Episode 06: How to craft irresistible offers that make your website a powerhouse of proof …and more

Welcome to episode 6 of Making Websites Win. If you haven't done so already, we recommend you start at episode 1 and listen to the episodes in sequence. Otherwise, welcome back. Let's continue. Winning websites make the benefits clear. If your visitors aren't persuaded of the benefits, here's what to do. Even if your visitors can understand your writing, even if they can use your website, and even if you offer what they came for, they may not understand or like your value proposition. In this chapter, we describe how to increase your conversion rate by fixing three of the most common problems with value propositions. What is a value proposition? Your value proposition can be defined as the benefits of your product or service minus its costs. Value proposition equals benefits minus costs. The costs aren't limited to the financials. They also include economic risk and the cost of time and resources. A more buyer-centric definition of value proposition. The previous definition can be a bit too cellar-centric. To aid clear thinking, we also find it useful to think of a value proposition as perceived through the eyes of an individual buyer. This view reflects more accurately what happens when a purchase is made. The decision is made in the mind of the buyer. The value of each feature will be different for each buyer. For example, some car buyers will find value in an ashtray, others won't. Either way, it's clear that the value being discussed is the value to each buyer. Thus, in the customer's eye definition, the value proposition is different for each buyer. Buyers reasoning tends to be in terms of pros and cons, not benefits and costs. Just listen to your own reasoning next time you buy something. If you create mental pros and cons lists and not benefits and costs lists, then it seems a shame to switch to the benefits and costs view when you're being a marketer, thus abandoning your lifetime of intuition. The view proposition equals pros minus cons. We find it useful to view a value proposition both ways through the seller's eyes and the buyer's eyes as two sides of the same coin. Let's start by focusing on the pros. Four ways companies fail to communicate their benefits, the pros and several ways to fix the problems. It's a myth that you should always talk in terms of benefits and not features. Some marketing experts say that all sales copy should be expressed not in terms of features or products properties, but in terms of benefits, how the product helps the user. This isn't true. You should sometimes state the features, sometimes state the benefits, and often state both. The benefits not features advice was aimed at beginner copywriters who often write only in terms of features. Features usually aren't enough. When buyers read features, they often think, "So what?" They don't understand how the features will help. Both as a buyer, you discover that a particular ebook reader has the feature of cellular connectivity. You may think, "So what? How would that be useful?" So you may appreciate an explanation of the benefits of cellular connectivity that allows you to buy and instantly download books from anywhere in the world. If you finish your book while you're lying on the beach on vacation, you can instantly choose and start a new one. Sometimes, even obvious benefits are worth stating. You might understand that a flight will take you to a sunny Italian resort, but an explicit mention of that benefit will still psychologically take you there. It activates those neurons. However, there are times when you shouldn't explicitly mention benefits. One of them is when the benefit is taboo. A charity website shouldn't explicitly say, "Donate today and you can show off to your friends." Another is when the benefit is so obvious or unimpressive as to be a waste of words and possibly patronising. On a car manufacturer's website, it's probably worth mentioning that a car has a maximum speed of 120 mph, but it wouldn't be worth explaining the benefits of that. The second half of "Mention benefits and not features" is clearly nonsense. You should usually state features. Imagine a laptop manufacturer's website that says, "Let's you store loads of files," but then refuses to state the size of the hard drive. Benefits alone can leave the reader thinking, "Yeah, right." Benefits usually need proof to support them, and features are among the most compelling forms of proof. It's not enough to hear that a car is really, really safe. You want to know it has airbags. So when shouldn't you mention features? You should admit them when the benefit is not in doubt, or when there is little space, and the benefit is better supported by a different type of proof. With fitness videos, for example, customers are much more persuaded by celebrity endorsements and by testimonials from other successful customers than they are by what's in the video itself. You become more effective at CRO when you ignore rules like "Technique X is good, technique Y is bad," and instead understand each technique's function. Now that you understand the function of features and benefits, you'll be able to spot when to state a feature, when to state a benefit, and when to state both. Remember, if you describe a feature and the readers are saying, "So what?" Describe the benefit. If you describe a benefit and the readers are saying, "Yeah, right." Describe the feature, or another type of proof. 