Building trust is pivotal to the success of your eCommerce store or for building the brand for your online business. The best way to strengthen trust is through a strong reputation and meaningful relationships nurtured over time. Here’s a closer look at what you can do to help build trust with budding customers and to drive sales.
Written Testimonials
Happy current customer testimonials play an important role in building trust with potential customers. In today’s world, people do pay close attention to online reviews. The majority trust online reviews to help them make a good purchase decision.
Most successful websites use this to their advantage. You should gather as many written testimonials and reviews from your loyal customers as possible and showcase them on your website. If you are an ecommerce business, ensure that you include reviews on your product pages.
Try to garner good reviews on your social pages, too. Social savvy customers read the reviews on your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+ page to learn about your business. Testimonials stand as an endorsement for the good products or service you provide.
Borrow Credibility or Get Certified Seal
To build strong credibility and trust, you should align yourself with credible people or organizations. The easiest way to bag credibility is to get certified by any authorized business rating authorities. These trust seals often act as trust indicators to potential customers.
Displaying the Logos of industry awards and recognitions, or displaying the places you have been covered, is one way to gain credibility. You can establish credibility with your website visitors by using the awards or any mentions in reputed newspapers, publications or online journals. Ecommerce websites and those which handle credit card payments should add payment and trust seals around the key areas of the site’s buy points.
Professional Web Design
If your site design looks awful and unprofessional, you’re likely to lose a high percentage of users and experience a high bounce rate. But if your site looks appealing and professional, with highly-captivating graphics and user-friendly navigation, visitors will be glued to your site, wanting to explore further. The web design should be meaningful with a focus on conversion. Make a good first impression.
Frequently Updated Blog or Monthly Newsletter
Meaningful content can vastly help your business by establishing you as a thought leader. It will also help to build a base of loyal returning visitors. Blogs should be updated frequently to get positive feedback from visitors. Your content should be reliable, authentic, and written intelligibly. This will help generate both better search engine results, and higher conversion rates. And, it gives you something to include in your emails.
Reputation Management
People trust online reviews more and more these days. It’s extremely easy for a customer to reach a large audience through social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc. Setting up a Google Alert to track your name and business will make it easy for you to monitor what people say about your website, giving you the ability to respond and to take necessary corrective actions, if necessary, before your business takes a hit from a negative review.
You must ensure that you stand out from your competition, constantly increasing your conversion rate. Building trust online is hard work and you do not want to make any wrong moves. Though this cultivation takes time, it is worth it.
