Without trust, no one buys.
Trust means befriending, and friends are not made instantly. Without building trust, you might get traffic, you might keep visitors interested and informed, but when it comes to leads and sales, you’ll fall flat.
Now, it might seem that we’re jumping the gun, here. After all, one of the 7 steps of website success is generating leads and sales. But trust is a fickle thing, and there is plenty of evidence out there that trust is built long before purchases or calls are made. And that bridge in time between trust and purchase means is worth mentioning.
How do you build trust?
Think of your own experiences online with purchases. Does the site look good? Does the company know what it’s doing? Are they easy to contact? Do they seem knowledgable about what you’re about to purchase? Trust can be broken down into 5 goals.
- Make sure you are easy to reach.
- Make sure you have the information your customer needs, and keep it fresh.
- Make sure your website is clear, and easy to navigate.
- Make sure you have testimonials.
- Make sure you are the authority in your field.
Tactics in building trust. Most fall into the category of great design, but becoming the authority in your field is paramount.
Primary Tactics
- Content Building: Avoid these trust issues. Probably the most important step, so make it easy to find relevant information that builds trust. What are your fears when browsing? Much of this in intuitive, but some is not.
- Is your contact information easy to find, with pictures? Do you have bios on top employees?
- Is your address, phone number, email prominently displayed on every page?
- Do you have certification and association images close at hand?
- Are your articles timely and come out regularly? Is there any outdated information? Nothing says lame like content that no longer makes sense.
- If you have an e-commerce site, does it prominently display the SSL logo?
- Creative Writing: Don’t use a hammer. This is less about what to do, and more about what not to do; don’t be pushy salesperson, be objective, and speak directly to your customer types. Create a page that lays out each type of customer, then sell directly to them.
- RSS: Broadcast and retrieval power builds trust. Make it easy for people to come back to your website, shout out to the world that you’re an authority. RSS does this.
- Branding: Brand is trust. Branding yourself (then creating great content) is powerful, since all content built can be be referred to your brand and therefore you. Also, building and prominently displaying testimonials directly onto your website is a convincing argument to giving you a try. Once even one purchase is made, quality and customer services takes over.
- User Testing: Live test to see facial expressions. Sit someone down at the computer with you, ask them a series of questions (can you find my contact information? Is that good enough for you?) Don’t get alarmed if they tear your website apart, that’s why your testing. Many problems with customer trust can be solved this way.
Secondary Tactics:
- Affiliate Marketing: Use the brand of others to build trust. Affiliate marketing is a ‘piggyback’ method of building trust. If the affiliate lets you use them, then their trust is added to yours (the percentage of transferral based upon how well known the affiliate is.)
- Competitor Analysis: Learn from your competitors how they build trust. Type in a key phrase that you would use to find your website. Click on the top ten results, and examine their websites,
- Shopping Cart Abandonment: Where most sales fall flat. Believe it or not, much of sales is lost at the last stage, in the shopping cart. There are companies out there spending thousands of dollars on this single problem. Shoping cart abandonment can be performed through usability testing or examining analytics. Contact us for more information.
- Landing Page Optimization: Building trust starts with the first page your customer ever sees. If your customers find information that is very useful on your website with the very first page they come to, average number of pages viewed per visitors goes WAY up.
Trust beyond Tactics
A note about customer service: Customer service is absolutely critical in a business. All the tactics above won’t help you if your customers buy from you once and only once. And satisfying irate customers is part of every business.
While web promotion and internet marketing is not particularly helpful in this area, we have made customer service easier by building FAQ machines in the past to help our customers. An FAQ machine allows call agents to digitally log problems with products and services, create standardized helpful responses, and refer both caller and callee to the resource online. The resource database can even be searched before the irate customer calls. See the usefulness? Contact us for more details.
- Tactics in building trust. Most fall into the category of great design, but becoming the authority in your field is paramount.
