How to increase conversions by reducing your visitors perceived risk

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!

Use Twitter Positively – Dont be a twit!!!

So, with the turmoil in Iran and the passing of Micheal Jackson, we have really seen the power of twitter!  But how can you harness that power?  Its not a place for endlessly plugging your Brand or trying to be sneaky!  Using the name @HabitatUk, Habitat “tweeted” updates about new products on twitter.  But  they also added “hashtags” – keywords that help Twitter users locate posts on specific themes – such as #Iran. This  meant that people searching for information about the deadly violence and mass protests in Tehran following the country’s disputed election came up with posts advertising Habitat’s goods.  The inevitable outcry has caused this to already become one of the most prominent examples of attempts to engage with social media backfiring.

OK  So, assuming you do not want to commit the same type of error,  here are our  best tips on getting the most out of Twitter.

1. Sign up at Twitter.com

That’s step one, of course!

2. Download a  twitter client such as  Tweetdeck find others through google, we use DABr for our Mobiles.

It does make tweeting much easier!

3. Try to keep negativity  off Twitter

You will lose followers – if you moan too much!

4. Follow people who are in your niche.

Click on “find people.”  Type in names of people who write blogs in your niche, who have similar  products and who are influencers. Remeber, more than anything, this is a social network tool.

Click the “follow” link under their photo.  This will let you see their tweets with other people.

5. Make friends

No hard sell here……Make friends.  Be a sociable person.

6. Learn the art of the RT

RT stands for “retweet”.  There’s a little icon that says RT.
When you retweet someone’s messsage, you’re passing it on so the people on your list can see it.

This is the ultimate form of sharing. You give before you get.

Even if you only have 5  people on your list, use the RT.
But watch how others do it first. be careful!

7.  Observe

Spend a week or so just watching others and learning what happens on Twitter before you jump in.

8.  Anything and I do mean anything you say,  can and may be  retweeted.
So be aware that anything you say can be spread.  So be very cautious about saying anything negative about anyone.  Once you have said it – its out there!!  Be aware that tweets are sometime picked up by Search Engines too!

9.  Be positive

Remember  Positive energy attracts other positive people.

10. If someone really annoys you, you can go to twitter.com, find their name and on the right side is link where you can block them. Remeber, they can do the same!

11. When you run across a cool web site or resource tweet it to your list.

12 . Remeber the @ symbol.
You want to send most of your messages to individuals using the @ symbol.

13. When you find a good blog post on someone’s blog, pass it along to your Twitter list.

This endears you to the blog owner.  Even if they aren’t on your Twitter list, there’s a decent chance word will spread back to ‘em.

This IS the age of instant communication.

14. Learn to Twitter on your iPhone or Mobile.

15. Understand that in the big picture your goal is to find people who have lists and can promote your products then make friends with ‘em.

It helps if you pass along cool resources and on occasion say things that are profound or retweetable.

Do NOT end up twittering away time you really should be using to create products or do other promotions.

Use Twitter.  Don’t let it use you.

Increase your ROI with negative keywords

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25% all of searches are totally brand new
If you advertise through search engine pay per click and use nothing but exact matches you will be running a very tight ship but you will also be missing out on a lot of potential (and relevant) traffic from keywords you haven’t thought of. With 25% of all searches thought to be completely unique (i.e. they have never been used by anyone ever before) you can’t possibly cover every single search term as an exact match.

Spending time to build up your negative keyword list will:

• Save you a lot of money!
• Increase your click through rate
• Increase your quality scores
• Increase your ROI

Use a combination of match types
On the other side, if you use broad match and phrase match keywords you run the risk of seeing your advert triggered alongside a keyword that isn’t actually related to your site. For example, if you bid on ‘web banner design’ as a phrase match you would also be shown for ‘FREE web banner design’. Common sense may suggest you change it to an exact match but you would then miss out on ‘GOOD QUALITY web banner design’ etc. Negative keywords act to prevent this from happening and don’t be surprised to find your negative keyword list is much larger than your keyword list (for one of our campaigns we have just under 400 negative keywords).

Finding your negative keywords
When it comes to finding your negative keywords the first step is to think of the situations you don’t want to have your advert shown with:

• You don’t offer that service e.g. ‘Free’
• You don’t want your advert to be associated with that keyword e.g. ‘porn’
• You don’t want to be shown at the research stage of the buying cycle e.g. ‘reviews’
• You don’t trade in that region e.g. ‘Sheffield’
• Etc.

A lot will come from common sense and your own industry experience. For example, amongst our own no brainers were ‘free’, ‘sex’ and ‘adult’. But don’t just stop there. Others will be less obvious (and some positively bizarre) and require you to use keyword research tools.

Google’s keyword tool
From within your AdWords account simply run the report using your most generic keywords (e.g. ours would be ‘web hosting’ etc) and from the list it generates pick out those you do not want to be shown for and add them as a negative keyword (e.g. ‘adult web hosting’).

Microsoft’s keyword mutation
It may sound like a zombie version of one of their products but it is in fact a really useful tool which shows you common misspellings and pluralisation of keywords. For example the keyword “Messenger” comes back with 35 different ways people spell it including ones you couldn’t guess at (e.g. “messemger”).

Microsoft’s keyword group detection
Another nifty tool from Microsoft. This one shows keywords that are related or similar to your keyword. For example “web hosting” brings back results for “dedicated hosting”, “domain hosting”, “isp” and “conference calling”.

Google analytics (GA)
One of the reports with GA shows you the searches used to find your web site. You can split these out in to ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’. Scrawl through the ‘paid’ list and pick out any keywords you spot you don’t like the look of.

Google suggest
A recent graduate of their labs, this nifty tool offers search suggestions for you to choose from. From this list you can jot down some more negative keyword ideas. Follow these instructions to turn on Google suggest (currently only enabled on google.com and not google.co.uk).