If you’re looking to turn more website visitors into members, you’ll need to ensure your membership site shows you’re credible and trustworthy. In this article, we’ll cover vital trust factors with your website that, if in place, can improve membership-site conversions.
You may have the best membership content in your field, but if you can’t demonstrate credibility and trustworthiness, no one will want to find out. Thankfully, there are many ways to improve the authority of your website and to make it look more trustworthy. Several of these ways can be implemented quickly, giving you instant credibility.
Create a Professional Website
First things first! It’s vital that your website looks the part. If you’re using WordPress, you’re spoiled with choices when it comes to finding the right theme and design for your membership website. However, it’s not just a matter of choosing the best-looking theme or design. You also have to ensure its right for your target audience. What to do? Check out other websites in your industry to see how they present themselves to their audience.
Creating a professional website with trust appeal isn’t all about design, though. It’s also important that your copy—the text—on your site is well written, free of spelling and grammatical errors, and appropriate for your target audience. For example, if you’re offering a membership product to help WordPress beginners start a blog, you want to tone down the technical jargon on your sales page. Conversely, if you’re offering technical guidance to professionals in a specific field, then using industry terminology will help demonstrate your knowledge and credibility. You may even want to consider working with a proofreader or editor to ensure your site lives up to its potential.
A few other ways to ensure that your website isn’t hindering membership-site conversion rates include offering a mobile-friendly option, using high-quality images, and reducing load times.
Use Video Presentations
Video is an effective way to increase website engagement, and membership sites are no exception. In addition to using video content to upgrade your membership product, you can also use a video presentation to better connect with your audience and to add trust signals to your site.
To help put a face to the name or brand of your site, consider creating a welcome video that not only explains the benefits on offer but also introduces you to your audience. This video could be straight-to-camera talking-head footage or a montage of footage from your membership site combined with images that showcase your personality and expertise.
Share Contact Details
Publishing contact details on your site helps increase transparency. Even if a potential member doesn’t actually want to get in touch, having the ability to do so is reassuring. Adding a contact form to your WordPress website is a good place to start, but providing an actual email address further increases trustworthiness. Publishing your business address also helps earn you extra trust points.
Social (Media) Proof
Sharing links to your social media profiles not only gives your potential members another way to contact you, it also lets them do some low-level snooping to find out more about you. Be sure to only share links to social media profiles you’re actively using and to fill out your social media profiles in full—no one wants business advice from an egg!
Member Testimonials
Publishing testimonials from members on your membership site is a powerful way to build trust and improved conversions. The more you can share about the member, such as their name, a photo, a link to their project or profile somewhere, the more trustworthy their testimonial will be. When soliciting feedback from your members, ask them to explain how your product has helped them. And text-based testimonials are good, but video testimonials are often more effective.
Share Client and Partner Logos
If you’ve worked with any impressive clients or partners (influencers), it’s worth mentioning on your site. One way to do so is to display client logos in your content. Hopefully, some of their brand appeal and credibility rubs off on your site while also demonstrating that you’ve worked with some of the best in the industry.
Publish Case Studies
Case studies—another way to use trust signals to improve membership site conversions—can follow your display of client logos and show how you’ve helped clients. Alternatively, these case studies could document the success you’ve had with your own projects, such as increasing productivity, growing your audience, generating more revenue, or some other metric related to your membership content. Publishing case studies from your members demonstrating how your membership site has helped them with their goals is sure to resonate with your audience.
Awards and Accreditations
Like client logos, publishing any awards or accreditations you’ve earned helps demonstrate credibility in an easy-to-digest format. These badges could be from industry-related awards you’ve won or for qualifications you’ve acquired. If you’re a member of any relevant organizations, consider displaying their logos to your site as well.
Data Visualization
Backing your claims with data also gives your website more credibility and trustworthiness. Just remember, though, that it’s important you present this content in a “viewer-friendly” format. Think charts and graphs rather than cold, hard data.
Money Back Guarantee Details
Want to provide potential members additional reassurance? Consider offering a money-back guarantee. Fixed refund periods are common in the digital product space and can help hesitant audience members to overcome risk aversion when it comes to purchasing products online.
It’s also a good idea to share how you’ll be collecting payments, including information about rebilling and payment processors.
Final Thoughts
The key to running a successful membership site lies in making the most of the traffic that comes your way. In doing all you can to demonstrate the quality of your membership product and the credibility of your site, you’ll increase the number of visitors who go on to join your membership program.
Then, once you’ve improved your website conversion rates, you can move on to reducing your membership site’s churn rate and keeping members signed up longer. There’s always something you can do to make your site more successful.
Which trust factors will you be adding to your membership site? Let us know in the comments below.
EN 
ES 
FR 
DE 
PT 
Add a Comment