2. Many companies don't make it clear what their products or services do. Some products or services, particularly those that are complex, can be hard to describe. When such products are sold using a traditional brand marketing approach, the results are often disastrous. The visitors don't buy because they don't understand what they'll get. For example, unclear branding waffle. Music meet home. An example. Introducing the OACs of freshness, the aquaris, the tritona, the anapos. Copy that wins. Choose your water filter jug, a slim one for the fridge, a large one for the table, or a water type one for on the go. Let's have one more. Unclear branding waffle. Express yourself. Impress yourself. Copy that wins. The ultimate suite of cloud-based tools for all your marketing communications. You get the idea. If you're asked to improve the website of a technical product that is currently being sold with a brand marketing approach, here's a useful tip. See if the product has a Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia page is likely to contain valuable plain language descriptions that are absent from the manufacturer's landing page. Plain language almost always beats branding waffle. Many marketers aren't aware that their website has this problem. The problem goes beneath the radar because visitors seldom report that they are struggling to understand the value proposition. Instead, they say things like "I'm still researching". Also, most unclear descriptions aren't as obviously bad as the ones above. The best way to identify unclear benefits is through user testing. Unclear product descriptions are guaranteed to kill conversions. So whenever we spot them, we know that a big win is just around the corner. Clarifying the benefits of complex hard-to-explain products has led to many of our biggest wins. Three. Some companies forget to mention some valuable benefits. The Travel Phone Company mobile gave away a high-quality travel adapter with every phone, but it forgot to mention the travel adapter anywhere on its website. When we added the travel adapter to the website, sales increased, so we added it to the offline marketing campaigns too. This was one of the many contributing factors that allowed us to triple mobile sales in one year. We used this technique to great effect when we created more than $1 million of additional sales for MoZ. In a case study on our website, we describe how we added to MoZ's landing page many features that previously went unmentioned. To ensure that you aren't making this mistake, list all of the elements of value that your visitors get, and then check that your website communicates them all clearly. It can help for you to order the products yourself, so you see the whole package with your own eyes. Also, ask your customers why they bought and then ensure that all of their reasons are featured in your marketing materials with appropriate prominence. Four. Many companies don't make it clear what happens once the visitor says yes. Many websites, particularly those that sell services, don't help their visitors to envisage the post-order experience. There are many ways of overcoming this problem. The following method, common in Japan, is rarely seen in the Western world. Japanese consumers expect to be shown what they are going to get. All Japanese restaurants, for example, have plastic food in their windows showing what each meal looks like. Similarly, many Japanese companies display cartoon flowcharts that show what will happen once a visitor orders the product or service. We created a cartoon style flowchart for mobile to show mobile's Japanese customers what to expect once they had ordered a travel phone. The flowchart makes it clear how the process works. The order is placed, the phone is delivered, the phone is charged, the person flies a broad, calls a maid, mobile sends an itemized bill, the person returns home, and then the whole process is repeated for subsequent trips. The cartoon was so effective on the Japanese website, we transferred it to mobile's USA website to similar success. Such flowcharts are an example of what the hypnotism world calls "future pacing". The buyer is told what they are going to experience over the next few days, weeks or months. This is closely related to the sales technique of making the prospect think beyond the sale. Even though future pacing diagrams are less common in the West, they are extremely effective everywhere for the following reasons. They answer the questions that the visitors are asking. If I order this product or service, what will happen next? What will be the process I follow? They allow the visitors to rehearse mentally the process of using the service, visualising it as being part of their lives. So, if your product or service has an unclear post-sale experience, then a future pacing flowchart may help to increase your sales. We frequently get wins by adding them. Future pacing videos and how to create them. Once you have created a future pacing diagram, you may find that it would benefit from being turned into a video. If so, remember that the process of creating a video should be no different from the process of creating a web page. To begin, create the video in a low-res, highly editable format which you can test on users, just as you would do with a web page wireframe. If your video designer isn't comfortable carrying out user tests