Case Study: Top Rated Local® Badge Raises Conversion Rates
September 14, 2018
A concrete service contractor using Marketing 360® found that adding the Top Rated Local® badge on their website had an immediate impact on conversion rates.
Trust. In today’s marketing environment, you can’t convert (at least not well) without it.
Trust is earned. You don’t create a tagline or pitch that fully engenders trust. You don’t talk about yourself and get prospects to trust you.
You earn trust through your work. When people experience the quality of your services and learn – first hand – that you keep your promises, they know they can trust you.
The way to represent this trust with online content is the customer review. When leads see your customers rate you highly, they believe you’ll treat them right.
Today, getting online reviews isn’t usually that difficult. Just asking happy customers or using an email follow-up will get you positive reviews.
The bigger problem is presenting this content in a manageable way so leads get that trustworthy impression before their attention span times out. This is difficult when reviews are spread out across multiple platforms, with varying (and sometimes unsubstantiated) ratings.
To use reviews so they support your lead-generation goals you need a way for leads to evaluate them quickly. That is precisely what the Top Rated Local® badge does.
This concrete leveling business learned this lesson – the fast way.
Trust Badge, Rating Score
The Top Rated Local® badge is placed on the lower right-hand side of the website. Note that it includes the rating score for the business:
Click it, and you get a quick look at the reviews and ratings on various platforms.
Click through to the TRL page, and you get the full review profile with links to all the platforms.
In less than a minute, a lead can check their reviews – in detail – and get a solid feel for the reputation of this business.
Conversions Increase
It’s always a big question. Does adding something like the TRL badge with its aggregated review content help the website’s conversion rates?
For this business, immediate indications are that it does. We added the badge in July. You can see the jump in August:
Conversions up 63.64%
Conversion rate up 264.09%
Cost per conversion down 47.15%
That’s a great jump for this business; we’ve seen similar results with other businesses using Top Rated Local®: