Article post by Travis Jamison

Brand credibility plays an essential role in the success of your business.

In addition to being more likely to purchase from the brand they trust, 46% of consumers are also ready to pay more.

Regardless of whether you’re running an ecommerce store or a regular website, your audience will pay attention to its design and form an opinion about your brand based on how good or bad it is.

And when we’re talking about the importance of website design for establishing brand credibility, it’s worth mentioning that it only takes visitors 0.05 seconds to decide whether they like it or not. And that’s how much time you have to impress them and make them stay and explore.

Here are some web design tips that will help you boost your brand credibility and convince visitors who land on your site to stick around.

Showcase Third-Party Accreditations

No matter how great your brand messaging is, you still need experts and reputable companies not affiliated with your brand to give you the thumbs up. Otherwise, what you say about your products or services will come across as boasting and blowing your own horn.

Customers will believe only substantiated claims, and social proof in the form of third-party accreditations will add another layer of credibility to your brand.

Wherever you have your service, products, or content verified as authentic by a reputable third party or expert, make sure you highlight this.

Clever design tricks can help you showcase these third-party accreditations more prominently on your website and catch the attention of your visitors.

Sleep Junkie, for example, has their content written by sleep specialists and medically reviewed by experts in the field. Their comprehensive review of the top mattress brands for 2022 could very easily come across as a plug for their products. The brand overcomes this risk by making sure their accreditation is easily visible by implementing a hover flyout element that shows the medical reviewer’s details.

The same applies to the writer, whose credentials are displayed next to their name. By clicking on the writer’s name, visitors are taken to their profile with the About, Experience, and Education sections.

Source: Sleep Junkie

SomniFix takes this tactic up a notch by giving their accreditor a whole section on the homepage. To show the authenticity of this expert review, the brand included the accreditor’s photo and a link to his site. This way, visitors can check everything out for themselves and see that the third-party accreditation is legit and written by a real person.

Source: SomniFix

Highlight Internal Quality Assurance Processes

If you make a claim about the efforts, you go through to ensure your product or service meets predefined quality, make sure your website highlights this process.

Simply stating you have internal quality assurance processes doesn’t cut it because this doesn’t say anything about how you do that. Therefore, such statements carry no weight and are considered empty words.

By explaining your QA processes to your audience, you’ll show them how seriously you take the whole thing and provide evidence that your claims are genuine.

Scott’s Cheap Flights has a QA process they call a “Bestie Test”. They’ve even branded this QA process and given it a logo and its own page. The site designers also made the decision to promote this process on pages where the product’s core features are discussed, like the Cheap Ticket Notifications page. This way, potential customers associate quality of service with a particular technical aspect of the service.

This is a very cool twist on the “trust badge” concept. The company scores every flight not only based on how cheap it is but also on whether flight experts would recommend it to their best friend.

The Bestie Test checklist features five elements:

• Cheap fare
• Good routing
• Convenient layovers with a connection
• Good airline
• No last-minute flights

Source: Scott’s Cheap Flights

Ensure Your Site Is Optimized for Mobile

In 2021, almost 55% of global website traffic was generated through mobile devices.

It’s expected that ecommerce sales will account for nearly 22% of all retail sales by 2025.

Due to the fact that people predominantly use their smartphones to access websites, Google introduced mobile-first indexing. According to this model, the search engine will mainly use the mobile version of website content for indexing and ranking.

All this illustrates why your site should be optimized for mobile.

However, to clear any confusion, we should distinguish between two similar but not interchangeable terms:

• Mobile-friendly refers to a scaled-down version of your site that adjusts to the screen size. This format is functional on your visitors’ smaller screens but doesn’t offer an exceptional user experience.
• A mobile-optimized site is built using the mobile-first approach. In other words, a site development process starts with a mobile user experience in mind, rather than designing for desktop devices and slimming down the design for mobile devices.

Obviously, mobile optimization is a more advanced practice since it offers a mobile experience that is highly customized for smaller screens, thus taking it to the next level.

