Customer confidence is imperative for small business owners. The more confidence your customer has in you and your business, the more loyal they become. Confident customers make repeat purchases and repeat visits.
Confident customers also tell others about your website products or services.
They spread the word.
Here’s how to generate customer confidence into your website.
Quality Content
One of the best ways to communicate your strength in your industry and give your customers confidence is to write quality content. Quality content positions you as a credible and trusted source of information.
It won’t come up until your customer is ready to make a purchase however a secure transaction with an SSL certificate is important. It shows customers you value their business and respect their privacy and security.
Testimonials
Customer testimonials are social proof. They tell your visitors that you have followed through on your claims and promises. Post testimonials on your landing page and where appropriate throughout your website.
Certifications and Associations
Any certifications or associations you belong to will also ad credibility to you and your website. They help increase customer confidence when they know you belong to other business organizations. For example, a BBB, Better Business Bureau, certification can be the difference between a purchase and a click away.
Contact Information
Including your name, address, email and phone number helps people feel reassured that you’re not only a real business, they can get a hold of you if they need to. Place the information on your home page, in the footer is fine. And consider including a “contact†button or page to make your information easy to find.
Use your About page to tell people who you are and help your visitors get to know you. As a small business owner, who you are is often your strongest asset. Tell them your story.
How long have you been in this business?
What made you get into it?
Why do you enjoy it?
People like to buy from real people.
What is your experience?
FAQ/Customer Service
Make sure you have an easy to use customer service system including a FAQ page. When people have questions, they tend to trust those who present the answers up front or make it really easy to find the answers.
Policies and procedures. In this day and age transparency is essential. Make sure all of your policies and procedures are 100% communicated and up front. This can be communicated with autoresponders when people sign up for your list or buy your product. However, you can also make sure to communicate on your website itself.
For example, if you have a subscription form, you can have a link in that form to your privacy policy.
Establishing customer confidence on your website is an important strategy.
Take a look at your website from your visitor’s perspective.
Are you doing everything you can to ensure they have confidence and trust in you?
Testimonials are really powerful and you have to have them when selling products or services!
Delighted to see that “Quality Content” appears first on your list. Online customers often don’t get the opportunity to meet the person behind the business, so it’s critical that they get a glimpse of the business personality and trustworthiness through the quality content.
If that content is built up over time through a business blog, then the historical content becomes another proof to your potential customers that you are trustworthy. It shows a history online, it shows commitment, it shows you care about your visitor.
Looks I like I really have to work on my “about” page. Considering the tips you just gave me it appears pretty weak.
I agree trust symbols like SSL verified are a great way to increase trust.
In my opinion testimonials are worth less these days cause so many fake them and people don’t trust them anymore.
If you take offline marketing techniques to customer service and apply them online you will do great.
Customer relationship is not only for small businesses. It is also for large business. Then what is the need of maintaining Customer Relationship Management in every Management. 🙂
Customer service is the only way to get any loyalty out of customers.
Hi Vera! These are great tips on nurturing lasting relationships with our real customers.
I believe the ones we should value are those who can actually connect with our brands. Those who have experiences to tell with our products, just as we have histories to share with our business. These people are the ones who help us spread the word, by actually living by the services and tools we provide them.
All the things you listed down are truly helpful in establishing a relationships beyond purchases and striking deals. Reaching out first and introducing ourselves and what we uniquely offer will definitely help build sustained contact with individuals who support our business.
thank you have inspired me to optimize my website in order to keep confidence.
I believe that high quality content should really be our number one priority. People will not subscribe to a website that does not have content that they need.
Getting the trust of somebody isn’t that easy. You really need to make sure to at least give an effort before you can win their trust. In this case, you need to prove to anyone else that you have the guts to be trusted.
Kudos for getting content on the top of the list. That’s way over looked. Photos are good, but there is nothing like helping the potential customer with a little info that they can use. Affiliations and Certificates can help too if you are in a close race. Nice article.
Great points Vera. Building customer trust comes down to many factors. Unfortunately it is true that almost any trust factor can be faked, but it doesn’t mean you should neglect any of those areas. This has reminded me that we should get around to putting up an About Us page. Remember that customer trust also comes down to offsite issues such as customer feedback on other sites. Another thing that helps build trust is a professional website design.
I tend to agree with you that winning customer’s trust is a great deal. You won’t only get repetitive sales but you will get more customers too. Before making a sale, people are curious to know reputation of your company/products so you should value your existing customer’s words and put the testimonials on your web.
Yes its right if we are loyal towards our customer then only they will come to us again and again and they will tell their friends and relatives to purchase from us this information is really nice and hope to see more from you….Thanks for sharing…
“Confident customers also tell others about your website products or services.” Yeah, VIRAL MARKETING. Thanks!