Improving Website Conversion 5 – Give Your Website The Stamp of Third Party Approval

This is part 5 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions.

In this day and age of marketing hype and hyperbole, it pays to be a bit cynical. And savvy consumers will now actively seek out reviews and recommendations before purchasing online, just as they would if, say, they were hiring a builder or buying a new TV.

With this in mind, if you want to improve the conversion rate of your website, you need to provide the ‘social proof’ people are actively looking for. In other words, you need to be able to demonstrate that people have actually gained the time/cost/happiness benefits you promise in your website’s effusive copywriting.

So how do you go about it?

You need to collect together all the ‘persuasive assets’ you can find about your company and then to plaster them all over your website. By ‘persuasive assets’ I mean all the third party endorsements written by real customers on their experiences with your product or service.

On my copywriting website’s home page, for example, I feature two testimonials and I’ve got a whole page more to persuade hesitant visitors, who don’t know me from Adam, that I can deliver what I claim.

Along with testimonials (which you should start collecting right away, if you don’t already), your persuasive assets could include reviews, media mentions, case studies, test results, survey results (e.g. gained from Survey Gizmo) and social media mentions (found using Radian6).

Giving your website social proof with third party endorsements is one of the most powerful ways of improving the conversion rate of your website. People trust the opinions of other people far more than the wondrous claims made in your website’s copywriting. So make sure you collect testimonials, reviews and feedback at every opportunity and keep adding them to your website.

In the next post I’ll be discussing what other changes you can make that will have the biggest impact on improving your website’s conversion rate. 

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