in our experience most aren't, you may prefer to do it yourself as follows. Create your storyboard using the animation functionality of PowerPoint or Google slides. If you wish to add a voiceover, record it in ScreenFlow. It's relatively test the draft video on users until you are confident that it communicates the message clearly. Only then should you get a high-quality version made. This process will ensure that your final video will convert visitors. The previous techniques provide four opportunities for optimizing your benefits and pros. In the next chapter, we will describe how to optimize the other side of your value propositions, the costs and cons. Winning websites have irresistible offers. If people aren't persuaded that your deal is great, here's how to optimize it. A sure-fire way to increase a company's profit is to optimize its pricing, deals and offers. Most companies don't spend as much time as they should on it, either because they don't appreciate how fruitful it can be, or because they find it harder or more boring than other aspects of marketing. Almost all of the strategies described in this chapter are ones we've successfully used in many cases with increases of over 50% often much more. Getting your pricing model wrong can be disastrous. Classmates.com chose to monetize early and to do so by charging its users. Two activities that are now widely understood to be disastrous for social networks. If you want to optimize your pricing, deals and offers, this chapter contains a huge list of tips, strategies and things to consider. We have used them on many businesses. Not all of the points will apply to you, but we have found that one breakthrough idea is often enough to transform a business. As you proceed down the list, we recommend you make notes of how you could implement each idea. Establish your long-term strategy for pricing. Identify your long-term strategy for pricing by considering the following points. Decide what your monetize. First, decide what you will monetize and how. Gillette innovated by making its money from the blades not the razors. Dollar Shave Club innovated further by selling a recurring subscription. If you have economies of scale, penetration pricing often works best. What your business benefit from economies of scale, most where businesses do? If so, your ideal pricing strategy may be penetration pricing. Charging a low price, basing your financial model on eventually reaching market dominating economies of scale. Supply side economies of scale mean that your profit margins increase the more you sell, because as you sell more, your cost of sales, unit costs, usually becomes lower. And your fixed costs become a smaller fraction of your overall costs. Demand side economies of scale mean that the more customers you get, the more value each customer gets from your service. For the following reasons. One, you may benefit from having a network of customers. For example, if a phone system had only two users, only one type of call could be made. One between user A and user B. If it had three users, then three types of call could be made. A, B, C and A, C. If it had 12 users, 66 different types of calls could be made. The overall value of a phone system to its users is roughly proportional to the square of the number of users. Two. You may benefit from there being a market of complementary products and services. The project management web app Basecamp has many integrations which it promotes on its website. At the bottom of the page, Basecamp shows off how quickly it's acquiring new users to persuade other companies to add integrations. Three. You may benefit from having a bigger knowledge base, more forums or more trained users. The ecosystem of knowledge around a product can be valuable in itself. Wordpress grows because it's easy to find a wordpress developer and it's easy for those developers to find answers to their questions. Four. You may benefit from the perception that yours is the standard. Users are aware of the value of choosing the ultimate winner, especially when they have to invest time and resources into using your company, so they will be attracted by the perception that you'll win. If you don't have, economies of scale, it often helps to price high, then decrease prices. Pricing high at first, then lowering prices, is good for mopping up all the money available in the marketplace. A book can be launched in hard back only, thus commanding a high price from those who are willing to pay it, and then later it can be released in paperback for mass market sales. This approach tends to be more effective with products, for example consumer electronics, than as a strategy with platforms, for example online stores. It also allows statements like "used to be $90" to be used in the future advertising. However, this approach has a weakness. Business writer Peter Drucker stated that high prices can effectively hold an umbrella over lower priced competitors allowing them to thrive. Increasing prices gets visitors to act promptly. If you communicate that prices will keep increasing, the current prices become scarce. Visitors therefore take action because they know they'll pay more if they hesitate. This strategy works best when the major challenge is getting visitors to act promptly. Place your product or service to win. Once you have chosen how your pricing will vary as time progresses, you can proceed to your pricing strategy. The following two principles are useful when considering how to price a product. 