Building Customer Trust on Your Website: Phil Gregory 2017.
How To Build Customer Trust on Your Website
Trust is a crucial ingredient that you must earn to get visitors to buy from your website. If visitors to your website don’t think it’s safe and trustworthy, they are likely to leave and may never return.
There are a number of factors that subtly influence visitors to trust your website. In this post, I’ll explore some of those factors. Then you can begin to improve your website building a greater level of trust with both your existing customers and new website visitors.
The key to increasing your customer base is showing visitors that you want to give them the best shopping experience possible. Happy visitors will probably become customers. Happy customers become repeat customers.
Continuous & Consistent Merchandising
Match Online to Offline
Businesses who have a bricks and mortar store know how to merchandise their products. Store managers know that the placement of products throughout the store is critical to getting good sales.
Products on “special offer” and clearance are placed in prominent places. Signage and brand logos are highly visible. Your store and it’s merchandising has been carefully laid out, your best selling products and product lines with the best margins are presented first. That helps your customers find what they want, and that helps your bottom line.
To help your offline visitor make a smooth transition into your online store, consider matching your online store to your retail store.
Questions about trust that shoppers ask.
What if I can’t contact the company?
Make sure the company contact details are clearly visible. Some websites have contact details in the headers or footers of each page, others have a dedicated contact page and some sites, sadly choose not to display contact details. Companies who make it difficult for the customer to contact them, therefore create a friction point between the brand and the customer.
- Display a real email, phone number
Get your developer to make the phone numbers clickable.
Or just create click to call button.
This way anyone browsing your site on a mobile device can click the phone number to contact you immediately. - Show your business address
Make sure that you list your head office address. (Add a map) This will help to build confidence and credibility. Shoppers tend to feel nervous about giving their credit card details to a company they can’t contact easily if a problem should arise. - “What if they are not a legitimate company?”
Customers look for trust signals. Such as reviews and endorsements. Reviews give a fair indication of the level of service you provide. Try where possible to encourage customers to leave reviews. Perhaps offer them a discount incentive to do so? Customer happiness is a good indicator of whether you perform well.
The American Ad Agency, Wordstream wrote a great article about trust signals recently.
Include Trust Logos & Professional Badges
Trust Badges are commonly seen type on eCommerce websites. Indicating endorsement that you offer a safe shopping site. Common badges are Trustwave, Trust Pilot, Ekomi, and Google Trusted Stores.
If your store isn’t e-commerce but offers professional services such as accounting or Tree Surgery. Show membership badges for any professional bodies that you are members of. If you hold special qualifications, show your accreditation too.
You can also add badges from trusted payment processing companies like PayPal & Sagepay.
Deal Clinching Incentives & Risk Reduction
Customers often abandon their purchase at the last moment. How can you prevent this from happening?
Some companies offer money back guarantees, Free Shipping or if it’s a viable option, price matching. Whilst this might seem like a profit destroyer, it works well for volume products.
This removes any nagging doubt that the customer will be able to find the products cheaper elsewhere. See Curry’s FAQ page:
Show Clear Policy Pages
State Your Terms & Conditions
Take the time to build a terms and conditions page, stating your obligations in a transaction. Whilst most customers can’t be bothered to read the small print, there are many who will. Displaying your terms and conditions clearly helps the customer understand exactly what is being offered, and serves as evidence, in case of any potential disputes over service.
Links to your policy pages reassure customers and covers you if legal disputes should arise.
Show A Clear Delivery Policy
State your delivery policy clearly to avoid disappointment. Perhaps you sell a product that is sold in bulk? This can make the delivery price change.
Or alternatively Perhaps delivering from your location to the customer’s location is going to be more expensive than the standard local delivery? For example, Delivery to the Scottish Highlands. Failure to clearly state a clear and fair delivery policy enrages customers.
It helps your customers to understand exactly what to expect if your delivery charges are clearly displayed.
Showing your returns policy gains customer trust
A returns policy helps you to gain customer trust. Customers want to know that they can return items and get their money back.
If you have an e-commerce site, then it’s important that you have a returns policy and ensure that information is easily accessible. Shoppers want to know that they can return an item or swap it for a similar product.
Some companies can afford to offer free returns. If you can, say so, if you can’t, list your best offer.
FAQ pages gain customer trust
Having an FAQ page will help to take the pain out of answering customer questions and cut down on repetitive customer calls.
Take time to look through the many questions that customers ask via email, log the queries you get via phone. This will help you to build up a comprehensive and ever-changing FAQ page.
Now customers can easily find the answers that they need answering before they commit to making a sale. This demonstrates your commitment to good customer service and will win you more conversions.
Provide Customer Service out of hours
Web visitors don’t keep 9-5 hours, it’s still important to try to help them with their queries. This is where automated customer service can help. With a little configuration, you can easily set up a chatbot on your site to help customers with their queries. Chatbots are never quite as good as a real person but they do help answer simple questions like providing phone numbers, opening hours and links to parts of the website that customers can’t find. The clever people over at Accu Web Hosting have compiled this awesome list of the top 10 best chat software solutions.
FAQ
1. How can I make my website appear more trustworthy to customers?
To make your website appear more trustworthy, ensure you display clear contact details, including an email address, phone number, and physical address. Include trust signals such as customer reviews, professional badges, and secure payment logos. Make sure your terms and conditions, delivery, and returns policies are easily accessible.
2. What are trust badges and how do they help?
Trust badges are logos from recognised organisations that certify the safety and security of your website. They help reassure customers that their data is secure and that your business is legitimate. Common trust badges include those from Trustwave, Trustpilot, and payment processors like PayPal and Sagepay.
3. How can an FAQ page improve customer trust?
An FAQ page helps address common customer questions and concerns efficiently, reducing the need for direct inquiries. It demonstrates your commitment to customer service and transparency, which can lead to increased trust and higher conversion rates.
Case Studies
Help with Digital Merchandising
Related Links
- Slideshare on eCommerce Merchandising
- How to build trust online: Hubspot
- 9 trusted ways to build trust and credibility for online business: Website Builder
- How to build customer trust: 4 things to start doing today: Zendesk
I’m Phil Gregory, the MD and founder of Peak District SEO.
I’m an SEO & Google Ads Consultant with 27+ years of experience in I.T and helping UK Businesses improve website performance.
I built my first website in 1998, then I discovered the joys of website optimisation and never looked back.
If you want a no-nonsense, no-hard-sell approach and to actually get your website fixed with a solid, affordable, long-term approach, hit the contact button today.
Peak District SEO is a UK-based Digital Marketing Company.
We help businesses make more money, using traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) , Ai Search / GEO and paid advertising (PPC).
Why Peak District SEO?
27+ years of experience.
80+ 5* reviews on Google
Our customers have hundreds of page one and position 1 rankings, and we can prove it.
We’ve helped hundreds of SMEs in the UK
We have numerous articles published across the web discussing SEO.
We regularly publish case studies about the work we’ve done
Customers trust our service – See our reviews on Google, Trustpilot and Facebook
Our customers have hundreds of page one and position 1 rankings and we can prove it.
