Photo by Negative Space, CC0 1.0
Establishing trust with your customers is something that you probably think a lot about. How can you get your customers to trust you as much as they would trust one of their friends or family members? While that level of trust might not realistic, there are still plenty of ways that you can build trust between your company and the consumers who buy your products or services. And you should know how crucial that trust is for your overall success in the business world. Without consumers who trust you enough to keep coming back to buy your products or to buy the product in the first place, you have no chance of building a high-quality customer base to bring in your profit and succeed. Keep reading down below, where we’re going to go through the top ways that you can build trust with customers online.
1. Professional Web Design
First impressions matter. And these impressions matter even more when you don’t have a physical storefront for customers to walk into. If you are an online business, your customers are going to set their first impression of your site the minute that they lay eyes on it. And if your site is not professionally done or looks messy/disorganized, you’re going to have a hard time getting customers to buy from you. Consumers want to buy from websites that look clean, organized, and credible. If there are tons of links everywhere and things look a bit too sketchy, then it’s going to be very difficult to get customers to the check-out basket. Be sure to get your website professionally done and avoid common web design mistakes if you want to build trust with those customers.
2. Humanizing Your Brand
If you want your customers to stay on your site and continue to search for products, they’re going to want to know about your company. Be sure to “humanize” your company by adding a comprehensive About Us page that details your company’s history, values, team members, etc. The more information you put out there about your company, the more human you seem and less you seem like a giant, monolithic thing that you can’t trust. You can easily add this to your site when you have it professionally done by a web designer.
3. Contact Information
Of course, if you want to build trust with your customers, you want to ensure that they can get in touch with you if anything goes wrong or if they have any questions. It’s been shown that customers are much more likely to buy products or services from companies who show that they are easily reachable by phone, email, chat, or over social media networks (more on that later).
You can easily add this right next to that About Us page that we talk about above. When customers come to your site, they will be able to get in touch with you as soon as they have questions and you can answer them right away to start building up that trusting relationship.
4. Privacy Policy
At a time in the digital age that more people are concerned about identity theft than ever, it’s crucial that you have a simple and easy-to-understand privacy policy on your site. This will give your customers the peace of mind that any information that they enter on the site will not be used against them and will be safe with you. You can easily add this policy to the bottom of the page and ensure that customers read it before they check out. Even if they don’t read it, make sure that they have the option of knowing that it is there. This will make customers much more likely to enter in their credit card information and other personal information that they wouldn’t otherwise without a privacy policy in place.
5. Fixing Broken Links
No one likes to see a website that has broken links all over the place. One-minute the customer is super excited to see that you have a link to a certain product that looks amazing and the next moment they are disappointed that the link doesn’t take them anywhere. When you are designing or updating your website, make sure that you fix all of those broken links that don’t take customers anywhere. Customers are really turned off when they have to do more searching than normal to find what they’re looking for.
This also comes into play when you think about payment links. An e-commerce site should employ a trusted payments gateway to ensure that the customers do not become a prey to malicious cyber practices and keep identity theft at bay.
6. Certified Seal
If you really want to boost up your credibility among consumers, then think about getting a certified seal from the Better Business Bureau or other organizations to put on your website. Customers absolutely love to see that companies have certifications. This proves to them that you are a trustworthy source to put their money because other outside organizations that have credibility have said so. What are you waiting for?
7. Showcasing Those Social Media Stats
If you have a pretty big following on social media networks, then it’s good to put those stats up there on your website. Consumers love when companies have large followings on social media networks because that shows to them that other people see you as a credible company to work with. And this applies to every social network out there – whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or any other one that you are present on! If you are not so active on social media yet, then it’s about time that you start that up so you can add those numbers on your site ASAP.
8. Testimonials from Other Customers
And lastly, one of the absolute best ways that you’re going to be able to build up trust with your customer base is to add testimonials to your site from other customers. Customers need to know that the products that you are offering actually work the way that you say that they will work. And a lot of times, they are going to trust other consumers, rather than your word. Adding in customer testimonials will give them that assurance.
When it comes to building up trust with customers, this is something that every company wants to do but is something that’s pretty tough to do in practice. It takes a lot of time and effort to get customers coming back for more, but if you put in that time and effort, then the rewards will be amazing.
