Some online business owners spend so much time trying to earn the trust of the major search engines they forget about their actual and potential customers. Don’t be one of these search-engine-obsessed business owners. Every visitor to your site is choosing to spend time at your site, among myriad other choices, so if you want to convert that visit to a sale you have some convincing to do. You have to prove, quickly, that you can meet their particular needs. More importantly, perhaps, you have to convey, in words and actions, that you are reliable enough to hold up your end of the bargain.
Long-established firms have been able to build and maintain that kind of customer confidence with their brand strength. If yours is a smaller firm without that kind of recognition, or you have only regional or local reach, you will have to work a lot harder to earn that confidence and establish that trust. This is even more important if you compete with those big, long-established brands.
Common worries remain
Despite the increase security on the Internet as compared to its early days, people still fret about fraudulent firms, stolen credit card stories and other web-related scares. You have to establish yourself to potential buyers, again quite swiftly, that you are indeed legitimate and will be around tomorrow to take care of a problem with today’s purchase. Customers want to be certain that you will stand behind your guarantees, live up to your return policy and, in general, value their patronage and protect their transactions (and personal data). Whatever you can do to lessen their worry is a plus.
Local or regional businesses can build trust by paying attention to appearances as well as reality. For example, your website is your “online store” and thus the defacto “public face” of your company. Fair or not, people will draw conclusions about your company based on the appearance of your website, so you need to be modern, efficient and generally “look the part” of a well-run company. The old saying, “Dress for success,” applies to your online business, too. Your site must be professional, not look like a first tutorial project on website building. Stay up to date with the latest look, without doing weekly revisions for no reason, of course. Every year or so, however, you should refresh your site’s look, features and even color scheme. Make sure your copyright notice, wherever you put it, has the current year in it, too!
Introduce yourself
Everything about your site should reassure customers that you are for real, legit and experienced. These indirect messages are important, but so are direct ones, so don’t skimp on the information on your “About the company” and/or “Contact” pages. Introduce yourself and your staff with short, informative biographies, mentioning education, degrees, special certifications and other pertinent experience. Having pictures will also personalize the experience for visitors, reminding them that there are real flesh-and-blood people behind this “virtual” storefront.
Don’t forget to do a short biography on the business itself, too – how you started the company, how long you’ve been around, interesting anecdotes and other things to humanize the site. If you belong to trade organizations, are in the Chamber of Commerce, support local charities and have a clean bill of health from the Better Business Bureau, say so, by all means. Do it without boasting, of course, but don’t assume people will investigate your background or company. Tell them about yourself and the firm, proactively.
Clips and links
Get permission from the local paper to reprint the article they did on you last year. Post video clips (after getting signed releases) of customers talking about a great buying experience. Link to reviews of both your company and the products you carry. If you have been mentioned in any other medium, from newspapers to local cable, make sure to talk about it and provide copies or links. Anything good that others say about you is great when it comes to establishing trust with new customers and reinforcing it with existing ones.
If your business is also an offline one, you should upload photographs of your store (front and interior), any delivery trucks or service vehicles, special equipment or product displays and anything else of interest. Doing this will indicate that you take pride in your business and your work, and that you run a company that they could visit in “real life.” It can also help show your expertise, as pictures are clear evidence that you have the right products and the right tools to do your job well.
Guarantees, privacy
Buyers always feel more confident making a purchase when the product or service has a solid, understandable guarantee. Of course, this is just good business whether or not you are online, but in the cyberspace market it can help you gain new customers who may have been hesitant before seeing the guarantee information.
You will certainly want to collect and maintain customer information, so you should post a privacy policy prominently. You will never know how many visitors actually read it, but it's critically important that they see one, so have a link to it on every single page of the site. Advise your customers that you will never share, rent or sell the information they supply, and even that you yourself won't use it for any other purpose than what they agree to (customer service, e-mailing special offers, etc.). Always give people a way to opt out of having their information collected, as well as declining your e-mail sales flyers.
Testimonials and perspectives
When you get an e-mail or phone call from a happy customer, ask them if you can post the message or the audio clip. Showing a picture of the people and using their names (even just first names and initials) will make the testimonials believable. Consider posting video testimonials, which are easy enough to make with the proliferation of low-cost webcams these days. If you have a brick-and-mortar store as well as an online one, you can make these videos with walk-in customers.
You need to view your website the same way that potential customers do. Look at it and try to imagine what someone who knows nothing about you will learn from your copy, graphics, pictures, video clips and other components. There are a lot of variables to cover when you are trying to build trust in business, and the lessons learned before the advent of the Internet are still important and applicable. Never stop thinking about how you can make your site better, as well as more representative of the professionalism and expertise that you, your staff and your business really do possess. It’s a challenge, certainly, but the payoff can make the difference between success and failure.
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from dedicated server hosting and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment