may not be your site and maybe even another 9 paid results for competitors bidding on your brand name, which means you could be competing with a total of 18 other results that aren’t your site!
To ensure the searcher a) comes directly to your website and b) doesn’t see any negative entries that can creep in to the top 10 results, it is important that you use as wide a range of branded content as possible for the search engines to spider and rank. Taking your position at number one in the SERP organic section as red, below are other methods to ensure you dominate your brand searches.
Paid search top result
It may seem strange to bid on your own brand name when you already have top organic position but with clicks likely to be as low as 5p to 20p per click you should view it as an investment in online real estate. Eye tracking research shows that people’s eyes start at the top of the SERP and as you go down the page fewer and fewer people look at that area (see the research here). By having two entries at the top you are increasing the likelihood of a click and forcing other results further below the fold. You are also blocking anyone else bidding for the top paid spot on your brand name.
Put your blog on a sub domain
Google views sub-domains as separate entities to the main site which gives you a great opportunity to get a 2nd entry in the organic results by naming your blog something along the lines of http://blog.domain.com
Create a Facebook page
A well populated and linked to (e.g. from your main website) Facebook company profile should see your Facebook profile be shown high in the rankings. To set up a business profile go here http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Wikipedia page
Although the terms state that you are not allowed to write an entry about an organisation you are associated with, let’s be honest, it happens all the time. There are too many corporate entries for it no to! Google loves Wikipedia and ranks it’s page in the top 5 for countless search terms. Set up your own page to benefit from this love! Go to the home page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and click on ‘create account’ in the top right to get started.
Google Universal Search
Google is always trying new ways at presenting the web’s information, and it is rare to be shown a SERP that doesn’t have either some results from Google News, Product search, blog search or all three! If you don’t have one, get a Google account and start using the submission and feed features to make sure Google is picking up your press releases, blog posts and displaying your products.
As we touched on in a previous post about Twitter’s integration in to the fabric of search, Twitter accounts are only going to become more prominent in the SERP, not less. Make sure you have an account and link to it from your home page to show Google how important it is.
YouTube channel
Following the same theory as Facebook and Twitter, a profile on such a large and heavily linked website will be shown highly in searches for your brand name if combined with a respectable amount of content and a little linking from your own site to the channel’s home page. Create an account here http://www.youtube.com/create_account?next=None
What about page 2?
How often do you go beyond the first page of Google? Probably rarely if ever, and that’s the same for the majority of searchers. The truth is, if you’re in position 11 to 20, you’re going to get crumbs, if you’re not in the top 20, you’re nowhere!
Free xmas tools for webmasters
Christmas is only 55 days away which means you should be well on your way to having your website ready to target those researching and hunting for Christmas gifts online. With more people than ever expected to do their Christmas shopping online this year, it is an opportunity not to be missed. However, if you haven’t started yet, or you are still thinking about what to do, below are links to some great Christmas related tools and resources to help save you time…
Don’t forget, from 99p. Eco Friendly, carbon neutral hosting from Instahost.co.uk
Christmas icons
1. http://www.clevericons.com/icon/christmas06/
2. http://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/free-christmas-icons-for-you/
3. http://www.iconarchive.com/category/christmas/christmas-icons-by-zeusbox.html
4. http://www.standard-icons.com/stock-icons/standard-christmas-icons.htm
5. http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/christmas-surprise-four-in-one/
Christmas photographic images (free)
6. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=christmas&l=4
7. http://freedigitalphotos.net/images/search.php?search=christmas&match_type=any
8. http://morguefile.com/archive/browse/#/?qury=christmas&terms_all=christmas
9. http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=search&txt=christmas&w=1&x=8&y=9
Christmas WordPress themes
10. http://www.devlounge.net/extras/iceburgg
11. http://wpthemes.amazing-christmas-ideas.com/cg/
12. http://www.simplywp.net/2008/11/19/hello-snowman-christmas-theme-for-wordpress/
13. http://www.blogger-template.info/blue-christmas-theme
14. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/24/christmas-wordpress-theme/
Christmas CSS templates
15. http://www.free-css.com/free-css-templates/page76/happy-holidays.php#bookmarks
16. http://www.templatemo.com/preview/templatemo_045_christmas
17. http://www.entheosweb.com/photoshop_templates/christmas.asp
18. http://www.dreamweaverresources.com/holiday-templates/index.htm
Let us know of any other you would like to share!!! by leaving a comment below
Twitter, the flawed genius? You decide
Twitter is becoming part of the fabric of search
Deals announced in the past couple of days will soon see status updates/ tweets added to the search results of both Microsoft’s Bing and Google search result pages (SERP). The sheer volume of information being entered in to twitter every minute has long been eyed up by the likes of Microsoft and Google as it offers them ‘real time’ search through topic trends, an area that even Google has publicly admitted it is lagging behind. This deal with twitter will give them access to instant and constantly evolving information their spiders could never hope to compete with, and it gives twitter its first major source of revenue!
