The One Simple Way To Build Trust On Your Website
Trust is a really important emotional state for users to be in.
Why? Trust is a requisite to persuasion.
And typically, websites are trying to persuade users to take a particular action. Whether it’s to make a purchase or sign up to a newsletter, there’s usually a persuasion motive.
Whatever the end goal you’re trying to achieve, trust come first (and often in many different overlaying guises); perhaps you want them to trust your product or service; perhaps you want them to trust your approach to data privacy; perhaps you just want them to trust you.
But, trust is bigger than just a potentially one-off action. Trust is the foundation of emotional connection, and research shows that emotional bonds between consumer and brand creates business value — brand loyalty, increased sales, brand advocacy and a greater willingness to forgive mistakes.
And it could all start with a simple visit to a website. So how do you start building trust?
First, we should acknowledge that there are two audiences for trust-building. Obviously, there are human users. But there are also search engines; since 2018, Google has placed a heavy emphasis on ‘EAT’ — a.k.a. Expertise, Authority and — you guessed it — Trust[1]:
“Our ranking system does not identify the intent or factual accuracy of any given piece of content. However, it is specifically designed to identify sites with high indicia of expertise, authority and trustworthiness”
How Google Fights Disinformation, Google, 2019
There are a whole host of ways you can signal trust to search engines, and you can read about them here and here.
Now, away from algorithms and back to humans.
Humans are pretty good at deciphering signals which tells us whether to trust someone or a particular scenario (or not). In fact, we can make decisions about whether to trust someone before we have even consciously registered their physical appearance[2].
Invariably, in a human-to-human trust environment there will be a number of heuristics involved. Some of these will be learned, some evolutionary.
But the same happens in a digital environment. We make snap decisions about whether to trust a website in milliseconds. Sometimes before the page even loads (or, if there’s http warning sign, even before a page even loads). We judge websites based on the design, the fonts, the language, the imagery, the UX… all of which are sending signals around whether we should trust the website or not; whether it’s a scam or whether it’s representative.
So how should websites build trust in one very easy way?
Don’t give your users a reason to distrust your website
It can be very easy to inadvertently trigger distrust. Pushy copy, obtrusive pop-ups, too many adverts, clunky copy, overlooking https, being vague, no/poor quality images, ironically-clickbaity-headlines… it doesn’t take much to suddenly make a user second-guess your website. Think about scam emails; sometimes it’s as little as a wrongly tpyed word that suddenly triggers the brain to start looking a bit deeper.
It’s also important to consider how individual differences may impact trust perception. Millennials, for example, may be more cynical than other generations but they are very trusting around personal data[3]. Demographic factors and digital experience will inevitably lead to users placing a difference emphasis on the importance of specific factors — so be inclusive in your approach.
But it can be hard to assess. After all, you’re inherently biased — you trust yourself/your company so you will always view your digital assets through that rose-tinted lens. And distrust isn’t an easy one to diagnose with surface-level digital metrics. Perhaps your conversion rate is mysteriously low, or your bounce rate ridiculously high. But does that immediately mean people don’t trust you?
So, ask your users (or ask your friends). Get real-life people to review your website and feedback against specific parameters. Do they have any initial distrust? And do they trust you to deliver xyz product/service? If not — why not? It might be the smallest thing that is massively off-putting.
Originally published on psykkd.com
Sources:
[1] https://www.blog.google/documents/37/How_Google_Fights_Disinformation.pdf/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25100591/
[3] https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/192401/data-security-not-big-concern-millennials.aspx