Evernote is a great example of a mobile-optimized website. It’s intuitive, easy to navigate, and devoid of any clutter. The content is legible, while the branding is on point.

Source: Evernote

Don’t Limit Reviews to Product Pages

Approximately 95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase.

That’s why you should make the most of this type of social proof.

However, many companies make the mistake of displaying customer reviews on product pages only. The thing is that instead of waiting for your customers to click on the product they want to buy and seeing reviews only then, you should pique their interest much earlier in the process.

Simply put, share product reviews across your site. It’s a good idea to show your customers what others think about your products, brand, and customer experience the moment they land on your site.

Mannequin Mall uses a “Reviews” flyout that’s visible on every page on the site. They understand the importance of social proof and don’t want users to click through to a product before seeing that the brand is trusted by its customers.

This flyout is also separated into two sections – one showing product reviews and the other reviews about the brand and its service quality. In addition to that, their website also features an entire page dedicated to authentic reviews by real customers, together with user-generated content.

Source: MannequinMall

Highlight Your Availability

93% of customers say they are more likely to purchase again from brands with great customer service.

Similarly, 78% of customers are ready to forgive a brand for making a mistake after receiving exceptional service.

If you have in-person, real-time support available, whether it’s through chat or telephone, make sure your web design showcases this.

Don’t hide it since you can buy immense trust by showing your target audience that you are always available to them to answer questions and support any future queries they may have.

Even if they don’t need support at the moment, they’re still aware that you’re there for them.

Bang & Olufsen’s website design reflects that they care about their customers. The brand clearly wants to make it as easy as possible for customers to reach support, so they listed phone numbers and available hours for different regions and countries.

Source: Bang & Olufsen

Go the Extra Mile with Your Earned Media

Earned media mentions show that your brand is credible and trustworthy.

This organic promotional tactic has the power to increase the authority of your brand plus improve its visibility and awareness.

When a reputable media outlet talks about a brand or features it in its content, it’s a signal that customers don’t have to worry about purchasing from or doing business with it.

Displaying earned media mentions on your website can have an extremely positive influence on how visitors perceive your brand. Placing logos of respectable sources that mention your brand on your homepage will not go unnoticed by your potential customers and can dispel their suspicions.

Many brands simply show the logos of publications that gave them a mention using the “As seen on” section. MarketBeat shows us a good example of this standard approach.

Source: MarketBeat

Gili Sports actually highlights a particular quote from the mention, thus amplifying what’s been said about the brand. These snippets tell potential customers what impressed each media outlet and condense the value that the brand adds.

Source: Gili Sports

Showcase Quality UGC

Communication with your customers isn’t a one-way street.

They don’t like being passive recipients of your brand messaging, so it’s crucial to find a way to make them active participants in your activities.

To achieve this, you should zero in on improving customer engagement.

This tactic allows you to deliver connected experiences and build meaningful relationships with your customers instead of focusing on transactional marketing.

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most powerful assets for engaging your customers. It’s so effective because people perceive it as 2.4 times more authentic than your regular brand messaging.

Another factor that contributes to successful UGC is its quality, volume, and frequency.

What this means is that you need a regular stream of high-quality images or videos created by your customers. If your feed contains only an occasional piece of UGC that’s of poor quality, it can only hurt your brand.

Cluse embedded the Instagram feed on their website homepage. This way, the brand provides a constant display of high-quality images of customers wearing their watches and jewellery. Website visitors can click on an individual image, and a pop-up window will show the link to the Instagram profile of the person who posted it and the product page.

Source: Cluse

Closing Words

Digital marketplaces have become fiercely competitive, giving customers an abundance of choices and options. As a result, only the best brands succeed – that is, those that manage to instil trust in their customers and deliver on their promises.

Having a well-designed website goes a long way in showcasing your brand credibility and convincing your potential customers why others love doing business with you.

Every detail on your website matters, including mobile optimization, the quality of your UGC, the prominence of third-party accreditations, earned media, or customer reviews, and the availability of your support.

The trick is in providing an exceptional user experience and showing your customers that you care.