1. Consider the gaps in the market. You can identify gaps in the market by asking yourself the following questions. Which market segment isn't currently being served? High-end customers, low-end customers, enterprise customers, small businesses, occasional users? To your target market, what represents value? Gillette, as mentioned previously, succeeded by being first to acknowledge that no one wants to pay for the razor handle. They want to pay per shave. What would their dream product be? We find it's useful to ask yourself, what would definitely work if only we were prepared to do it? Write it down, even if it's miles from being possible. Once you know what it is, you may be able to think creatively about how you could offer it. This approach led us to create the highly successful 49-dollar world phone with no monthly fees, which became a standard in the world phone market. 2. Price high or price low? For a given type of product or service, pricing low and pricing high each has its advantages. The challenge is to work out where on the continuum your winning strategy lies. For products that are otherwise clearly identical, low prices tend to lead to high conversion rates, customers or visitors. More repeat purchases or high customer retention? High tele-friend rates and word of mouth and favourable reviews. High prices lead to a higher profit per customer. If you increase your prices and your conversion rate doesn't fall too much, you may be able to afford to spend more per visitor than your lower priced competitors. Neither of those two options is intrinsically better than the other, but bear in mind that in any market there can only be one cheapest option, and that many people don't want the cheapest option. Most people don't buy the cheapest car available, the cheapest shampoo available, the cheapest clothes available, the cheapest watch is available and the cheapest insurance available. People tend to buy options they perceive to be of higher value. There are many opportunities for selling at high profit margins provided you can find features and benefits for which customers would be willing to pay a premium. A good mindset is to imagine that you will charge a premium price and then use your marketing know-how to justify that price. Note that many companies take external investment to fund their costs of client acquisition in the short term. The investment gives them all the previously mentioned benefits of high prices and low prices and is based on the assumption that the strategic benefits of growing quickly will be worth it in the end. Create Irresistible Offer Sequences Once you've decided on your pricing strategy you are ready to start packaging up your offers. Here are some of the many options available to you. Use an offer that's known to win. Here's a great tip. Ask your salespeople what is their most effective offer? Is there anything they can say that always brings in the deal? One of our clients top salespeople once told us an offer that almost always worked. We incorporated it into a landing page and presented it to the company's CEO who said, "We aren't able to offer that." We explained to his surprise that his company already did and that it worked well. He agreed to let us run the page and to his delight it instantly increased the whole company's sales by over 65%. Lead with a no-brainer Decide at what point in your offer sequence humanitise your services. The winning strategy is usually to defer gratification, making the initial purchase a no-brainer, and then to make money on the subsequent payments. Make your headline offer irresistibly appealing. Ensure that the first product that people buy is one of your most liked ones. This will make customers much more likely to return. Survey customers to ensure that you know which of your products are most liked, note that your most liked product isn't necessarily your best seller. Understand what main criteria your prospects are using to determine value. Set low prices for the criteria people consider when judging value. Supermarkets are very competitive on prices of comparable products, like Heinz-Bake's and charge more for products that are less easy to compare, like Artisanal Bullsamick Vinegar. Make your money on the things people don't consider when making a decision. Restaurants often have low priced meals, then make all their money on drinks. Consider stripping down the features of your core service, then charging for extras. Char dealers often have low headline rates, then charge for extras. It can help to make the initial purchase free. If you can't make it free, then at least try to make the initial price low. Offer a free trial, which may be a no-strings-completely free sample, perhaps with a discount voucher if the customer decides to continue. This works if your service is fantastic and the best way to persuade buyers is to get them using it. Offer a free trial with an ongoing monthly charge if the customer continues. If it's not possible to offer a sample, consider a simulation of a sample. Freebird is a service that allows travellers to get an alternative flight if theirs is cancelled. As part of its conversion funnel, freebird allows users to experience the whole process as a simulation to see how easy it is. Consider offering something small and irresistible for an amazing price, just to get something into the buyer's shopping