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There are more than a thousand ways to optimize your website to maximize conversion rates. The following excerpt from Andrew B. King's Website Optimization explains one of the top 10 factors to maximize conversion rates.
Your logo is often the first impression that your visitors have of your company. Does your logo present your company as expert and trustworthy? How do you know? It helps to have an extensive background and training in commercial art and psychology. But barring that, you may find the following introduction helpful.
Dr. William Haig, coauthor of The Power of Logos (John Wiley and Sons), provides a framework for designers to create credibility-based logo designs. [58] These "source credibility" logos have been shown to increase conversion rates by up to a factor of four.
A logo which contained the credibility traits of a website company induced 2x to 4x more clickthroughs than logos which did not have the same credibility traits and were thus considered non-credible. [59]
The psychology behind credibility-based logos is to encourage the acceptance of messages that motivate consumers to take action. Logos lend credibility to the company's main message. So, if the source of a message is perceived to be credible and trustworthy (partly as a result of your logo design), the messages your company transmits will be more influential. In persuasive communication theory this is called source credibility.
The key to Haig's theory is to translate nonverbal communication into design forms that convey the specific credibility traits of the company in a logo. Haig found that a successful logo must:
Be credibility-based. It must incorporate attributes—such as competent, knowledgeable, trustworthy, cutting-edge, conservative, dynamic, exciting, traditional, forward-thinking, and innovation—that are specific to the company.
Symbolize the company's core competency.
Be designed to communicate that the company is trustworthy.
Be planned in content and in design form.
Use a symbolover, or next to, or to the left of the company name.
Be prominent in application and be frequently and consistently used.
Have a graphical symbol and name that work together.
Your logo is a graphical icon that symbolizes the credibility of your business. Effective logos are designed for immediate recognition. As described in Alina Wheeler's Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands (John Wiley and Sons), they inspire trust, admiration, and loyalty, and imply superiority. Make sure your logo is professionally designed to symbolize your company's unique credibility traits.
Haig said this about credibility and conversion:
Only 1–5 visitors out of 100 follow the links on a website to the "purchase" page. My work shows that over 90 percent do not even get to the "follow the link" stage. Only about 8 to 10 percent do at "first glance" within the first few seconds. My work shows that a credibility-based logo design can increase the "first glance rate" by up to 4 times. This means that a "credibility-based logo" and a "credibility-based home page" with consistent credibility traits expressed through design will more than double the visitors to the "purchase" page. That is big bucks baby!
To view some examples of credibility-based logo designs, see Haig's website at http://www.powerlogos.com.
[58] Haig, W., and L. Harper. 1997. The Power of Logos: How to Create Effective Company Logos. New York: John Wiley. Haig coined the term "credibility-based logo design" in his master's thesis at the University of Hawaii, "Credibility Compared to Likeability: A Study of Company Logos," in 1979. His Logos book expanding on his thesis followed.
[59] Haig, W.L. 2006. "How and Why Credibility-Based Company Logos are Effective in Marketing Communication in Persuading Customers to Take Action: A Multiple Case Study Toward a Better Understanding of Creativity in Branding." Ph.D. dissertation, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia.
Is your site easy to find, simple to navigate, and enticing enough to convert prospects into buyers? Website Optimization shows you how. It reveals a comprehensive set of techniques to improve your site's performance by boosting search engine visibility for more traffic, increasing conversion rates to maximize leads and profits, revving up site speed to retain users, and measuring your site's effectiveness (before and after these changes) with best-practice metrics and tools.
