You can’t sell much if you don’t build trust with customers.

While your business could always use a revenue increase, customer trust is an important factor when attracting both new and repeat customers. A decreasing trend of consumer trust has been observed in all industries as they start turning away from traditional sources of information about products and services and instead using the web for verification.

Achieving trust through online resources might be difficult. It is so much different from those old-school face-to-face encounters. Customers tend to look at reviews and recommendations from their fellow purchasers before they make a decision to buy something. According to some studies, up to 78 percent of digital consumers read reviews before buying.

The keys to building trust

Building trust with customers is the key to success in the digital era. There are many steps that you can take and many paths to follow to establish the desired trust on e-commerce sites and apps. We will be showing you some of them shortly.

Be transparent

Steven Tadelis, a professor at UC Berkeley, researched the factors that encourage trust back in 2007. His main finding was that secretiveness doesn’t work. Transparency and full information about the identity, among others, were the most important positive trust factors.

Over the years, transparency has become a top priority for businesses. A recent study by Label Insight clearly indicates that up to 94 percent of consumers prefer businesses that offer transparency. At the same time, almost three-quarters of consumers wouldn’t mind paying more for services and products that offer total transparency.

In today’s world, your website should include more than a legal disclaimer. The more you cover, e.g. via questions and answers, the better. Also, transparent pricing is simply a must. Any attempts to bend the truth will fire back at you as 81 percent of digital customers tend to punish businesses by making their inconsistencies public.

Make a great first impression

Design matters because it reflects how you do business. Consumer trust begins with a great first impression. If you can do it, you might be able to keep a customer for life. Focusing on design in order to impress your customer will result in a much better conversion rate. This is essential when it comes to navigation, content and visual elements, proper organization, engagement, brand uniformity, and search engine optimization (SEO).

It is very important that your users/visitors can easily understand and explore your website or app. You really don’t need to go into such small details, though. It is enough that the navigation is perfectly intuitive. A good choice of a font and other details related to typography are also important.

If any content presented is hard to read or cluttered, your customer may not want to come back. The most comfortable way to read content is from top to bottom and from left to right. You thus want to put the most important pieces of information in the upper-left area of the screen.

You also want to catch your users’ or visitors’ eyes enough to get them engaged. This is a very important factor when creating that great first impression as that’s also where the engagement will begin. And if your business has a unique logo and/or a slogan, all of these elements need to be integrated into your design to ensure full consistency.

Don’t forget about SEO, either. The way you present the information will affect how search engines can see your website. Sometimes even a small detail will result in higher search engine placement – meaning that your website will become more visible.

Humanize and show your empathy

One of the best ways to gain trust is to avoid jargon. Use a language that is easy to understand. Use storytelling to humanize your brand, run a business blog, utilize social media, and show empathy for your users or customers.

Also, offer docs and tutorials wherever possible and make sure to give your customers ways to get in touch with you. This is how you show in public that there are real people behind your brand or company.

All these factors will inspire recognition and help you build consumer trust.

Show off your products

A picture is worth a thousand words. Your customers need to be able to visualize as much as they can about your product or services before making that buying decision. The better you understand and utilize this principle, the higher your revenue. Even small things can get you the sale.

When selling services – you want to make your description as clear as possible and cover just about every aspect of the product in a way that is easy to read and understand. Selling physical products will require crisp, high-quality images. Ideally, you should add both studio shots and “environmental” photographs.

Don’t have the budget for studio images? You could invite your customers to send in their own photos. Not only does it work but it also adds a nice personal touch to your products.

Add trust signals to your website

As we have already mentioned, trust is a crucial factor, and your business won’t survive for long without it. Adding trust signals to your website is obligatory in order to become successful. Adding these extra features to your website will inspire trust in the minds of your visitors. Here are the most important trust signals to help grow your revenue and conversion rates:

SSL Certification

According to the CA Security Council’s 2015 Consumer Trust Survey, 53 percent of respondents “recognize the padlock means trust”, while 42 percent agree that the green bar means safety. Having an SSL certificate obtained and properly implemented ensures that all data passed between your web server and your customers’ browsers will remain private. And that’s exactly the level of online safety that today’s customers want.

Reviews and testimonials

Publishing testimonials and/or reviews written by a satisfied customer is the most effective way to build trust. It will easily take your original content to the next level. Make sure to add the identity of reviewers to boost the trustworthiness as the internet is already flooded with anonymous opinions that hold very little value in the eyes of consumers.

Contact and communication

You need to tell your customers who you are and what your physical location is. They also need to know how they can get a hold of you. Putting a phone number and a map with physical address will definitely work great.

Enhancing trust through social media is also a good idea. Consumers trust Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, to name a few. People use these platforms to connect with their friends, so they provide a great way to connect with customers and gain their trust.

Payment assurance

Different consumers favor different online payment tools. Providing the right variety of payment methods will certainly boost their trust and your revenue. Adding badges and/or certifications works as well. In addition, icons like Visa, VeriSign, and PayPal are also among the highest rated trust elements for e-commerce website.

Conclusion

The first step to establishing trust on your e-commerce site or app is to find out what trust features your customers are looking for. After that, you simply need to give them what they want. Even though most trust factors are universal, some of them may be best-suited for specific types of e-commerce websites.

In this article, we have covered some of the most efficient ways to build trust with customers. Now it’s your turn to implement them and start building a loyal customer base.