cart. Once the buyer has accepted that they'll be going through the checkout, they are more likely to buy other things. Offer an initial discount. For example, only $9.99 per month for the first three months, $19.99 per month after it. Multi-buy deals. Buy one get one free can be more effective than half price because it keeps a high price on the product so it doesn't lower its perceived value and encourages the customer to buy twice as much. The same goes for other types of multi-buy deals. State that we won't bill you until a certain number of days after your purchase. How the buyer to pay an instalments? For example, three monthly payments of $9.99. This works well if your research reveals that many buyers don't currently have the money to pay for the product outright. Allow the buyer to return it within X days for your money back. Add premiums, gifts and incentives to get a big uplift. You can boost sales by adding gifts and incentives to the core deal. Information is a great thing to give away as a premium because it has zero or almost zero costs of sale and can have incredibly high perceived value. Think of valuable information that your customers would love to have. For example, a person buying a health supplement to help them sleep may highly desire a report that describes how to get a good night's sleep. You can deliver the information in a wide range of formats, including audio, video, electronic or printed reports, software, tools or access to websites. If some of your offering involves information, consider how the information can be made to educate the buyers about how to buy your type of product and how to appreciate the ways in which your product is superior. This works well in B2B sales, because B2B buying is often complex. B2B buyers therefore value decision support materials. A seller of web hosting, for example, could benefit from giving away a guide called "Seven Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Web Hosting Solution". Consider offering particular premiums only to customers who spend more than a certain amount. One of our favourite techniques is to offer a valuable free report for customers who buy one unit, an additional free report for customers who buy three units, and a further free report for customers who buy five units. A buyer who wants that third report can never get it if they always order one unit at a time. This offer alone can greatly increase the average order value. If a customer is paying with someone else's money, such as their employers, consider options that will reward the person personally. Companies that sell to businesses often use rewards such as meals, events, airmiles, cashback and gift vouchers. Of course, don't offer anything that's unethical or illegal. Offer incentives to encourage prospects to behave in a certain way. For example, if you want all the orders to be placed via the web or via the phone, offer incentives for customers who order via those channels. Offer discounted prices if visitors order quickly. For example, early bird discounts or in large quantities. Increase the average order value by adding upsells and cross-sells. Upsells, like would you like that large, and cross-sells like would you like fries with that, can make a great difference to the economics of a sale. You can already think of other things that the buyer would pay for, such as better service, better customer support, insurance, extra information, for example, a valuable ebook. Quicker or better service. Complementary products they'd also like, for inspiration, study the conversion funnels of companies that sell commodities in highly competitive markets like domain names, business cards and cell phone plans. For inspiration, ask customers, maybe via a survey, what other services they'd like you to offer and what other related services they currently use. In the chapter "Winning websites give people what they want", we described a useful workflow for doing this. Versioning. Huge increase profits by offering different deals to different people. It helps to offer different deals to different people because they have different needs and desires. The common law of business balance describes consumers belief that you get what you pay for. So, many customers have a price in mind before they begin shopping and will pay that price regardless. A friend of ours went looking for a suit expecting to pay about $700. He found one that looked good, but it cost just $70. He decided against it, preferring to stick to his plan of finding one that cost more. Imagine how frustrated the store owner would have been to know that not only did she not sell the suit, but that she would have sold it if she had charged ten times as much for it. Create pricing segments for each of your groups of customers. For example, you may choose to have different prices for enterprises, small businesses and domestic customers. Then start from the point of view of the customer. Begin with the price they'd be prepared to pay and then work out what the product or service should be at that level. Ensure that each price level contains a deal maker or deal breaker component that makes it worth it for the buyer to pay the extra amount. Create gold, silver and bronze levels of pricing so you are more likely to have a price point at the amount that a given buyer was thinking of paying. Consider a price that's ten times your current highest price and then imagine what kind of product or