The Original Conversion Copywriter, Joanna Wiebe
Explains How to Use “Reasons to Believe” on Your Pages

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, Joanna here from Copy Hackers. Today we’re going to talk about something that I have found very valuable when optimizing websites and really squeezing more convergence out of your visitors and that is Reasons to Believe. Now, this is an unsexy but very, very usable exercise that you can apply in numerous places on your site and see pretty good convergent lift. These are the sorts of small quick messages that neutralize anxieties without necessarily introducing anxieties. They can be extra delightful that can make you feel really good about your business and about dealing with you.

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They’re really those things that push people over the edge a little bit more and that is simply because you are speaking to very quickly something that they desire, something that falls into these buckets. There are four buckets here; time, money, risk and blank. Now blank is a more specific to you sort or more reason to believe.

Now, reasons to believe, there are some very common ones out there. I’ll say it with time, I’ll say it with money, I’ll say it with risk and then other things that might be more specific to your business or to … in type of thing that your unique customer is looking for.

Time; if you have a downloadable product, it might be instant download. If you a have shippable product, it might be fast shipping, two-day shipping, priority shipping, next-day shipping. If you have a SaaS solution or a free like social site or something to that effect, it might be that you have 99.99% uptime. People will then know that they never have to worry about your service being down.

Money related reasons to believe. There are a lot of these and these are really good because when it comes down to it, when we’re making decisions to buy or not to buy, to sign-up or not to sign-up for free track trial, whatever that might be, we’re more of the not … when we get to the point of converging thinking, “Can I afford this? Is this really [inaudible 00:02:20] my money on?” Money focus reasons to believe, you can go a long way. These include money-back guarantees, which is again one part risk and one part money, lowest price guarantee, free shipping, we pay a tax, we pay customers duty, free support, free 24/7 customer service, things like that, that are related to people not having to worry about shelling out more money than they want to.

Risk; risk is something like guaranteed secure if it’s an online solution, for shipping same sort of thing, things with it to how trustworthy you are, no-question-asked returns. Finally, the low delightful one. Now there are bunch I can go in here and again there might be some better really specific to what your target audience is looking for from a service provider or someone like you. Now, for me, what I have seen a lot is people focus messages in your social proven authority proof, those things that make us trust that if everybody else is using this or choosing it, then I should choose it too. It’s okay. It’s a minimizing risk of course and saying, “It’s okay,” because everybody else is using it.

It’s really speaking to something that’s a bit more social and broad than just like minimizing risk. These include #1 best selling, world’s most trusted blank, world’s largest selection of blank, those sorts of things that are related to something bigger and broader. It may also include in that kind of people topic, something like we support X30 like 1% for the planet or something for that effect. It’s really as simple exercise and figuring out what your reason to believe are if your list out time, money, risk and blank, this is of course something you would fill in that you know to be true for what your customers are looking for.

Then once you get those lists out, just a matter of taking up what you do if you don’t have a product you can ship then obviously free shipping is not the reason to believe for you. What’s the alternative that might actually work if you’re [sas 00:04:25] business, you don’t ship in anything , what can you say that would help people through their believe that they are ready in choosing you or trying to justify a decision here and make them feel really good about a decision to choose you. Now, what do you actually do with a reason to believe? Once you got them listed, like so what, so now what, what do I do with it?

There are some key places on your website and in your emails that you can put your reasons to believe. This will be your assignment today. My white board is kind of mess. Here are some places that you should be thinking and putting your reasons to believe. What I’m really focusing on here is that you’re putting it on a place where it’s always visible to your visitors. Reasons to believe are so short and they work really well to persuade people and to reinforce your key reasons to believe and not your benefits focused messages most other things that define of different pages, but rather things that they should care about at every point into their experience, the importance of the real reasons to believe.

You were to put four really solid reasons to believe in your header. Verify your logo by your phone number, whatever, you can have your phone number on there, or you could put it just above your nav or just full low your nav and that’s your global nav that I’m talking about. Now assuming you have a [inaudible 00:00:54] that’s the minimum, that’s where I always recommend they go and I’m recommending that to you today.

Footer; you can also put some of these in your footer and you might want to put quite a few of them in your footer because if someone does make it down there and they do see what you’ve got listed as your reasons to believe, holding back when you’re already through the majority of the page like the pages like done, so you can kind of as much of there as you want to.

Cart, checkout, sign up, when you put reasons to believe that are directly associated of objection or anxiety that somebody might have the point of converging such as price related once, risk reducers, things like that, that can go a long way. There are some types of reasons to believe that you might not want to put up the point of converging, we want to put exactly right message wherever possible, and obviously when they’re thinking of taking out their credit card or giving you their email address, they need some assurance that this is the right decision to make that they are right to pay you today for this, so reminding them of the ways that you save the money or that they don’t have to worry about jumping into this and not being able to back out later after they try you. Those of the messages go a long way when your cart, checkout, sign up.

Finally, buttons. Buttons are a very big deal. I’ve talked about that quite a bit. I dedicate the whole book to them. I think that observes a lot more than that. Buttons are the point of converging. You cannot do enough to optimize your buttons but that doesn’t mean you should bloat your buttons, that’s the whole bunch of stuff that you can test, some really good ways of getting more people to click more often on your buttons. Putting the right reasons to believe around your buttons, not a lot of them necessarily around them but at the right moment in the experience that they’re going through having the right reason to believe below or above or right or left, up, your button can go a long way to get in a few more clicks out.

That is really the point of optimization. We’re not talking about doing a whole bunch of huge dramatic things as necessarily but rather squeezing more convergence out, take what you have and get more out of it. These little things like putting recently near button can really go a long way. Going forward you may want to test more radical reasons to believe. A lot of the reasons to believe like money-back guarantee and free shipping, those are great, but they can be a little bit like … kind of a given … like people expect an instant download when they’re downloading software, so although it can be a good reason to believe, it might not be the best one for you. Your goal today is to get some good ones out there.

Moving forward I’d strongly encourage you to test more dramatic or radical reasons to believe, the really delightful ones, the really different ones that make you sound as cool as you are and people may really believe in you because they should. That is it. Good luck with that assignment today, and we’ll see you later.