In this digital age, establishing trust amongst your audience is becoming an increasing concern. Although online shoppers are becoming more confident with website details, they may still need some kind of assurance when they are visiting an unfamiliar website. In this case, especially if you are a new website, it is important to establish trust marks that reiterate your authenticity.
What exactly are trust marks?
Trust marks are essentially logos or trademarks that are displayed on your website that show that you have met different security and privacy requirements. They are mostly independently functioning third party assurances that are trusted names in the eyes of buyers, that reassure your customers that it is safe to shop from your platform. Some of the most commonly used trust marks include PayPal, McAfee and other established trust marks. Obviously, your website will have to meet certain specifications in order to legitimately display these trust marks on your website.
The psychology behind this operates in a simple manner. Essentially, if one of your potential customers has visited the physical store, they would be more inclined to visit the site of that trusted source. They may also trust purchases that are made through well-established platforms such as Amazon and eBay.
Apart from this, there are also other advantages of establishing a trust mark on your website. Applying for one of these schemes means that you are constantly protected against vulnerabilities in the security of your website. You are immediately notified if there are any chances of a hacker attack. This kind of service protects your reputation and keeps your business free from any kind of cyber-attacks.
How do you apply and get a trust mark on your website?
If you are deciding to opt for a trust mark, the first step would be to decide which are the trust marks with high recognition and then which are the ones that are relevant to the market you are servicing. This will obviously vary according to the market you are functioning in so it is always better to do a thorough research before you enter into this. When you contact a trust mark provider, they will conduct a vetting process which starts from conducting an initial assessment of your website to check it for security following up with feedback on its strength. You can be asked to incur the further expense if the trust authority identifies any potential threats with your website which will need fixing before you are eligible for the trust mark.
When you are going in for this trust mark, it is important for you to do an analysis of your conversion rate and basket abandonment rate, so that you know exactly what kind of impact the trust mark has had on your website. The other optimal way would be to conduct A/B testing on your website, that is establishing 2 versions of the page, one with the trust mark and one without, to evaluate the performance of both.