service would justify that price. A company that advises people on getting work permits may usually charge $500 per client. The company might benefit from exploring what a $5,000 service would entail, who would use it. And if only a small fraction of buyers took advantage of such an offer, the effect on the economics of the business could be significant. Bestow status levels upon your customers. Have different levels of customers and publicly reward those on the higher levels by giving them a higher status and benefits. People are naturally competitive and aspire to become better customers. This technique is used by every producer of luxury goods. Even credit card issuers manage to charge more for premium gold and platinum cards. Offer a loyalty program. Whereby the buyers get certain rewards once they have purchased a certain number of units from you. This encourages them to return for more, thus forming a habit and increasing your lifetime customer value. As every cafe knows, it helps to give customers free loyalty points to begin with, so their reward account has a value from the outset. Test your prices to see which ones win. Testing pricing can be a thorny issue. Some users may contest it. However, changing pricing is one of the most sure-fire ways of increasing or decreasing a company's profits. So there's a high value in doing it and a high cost to getting it wrong, which is a good reason to A/B test it. One effective option is to run A/B testing to offer different prices to different users, but then once they have ordered to charge them all the lower price to make it fair. Bear in mind that, as with all A/B testing, buyers who use more than one device may see different versions of your pricing. Another less scientific option is to test different prices on different days or weeks. In both cases, it can be hard to measure the results if your buying cycle is long, but if it's short and you sell a lot of units per day, you can gather vital information in a matter of hours. Increase sales just by optimising how you describe the offer. Sometimes you don't need to change the offer or the value proposition. You just need to change how you describe it. The following techniques work well. Position yourself as and actually be the prospect's trusted advisor, so they know you're acting in their best interests. This is incredibly important. Be very careful not to squander your integrity for the sake of one quick sale. As Mozzies Rand Fishkin says, "The best way to sell something is to not sell anything." Instead, earn the awareness, respect and trust of those who might buy. Make prices look larger by displaying the decimal points or lower by hiding them. Odd prices work slightly better. $10.99 is perceived as being disproportionately lower than $10. This is presumably for the same reason that people get excited when their car odometer clicks over to $10,000, even though it's just another mile. And sad when they reach their 40th birthday, even though they're only a day older. If a price was $19, now only $89, highlight the discount by applying a strike through to was $19. If something is free and the offer sounds too good to be true, mention that it's free several times in different ways. For example, it's free, so you pay nothing. No strings attached, no hidden charges, absolutely no cost to you whatsoever. People find it easier to understand fractions than percentages. So it's better to say half price or one third off than 50% off or 33% off. Use apples to oranges comparisons to remind people what great value. the product is. If you're selling a training course, compare it to the cost of a college education, highlighting the net benefit by showing students who have gone on to get jobs. If you're selling a shed, compare it to the cost of having a house extension. If you're selling a video conferencing solution, compare it with the price of international travel. You can make almost any product sound like a great deal by comparing it to the price of something the buyers are already squandering their money on, like lattes or beer, which makes you wonder how anyone ever manages to sell lattes or beer. Consider expressing the price in a way that makes the numerous all less, like changing a monthly rate to a daily rate. Give a reason why you're making such a great offer. Buyers don't always want the cheapest option, for example, a Casio digital watch, but they do want a bargain, for example, a Rolex Submariner for only $3,000. However, a bargain needs a good rationale. If the deal is great, as it should be, explain why with proof. The following approaches can help. Our price is a great because we cut out the intermediaries and sell directly to the consumer. This is an opening sale. This price is a special product launch price. This is a special offer for new customers. This is a special offer for existing customers. This is an end-of-line clearance promotion. The offer is about to change and their scarcity. This promotion is linked to a certain event, for example, Christmas, summer, back to school, or Black Friday. In all cases, give indisputable proof. If the product was previously sold at a higher price, give details when, where, how much, and justify why that price was reasonable. If it's cheaper or better than competitors' products, give details, maybe with a comparison chart. Optimize your payment options. Different customers tend to have different preferred methods of ordering and