Badging – Persuade Users To Buy

Badging is a way to draw attention to a product or service on your page, essentially you highlight the product or service against others on the page or for a reason that it stands out by putting a badge or graphic next to it to draw the user and promote the price, feature or benefit. It sounds simple but don’t underestimate the power of badging, it’s a very effective way to push people towards an item or service that you want to sell more of, below we’ll cover a few examples of how to and how not to do it.

First; Badging and how not to do it :

The VIP section in a night club operates by making people feel special, they skip the queue, they get an area cordoned off from everyone else, aka the “normal” people, there’s no value attached to anything that’s the same for everybody and that’s the same with badging, if you badge every product up with the same offer then it loses it’s value, it may convert better than having zero badges but you should use the same badge sparingly to really emphasis a few main products, this hopefully then turns it into a question of “WHICH item do I buy?” rather than “Do I buy?” :

The above example of badging that just fades away, the “Save” is pretty bland, generic and doesn’t really stand out, unlike the example below, but they could both go even further with sale badges, discount amount badges, perhaps advice badges too like “Best for Hiking” or “Best For Coastal” etc.  :

As you can see there are two different badges there, one is essentially just saying “New” the other infers a discount by buying online, but they do stand out more than just “sale” – One test to do here might be to remove the rating stars until there is a rating as it could look negative to some people.

How to Badge To Highlight Products You Wish to Sell :

Try to highlight positives, this could be new stock, best rated, fastest, cheapest, free delivery, hard wearing, low weight, most weight, durable, etc. basically try to think about what the purchaser would want to see to make the buying decision, what is important to them etc.

The above examples to the left, whilst offering Free Backrest, paddle and delivery also sets the seed in the users mind that the other two will incur backrest, paddle and delivery costs so a double message is served which makes the first two look good value for money, even though they are  the a little more expensive items.

Show The Savings! 

When badging sale items it’s also good practice to show the saving, rather than just saying “sale” but not quantifying how much they can save, below are a couple of examples of this :

As you can see, three of the items are on sale, showing not only the price (with previous crossed out) but also “Save x%” too in red, The sale stripe isn’t highly visible, trying a different colour background for the stripe could be a good A/B test.

The above badging example shows Free delivery, sale saving percentage as well as the RRP v Sale price.

More sale badging badging below but rather than just all being one type there are some on sale, some not, most show the 50% but it creates a feeling of more choice than just the first example with “Sale” on everything, even though in reality below there’s a saving to be had on every item.

Two examples below of badging v no badging, the first site highlights free boardbags and delivery for two items, then just delivery, also note that the brand logos are there, sale price and even a video icon on the last item.

The second example is pretty bland by comparison, it has a better call to action (the first didn’t have any button!) but doesn’t really offer the same level of incentive to click as the first site does.

Advice Badging :

Rather than just price or delivery information you can use badging to advise potential customers on which products might suit their needs, below is an example with “Our Experts love” which infers that it’s the best camera.

Advice badging works well if you have products or services that appeal to a range of people, for example in Kayak sales you could badge up for “Ideal Beginner”, “Best for Intermediates” or “Expert Kayak”, Snowboards could be badged up for “Best For Powder” or “Fast Board” etc. For camping it could be “Lightest” or “Smallest”. For computers it could be “Fastest” or “Our Choice” etc. For Mobile phones it could be “Longest Battery Life” or “Largest Screen” etc.

If you just wish to sell more of an item, simply putting “Best seller” or “Most Popular” will highlight it, giving social proof to items like that infers that most people choose it.

You might not be sold on the benefits of badging but it’s worth running some tests to see if it makes a difference on site for your product or services.