During the persona creation process, you should consider what motivates a prospect to make a purchase or sign up for a service. More importantly, you should consider what would stop a prospect from moving forward with a conversion. What concerns are visitors fueled with upon entering the site?

Visitors can experience different FUDs as they move through a site. A visitor’s initial concerns when entering a site can be either alleviated or aggravated as the buying process continues. Every visitor will experience a certain amount of friction, but you can reduce these concerns significantly. Anything that causes a visitor unease, anger, frustration, annoyance, or confusion results in another lost conversion.

Dealing with FUDs requires countering the objections users have throughout the buying experience and dealing with elements that cause friction and anxieties. As we discussed in Chapter 4, building trust first requires building confidence. FUDs are the elements throughout the site that can build anxiety and destroy confidence. Figure 6-1 is an overview of the “circle of trust.”

Circle of trust
Figure 6-1. Circle of trust
Personas and FUDs

What raises anxieties in one persona may not phase another, which is why it is important to understand your visitors and create personas that best represent them. Every page on your site can be addressed from the persona perspective. We can look at best practices for days, but if you do not address issues on the site from the perspective of your customer base, best practices are meaningless and, when applied, will not have a strong impact.

An online retailer came to us with questions about their higher-than-usual abandonment rates. After studying their market, we created four personas and began to probe deeper into the questions and anxieties these personas would have on the site. Three of the four personas had major concerns about the privacy policies and overall security of the site. We countered this FUD by including assurances on the page. This assurance helped the retailer reduce cart abandonment rates by close to 35%.

Another retailer came to us only weeks later complaining of the same high cart-abandonment rate. Although they offered similar products, they were more of a niche retailer that appealed to only a specific type of buyer. Additionally, the items they carried were more expensive. The personas for the two clients were entirely different, yet this client insisted on including similar assurances on their site. Within weeks the client saw a drastic drop in conversion rates. The assurances only enhanced anxieties because visitors started to question the security of the site.