paying. It's often best to offer the payment methods they are most comfortable with. Popular options include credit card or debit card, PayPal, Google checkout, Amazon Pay or Apple Pay. Some iOS users are much more likely to purchase if Apple Pay is supported. Direct debit or standing order, purchase order, credit card over the phone, 0% finance, check, cash on delivery, which is popular in some countries. It's important too that you offer the optimal payment schedules. The following options are effective. Payment in multiple installments works well when the initial price point is high. An ongoing monthly fee often beats taking a one-off charge. It represents less initial risk for buyers and customers pay as they receive value, which can feel more reasonable. If your service is charged on a monthly basis, you may choose to specify a minimum term before which the customer may not cancel. This increases your average order value. However, customers are more likely to buy if the minimum term is, say, 12 months than if it's 24 months, so you can increase sales by optimizing the length of the minimum term. If your service has a monthly fee, consider also offering a discount for customers who commit to a minimum term and pay in advance. This will be great for your cash flow and customers are less likely to cancel early. Change the offer to stay interesting. Ideally, you want to be constantly iterating toward whichever offer is optimal. However, in some industries, it helps to vary things just to stay interesting. Just ensure that in doing so, you're constantly learning what works. Winning websites are trustworthy. If visitors are wary, here's how to make your website a powerhouse of credibility and proof. What if your visitors don't trust you? Sometimes visitors don't proceed because they aren't persuaded that your company is any good? This is usually because your website lacks relevant trust signals. There simply isn't enough proof that the visitors should use you. This chapter describes some highly effective ways to use proof to improve your company's credibility and sales. What kind of proof should you add? There are tens, maybe hundreds of ways to show trust and credibility. Some of them are particularly suited to certain types of businesses, but most businesses benefit from the following. Size and growth rate Visitors are greatly influenced by the size and success of companies. For Da Flores, Latin America's largest network of florists, we gained a 44% uplift in sales by highlighting how many Facebook fans the company had, by showing a sight-wide sign that read "Thanks to our 1 million plus followers on Facebook." Reviews and testimonials, particularly from authorities and experts. In one experiment for a software company, we grew sales by over 20% by creating a page that linked to hundreds of customer reviews. We gathered the reviews by surveying the client's customers. The visitors were persuaded by hearing the experiences of people like themselves. We know of one e-commerce company that took a bold approach, demonstrating its integrity by highlighting its worst reviews. The company's average feedback rating was 4.8 out of 5, so the technique actually drew attention to the company's incredibly high customer satisfaction. Data and statistical evidence Buyers are much more likely to believe your claims if you support them with hard data. So, if you sell cat food, it's not enough to say that cats like the taste of it, why would people believe you? A popular cat food brand supported its claim with data eight out of 10 owners said their cat prefers it. Insurance companies don't say "we make it easy to save on car insurance." They support their claims with data like "15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance." Restaurants that deliver fast food don't say "we'll be there as fast as our bikes can carry us, we promise." They say things like "delivered in 30 minutes or it's free." Hand soap manufacturers don't say that their product kills a lot of germs. They say "kills 99.9% of germs." It sounds much more convincing. And in its 1962 ad, a particular oil refining company didn't just say "we supply a lot of oil," it said "each day we supply enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier." With hindsight, maybe that last one was misjudged. Celebrity associations Celebrity associations can be more effective than you might expect. When selling a diet, for example, many people will be more influenced by a celebrity figurehead than by scientific research. Over the years, we have paired several of our clients with celebrity figureheads. Most of the celebrities allow their image to be used in return for a fixed fee for a specific duration. In one case, the celebrity was happy to do it for free because she was a fan of the company. A word of warning Before you commit to a deal, though, you may choose to first run an AB test to measure how the celebrity affects conversions. One of our clients had a celebrity figurehead whose presence actually reduced sales. The client's branding agency hadn't carried out AB tests, we've yet to see one that does, and so was oblivious that they had caused such damage. Demonstrations Sometimes, the best way to prove something is to demonstrate it. One of our favourite examples is a poster that consists of three photos, which showed the space required to transport 72 people by either car, bus or bicycle. The photos demonstrate better than