It has its own eco-system
An entire eco-system has sprung up using the twitter platform such as twitter alerts, tweet scheduling, back tweet analysis, polls, group tweets, pictures, backgrounds, advertising… the list goes on. The more developers that come on board to create new tools and applications based upon Twitter’s platform the more likely people are going to find a use for it.
The sheer size of its user base
When it comes down to it, the number of people who use Twitter is massive! Although growth has started to slow down, it still pulls in close to 25 million unique visitors from the USA alone, as shown by compete.com’s unique visitor statistics.
Should you be on Twitter?
A lot of webmasters and business have jumped on board Twitter without really asking why? As with any form of marketing, be it newspapers, Email marketing, or paid search, Twitter is not suitable for everyone. But the reasons why you should not be on Twitter should be based upon those factors and not because you think it will have gone by 2010. It is important to understand Twitter is now firmly established as a major source of traffic for websites, a revenue generator for supporting businesses and is soon to become a vital source of data for the search engines so any question of whether it is simply a short term fad should be dismissed.
Or Is It?
Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.
‘Twas always thus. Twitter was never really a company; it was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter’s better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved.
Despite Williams’ seeming indifference, Twitter took off — so much so that a crush of new users strained its servers, to the point that the service became famous for its technical incompetence. (The “fail whale,” a cheery cetacean icon displayed when Twitter’s website was unavailable, now appears on T-shirts in San Francisco and Brooklyn.)
In its business affairs, too, Twitter is proving incompetent. Most Web 2.0 startups run cheaply, but Twitter faces large bills from mobile-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to mobile phones; the more it grows, the more it pays. And it has yet to announce publicly a way to make money.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have a scheme. The latest one we’ve heard floated: Twitter would charge companies to have verified Twitter feeds, so users would know that a message from, say, ExxonMobil really came from the oil company. (It’s not as hypothetical as it sounds; a Twitter user inexplicably impersonated ExxonMobil this summer.) Verified accounts might then pay Twitter for every message they send, and also get prominent listing in a Twitter directory.
If that sounds like utter nonsense, the fever-dream imaginings of a desperate business-development executive high on whiteboard-marker fumes, that’s because it is.
With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter’s best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn’t even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn’t require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.
So this apparently “Mickey Mouse ” operation is the future of news? That’s not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks, most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter’s length limit was zero characters, not 140.
As more users join, the Twitter feed becomes filled with more and more noise; repetitive retweetings, back-scratching praise, and self-congratulation. A set of amateurs celebrating each other not for the quality or insight of their reporting, but its brevity, swiftness, and modish form of delivery.
FREE faster broadband with BT
BT has started handing out Broadband Accelerators to customers prepared topay the £1.20 in postage, and promises an average speed increase of half a megabit.
BT customers interested in a free boost to their broadband can apply on-line for a free Broadband Accelerator, assuming they have the right kind of BT socket, and aren’t already getting the promised bandwidth from BT.
The device is actually BT’s I-Plate, and it has been around since last year, retailing for under a tenner. It blocks the bell wire that’s prone to picking up in-home interference, as well as providing some filtering on other lines. Anyone with extensions around the house should get one, as the improvement to ADSL connections can be dramatic. This is why BT is handing them out with such enthusiasm.
The bell wire is supposed to provide a signal to make extensions ring, but modern phones don’t use it – it doesn’t even pass through the ADSL microfilters that should be fitted to every socket. So it just acts as one big antenna picking up rogue signals from around the house – such as those generated by florescent lighting – and channelling them into the ADSL line to interfere with the data connection. Simply cutting the bell wire also works, as well explained by Jarviser, though the filters in the I-Plate may improve things even more.
Recognise this socket: then you could benefit from a free I-PlateThe I-Plate won’t help those of us who’ve been pushing our speed by any means available (currently topping 288Kb/sec, thanks for asking), but if you’ve got any extensions and the right kind of BT socket, then it seems worth a try for less than the cost of a half.
