Increase online trust, show them who you are!

This post has come about from reading, research, and podcasts on what helps websites convert, and it’s all about faces. Specifically faces in websites. While listening to one of Tai Lopez’s podcasts giving some feedback on people’s websites, he remarked that businesses use crappy stock images with pictures of hands, skylines, and other generic things and that you shouldn’t.

When you spend a lot of time on the web, you tend to see the same things throughout the internet. Some good and some bad, but the one thing that we are aiming to focus on for ourselves and our customers is that the best thing that you can have on your website……..is a person.

Are you Guilty?

Think of it this way. If you are selling a product, what do you think would help increase sales on a website? A picture of sunglasses, or a picture of somebody wearing sunglasses?

We did a bit of digging, and we think this pretty much sums it up. Look at the section below and where is your eye drawn to?

Now we don’t know about you, but we clocked the fella in the bottom left of the picture before anything else. We did a bit of a non-scientific test in the office and the results came through, and most (but one) said they were drawn to the picture of the man in the sunglasses. But why?

Relate.

Back in 2012, Sabina Idler put out a post about designing websites for emotion and the point of it is that you need to create a humanistic response to interacting with a website. As humans spend more time online, we need to find better ways of creating that opportunity to connect with the visitors, and using a picture of a face has been proven to help that connection.

But Why?

Humans are hard programmed to look at people’s eyes and faces. A psychological research program identified that babies are more likely to respond to images of faces than they are to a picture of a phone or apple. So in a world where we are living behind a screen, there are many reasons why we should be using people instead of products.

Trust.

When you use an image of a person, you are giving visitors an opportunity to see who you are. An opportunity to see that you are an actual human and that if they came to see you, then that’s who you are. That’s why there is a picture of me on the homepage. I’m not trying to hide, I am trying to connect to people who visit the site. I could have used pictures of my local area or some pictures of computers, but everybody does that. I am trying to be different in that if you deal with Webzlee, and we arrange a meeting, you are going to know who I am before we do meet. I am taking lead from guys in the business who are much more successful than we are, and they are open about who they are and this is what they do.

These guys are tech companies but do you see a computer? Are they hiding behind a desk and monitor? No, they are just upfront about who they are and what they can do for you.

Association and direction.

Faces in websites help us associate with something as well as lead the visitor to look in a particular direction. If we take coffee for example. A cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee. Nescafe’s website shows you……..a cup of coffee. That’s it.

But if you take a look at the technique that Nespresso uses, they have George Cloony looking at the cup with a smile. This simple use of direction has the viewer following the gaze of George. It gives emotion to the fact that it is just in essence a cup of coffee. It also helps that it’s George Cloony!

It helps visitors relate.

When creating visual aid for your business, you need to make sure that it helps people relate to the product or service that they are researching. For example. If you were a business owner that was looking for help on how to get more business from the internet, I can almost guarantee that the majority of Flower companies for example will have pictures of flowers. A quick google search of “Flower Shop Durham” and boom. The first result is https://www.elvetflowers.co.uk/ (nice one! Now it’s time for you to increase your online orders) and there we have it. Flowers everywhere.

Where are the people? Apart from the arm, there is no connection with the visitor. The random arm is holding a Sunrise Surprise bouquet, and since this is on their home page we are guessing that this is their main selling product?

Where is the human connection??

Would it not be better if on the main page there is an image that shows that connection between people when they receive something they were not expecting? We’ve heard it many times before, “ sell the sizzle and not the sausages.”

Wrapping it up.

What we want you to do is to take a look at your website. Does it look generic? Has it got that human connection that helps to build that relationship with your visitor? 

From what we have experienced when it comes to using people on our websites, we have genuinely found that when we first meet potential customers, they usually see us before we see them. When we meet them for a coffee, customers come up to us and say “hi.” It’s not really a scientific result, but it is enough for us to know that utilising the imagery that we do helps to start building that connection with our new clients.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you used faces in your website or marketing strategy? Ask us what you think of what you have done and it would be great if you could give this a share!