Have you employed the best technology for your business? Are you using the latest marketing tools to promote your website? If your answer is yes, then my guess is that you are getting a lot of traffic. My other guess is that your visitors are not converting.
Like it or not, marketing your website without understanding human psychology means you are running fast but getting nowhere. And that isn’t going to get you the desired results. Not even closer.
Call it herd psychology or the bandwagon effect, everyone who checks your website – that includes your visitors, newsletter subscribers, partners, affiliates, and potential customers – is going to trust you only when you show them the social proof that you’re already trusted by others.
In this post, we’ll discuss the top five psychological hacks that will help improve your conversion and help you achieve big sales numbers much faster.
1. Testimonials
When you talk about your brand, it’s called advertising. But when someone else talks about your brand, it’s called social proof. And that’s what matters more to your target audience.
The smartest way to snowball the bandwagon effect is to include legitimate reviews and testimonials in your sales page. The reason why your customers’ opinion is so powerful than your own marketing content is because they are non-salesy, less-polished, and most importantly they’re more authentic. That’s what connects with the audience much better and ultimately earns their ‘trust’.
Instructions: Make sure you write great content in your web pages, preferably have them written by a renowned Copywriter as they have higher conversions than the web content writers, and include a couple of testimonials in each of your service pages as opposed to the usual norm of including them in the ‘Home page’ or a separate ‘Testimonials’ page. The reason is because your audiences love targeted reviews about a particular product or service rather than a generic review of your company itself. Another reason is that, according to numerous surveys, the testimonials pages have fewer clicks when compared to the other pages in the site – check your analytics, and you’ll admit it.
2. Include compliments from the media or niche influencers
As much as your prospects like positive testimonials from your existing customers, they sure love to know what the experts and celebrities are saying about your brand. Well, who doesn’t? And what better way to show them the social proof than putting the endorsements right in front of their eyes?
All you need to do is go back and collect the best compliments you’ve received from industry-leading experts and media about your brand. As far as expert reviews go, the more relevant the influencer is, the more appealing the testimonials. Put them up on your Home page. When you do, make sure you don’t forget to include the picture of the person. Studies conducted on human psychology say that pictures are be a vital tool to build confidence in the users’ mind. You sure don’t want to miss even the smallest of opportunities, do you?
Also See: Top 10 Tools for Generating Sales with Referral Marketing
3. Spice up your Email signup form
Having an email signup form in your website will not increase your conversion, but having a signup form that your audience will trust can only get you that all-important conversion nitro boost.
New leads can open the door to a lot of customers for your products or services. It gives you the golden opportunity to announce a new offer or great deal to a future customer and even remind your existing clients of something they might be interested to purchase again.
As you are pretty much aware, most web visitors stay away from signing up for newsletters. The reason could be anything from privacy to not wanting to receive too many emails. One of the best ways to convince your visitors to signup is to show them the social proof. Make sure that you mention the number of people who are already receiving your newsletters. A simple example would be something like, Join over 6000 members who receive free weekly alerts on our best deals.
And don’t forget to mention that you respect their privacy and won’t share their contact details with anyone else. This will act as a confidence booster and increase their chances of filling up the form.
Also Read: 6 Email Marketing Lessons for Small Businesses
4. Social media
This could be good or bad for your website. One thing that website owners never forget to do is adding social sharing buttons to their posts. But not many realize that it can be a path-breaker as well as a brand image-breaker for their business.
The truth is, social media buttons can do wonders to help build customer trust if you have the ‘social proof’ that you’re already being liked and shared by a few thousand (or at least a few hundred) people. Having four or five shares per post can seriously dent the readers’ confidence and prevent them from signing up for your products or services or even visiting your site again.
The best way to increase the social shares, tweets, and Pins for your posts is to run a separate short marketing campaign and promote them in all the popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It takes a few hours to promote your stuff but in the end, you’ll realize it’s seriously worth the effort. If you take a look at the successful brands in your niche, you’ll find that each of them have a huge fan following on various social platforms.
You can even use social media monitoring tools to analyze your audiences’ interest and competitor’s activities and optimize your marketing campaign accordingly. Once you have earned a loyal following on social media, feel free to add social sharing buttons to your posts. Now, you will see the difference.
Also Check: 10 Facebook Tools for Business & Marketing in 2014
5. Trust Seals
Create ‘Trust seals’ as icons and logos and include them in your website footer. As you’ve already included your achievements and accomplishments in your web pages, it makes sense to use the trust boxes to include everything that is missing. Some good examples include mentions of your Association memberships, Security verifications, Google ranking, and Yelp ratings.
These are some of the most trusted ways to earn the trust of visitors. Try these and see your conversion soar up. Good luck!
