Building Online Trust for your Brand
Trust is one of, if not, THE most important aspect when it comes to expanding your brand online. It is essential for improving customer acquisition and customer loyalty.
Anxiety is one of the key issues when it comes to keeping a customer on your site. This especially relates to e-commerce websites as you want to minimise all possible anxiety factors from your site’s payment process especially when handling credit card information.
Mark Smiciklas recently came up with an 8 step path to building online trust. This path will benefit anyone who has an online presence for their company or brand…in other words this will apply to every business!
Being truthful to your stakeholders is essential to building online trust. This particularly applies to any mistakes made, don’t try to cover them up or shift the blame. Just like any PR firm will tell you it is far better to admit your mistakes than to be caught out, and trust me if you lie you will be caught out. This will quickly damage any trust you already have for your company.
Never use any personal details from your users that deflect from what you have stated in your privacy policy. You need to emphasise to your customers that you have strong data security, especially when handling credit card information.
Never make a promise that you can’t keep. Breaking a promise is very hurtful to your online trust. Instead, not only should you be addressing promises made, you should also be providing your customers with a level of service higher than they expected.
Utilising a fast response time will also help to gain online trust. Always make sure that you address any questions or enquiries a user may have. Today with the immediate delivery of information online, users will expect their queries to be dealt with fast. You wouldn’t want to lose a customer because they impatiently left your site to find a competitor’s instead.
Every time you communicate directly with your users make sure you approach it with integrity. Be respectful when it comes to your prices and your level of service. Also apply this to disclosure and attribution etc.
For any online advertisements or promotions that you implement on your website, make sure they are ethical. So for instance, use permission based marketing, straightforward offers and contest rules that are easy to open and understand. Just think of all the times you’ve seen advertisements such as ‘Congratulations you are the
10, 000th visitor and have won a brand new car!!’ Although it’s not necessarily the site that is behind these dodgy ads, it still will definitely help to decrease the level of trust a user will have with your online brand. You don’t want to be associated with untrustworthy advertisements.
Be open to any information needs from your audience mainly surrounding policies such as your terms and conditions, warranties, guarantees, service levels, etc. Users will rarely ever read the lengthy policies that you have uploaded to your site, so don’t make the information hidden. Anything the user should know upfront should be very clear.
Lastly we have history which sums up the above points on how to build online trust. It is the repetition of positive communication and interactions that help build trust. So if you haven’t implemented any of the above points for your online presence it is crucial to start now. Building trust doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time and perseverance.
Mark Smiciklas has developed a solid 8 step path to building online trust to your business. If you follow all of the above points you are well on your way to dramatically improving how your audience perceive your site and your brand.
