Why do the thoughts of complete strangers have so much influence over our buying decisions? Trustist Founder Nigel Apperley explains the power of good reviews in your business, how to seek out ‘moments of delight’, and why a 4.7 rating is the sweet spot when choosing a restaurant.

Plus! How Ryanair mocks customers for their bad reviews – and still makes more sales.

In this episode we meet Trustist founder Nigel Apperley. He has two decades of ecommerce expertise, at places like Slendertone and Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton. It was when he was Director of Ecommerce at Kwik-Fit that he really started to see a link between customer reviews and sales.

So he ran an experiment. He gathered up Google reviews, and showed them on the website and on screens in stores. And saw an average increase in revenue of over 50%.

Bit of a lightbulb moment!

So in 2014 he set up Trustist, a customer review platform which pulls together reviews from lots of different sources to give you stars in Google search results. Which leads to more clicks – and more sales!

Listen to our conversation and discover:

• The power of ‘moments of delight’ and ‘review gating’
• The right time to ask for a review?
• Why a 4.7-star rating better than 5 out of 5
• The impact of reviews on your conversion rate (and how to deal with bad ones)
• The right question to ask for the most positive and useful response

Show notes

Read more about Nigel and the story of Trustist: https://trustist.com/about/

Find out how you can use Trustist to get more stars in Google search results, drive traffic, reach more customers, and streamline how you display positive reviews of your business.

Book a demo: https://trustist.org/ChrisConsultation

See pics from the Ryanair we refer to and see Martha in her pink flamingo!

https://www.theinspiration.com/2023/09/ryanair-being-ryanair/

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Nathalie Nahai, behavioural psychologist and author of the book Webs of Influence, explains how colour shapes our decisions and affects our buying behaviour. And what it is about red that makes it the winning colour?

In this episode we’re talking colour psychology and how you can apply these techniques to your own website and branding.

You’ll learn about:

• The colours which imply trust, calmness and wealth
• Which combinations make us see danger
• How different generations and cultures respond differently to colour – and how global influences throw all this out of the window
• And why our brains process a black and white caricature of Celine Dion more quickly than a colour photo.

We will also be taking a break in the middle to explore why red is statistically shown to be a colour for winners – great news for Manchester United fans, but not so much for Chelsea…

Show notes

Visit Nathalie Nahai’s website where you can buy her books, listen to her podcast and discover useful resources.

About Nathalie Nahai

Nathalie’s background in human behaviour, web design and the arts offer a unique vantage point from which to examine the complex challenges we face today.

Her best-selling book: Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion has been adopted as the go-to manual by business leaders and universities alike, and her new book, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”.

A popular speaker, consultant and facilitator to Fortune 500 companies, Nathalie also serves as a behavioural science advisor and helps organisations to ethically apply behavioural science principles to enhance their business.

Having lectured at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, Nathalie's ability to ignite conversation and offer tools and strategies with which to harness human potential, has helped countless organisations transform how they approach business online, with clients including Google, Accenture, Unilever and Harvard Business Review, among others.

Having co-hosted the Guardian Tech Weekly, Nathalie now hosts the popular podcast, Nathalie Nahai In Conversation, which explores our relationship with one another, with technology, and with the natural world.

She is also the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.

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Iain Boyd and Adam Robertson from GOV.UK Forms at the Government Digital Service join us to share best practice in designing online forms to capture information efficiently and ethically. Plus, discover the dark patterns on the web which set out to trick us into doing things we never set out to do.

Online forms. They’re either so intuitive you hardly notice you’ve filled them in. Or they take so long to complete that you just lose the will to live.

Or maybe you’re the one creating the form and trying to gather the information. People just don’t fill them in properly! How can you work with data that’s incomplete?

An organisation dealing with this issue on a massive scale is Government Digital Service, who are behind GOV.UK, the website for the UK Government.

More than 13m people use GOV.UK weekly, and more than 1bn transactions are completed a year – things like filing a tax return or renewing your passport. GDS are introducing their new Forms Builder to make Government forms more accessible.

Our two guests on this episode are both from GOV.UK Forms at Government Digital Service. They share best practice in designing online forms so that not only do more people fill them in – but you get accurate data too:

• Adam Robertson, Senior Product Manager
• Iain Boyd, Engagement Lead at GOV.UK at the UK Government Digital Service and Iain Boyd from GDS

And in complete contrast to this ethical, transparent approach, you’ll find out about dark patterns on the web, and why Amazon, Google, Meta and the makers of Fortnite are being fined millions of dollars for tricking users into doing things they simply never set out to do. And who’s clamping down on nudges and sludges, biased framing and confirmshaming once and for all?

Show notes

GOV.UK Forms builder tool: “Create an accessible online form in minutes without needing technical knowledge”

Government Digital Service service manual. Accessibility, measurement, research, good design practice…it’s all in here!

GDS blog: How we’re opening up access to GOV.UK forms

GDS blog: Making it easy to create and publish digital forms on GOV.UK

About dark patterns

Visit Harry Brignull’s website, Deceptive Patterns for a full description of the term and some pretty horrifying examples in the Hall of Shame!

The autofill dark pattern

UK regulators target dark patterns

National Law Review: FTC report shows increase in dark patterns

ICO and CMA clamp down on dark patterns in the UK

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