words ever could, how single occupancy cars take up a disproportionate amount of road space. Social proof In our case study about how we grew crazy eggs conversion rate by 363%. Our winning landing page featured some of crazy eggs prestigious clients. Similarly, when we made over $1 million for Moz, one of our winning pages had a headline that incorporated the names of some of Moz's prestigious clients. Buyers are reassured when When they see that others similar to themselves have already chosen and like a particular company. Readers think, "If it's good enough for those companies, it's good enough for me." Two industries in which trust is particularly important. Trust is more important in some industries than others. Visitors to financial institutions and health and fitness companies tend to be particularly concerned about trust, because choosing an unsuitable company could be calamitous. Health and fitness companies typically benefit from being associated with medical professionals, celebrities, research institutes and universities. Financial institutions tend to benefit from displaying proof of their longevity and size and from demonstrating flawlessness. Both magnets. A way of bolstering trust and credibility. The world already contains a vast amount of proof of your company's merits, much of which you probably take for granted. Across the web there will be a lot of content that would persuade your visitors if only they were to see it. Search for reviews of your company, testimonials, positive PR, etc. and you'll probably find that only a fraction of this proof ever gets seen by your visitors, either because it's not on your website or because it's tucked away in the corner of a dusty, about us page. Make sure your visitors see this proof by incorporating the best of it into your most visited pages. We have helped one of our clients, Top Cashback, to win the Fast Track 100 award three times in a row. Top Cashback's homepage features many types of proof. Big brands that Top Cashback partners with segmented by Category, EG Fashion Travel and Hotels. The tabs at the bottom of the page link to logos showing authoritative national newspapers and TV programs that Top Cashback has been featured in. Testimonials of members describing the benefits of using Top Cashback. Top Cashback's TV ad, which is both informative and persuasive, plus the fact that it's a national TV ad is itself evidence of credibility, the Fun Fact section, which is actually a showcase of compelling evidence that Top Cashback is the best at what it does. We pay the highest rates. You'll typically get at least 5% more cashback with us. If you find a better retail swear, we'll match it. We were the first Cashback site in the world to pass 100% of the cash to our members. We have the most offers with statistical evidence. Combined, these elements are enough to convince the most skeptical of visitors that Top Cashback is trustworthy and authoritative. Taking it a step further. Proof Investment. Beyond proof magnets lies proof investment. Once you understand what would persuade your visitors, then you should spend time, money and ingenuity acquiring those things. For example, if your visitors would be most persuaded by an association with a Hollywood celebrity, then invest in acquiring that. If they'd be persuaded by rave reviews from experts, then work to gain them. If they'd be impressed by your rapid growth or huge size, then set that as a goal. If they'd be influenced by the fact you've won awards, then aim to win awards. This illustrates an important point. Conversion is not an afterthought. Conversion is identifying what type of company your visitors would ideally love to do business with, and then becoming that company. This approach goes to the core of your business. It means that your customer research determines the direction in which your company grows, as it should. Hence, the company's product strategy and marketing strategy should be led by its conversion team. What if visitors trust your company but not your product? That's because visitors trust your website doesn't mean they have found a product that they trust. A visitor may be happy to use your online pharmacy, but they still need to be persuaded of the efficacy of a particular drug. A visitor may lack trust for several reasons. The product isn't good. The product isn't described well enough. The product isn't the best choice for the visitor, perhaps because the search functionality or navigation has done a bad job. In such cases, your job is to persuade the visitor of the merits of the product, but not at the expense of eroding their trust in your company. Leading e-commerce companies are great at this. They retain their trusted advisor status by including impartial customer reviews. The same types of proof that were effective for building trust in your company are equally effective at building trust in a product. Just be aware that lack of trust in your company and lack of trust in the product are two separate problems. Both must be solved before a customer will place an order. In the next episode, we'll explain why winning websites remove risk and how to use guarantees to remove visitors' fear of commitment. And that's all for this episode. If you'd like to be kept up to date with our new discoveries, get our free email newsletter from conversion-rate-experts.com/gifts. Until next time, we wish you the best of luck with making your website win.