Building customer trust is proving to be one of the most challenging aspects of marketing today. Today consumers are faced with 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. Gaining customers’ attention is more difficult than ever.
However, thanks to modern marketing tools, building and earning trust does not have to be a painstaking process. Here are five easy steps you can implement today to gain your customers trust and increase your bottom line.
Emphasize transparency with customers
One of the most important prerequisites for building customer trust with your customers is to earn it by being transparent and truthful about your offer and each element of your business.
“If you tell the truth, you never have to remember anything” - Mark Twain
The number one mistake you can make is to make false claims in your offers. By using gimmicky copywriting to hide the flaws of your product or service, you’re only setting yourself up for short-term wins. As soon as the customer figures out they’ve been duped, you’re in for a refund. Even worst, a poor review that will give you a bad reputation.
Take for example Buffer. Besides being one of the most popular social media scheduling apps out there, Buffer is known for their transparency. You can go to their website and find out their revenue, individual salaries, annual losses and much more. They also have a blog where they outline their company retreats, complete with how much money they spend on each of their trips. You don’t have to go to these extents, but it pays to share details that other companies wouldn’t.
Ultimately, the more honest you are, the more customer trust you will earn. From features to pricing and guarantees, aim for transparency and your customers will trust you more.
Leverage social proof from customers
Speaking of trust – your customers probably don’t trust your ads. In fact, research suggests that 76% of all customers think that ads are exaggerated to some extent. The amount of advertising out there coupled with the fact that some marketers “twist the truth”, made consumers lose trust in traditional advertising over time.
However, there are good news. Customers still trust other people like them, as long as they’re not marketers. According to research, 92% of people trust recommendations from peers, and an astounding 70% trust recommendations from people they don’t even know. This means that social proof is an important element used to build trust with potential customers.
There are multiple ways to use social proof to your advantage. First, you can use product reviews and have them displayed on your website, on Amazon or Google search results. You can encourage reviews by sending follow up emails or enticing buyers with discounts, freebies, promo offers, etc. Alternatively, you can use testimonials. These are more long-form and are excellent for displaying social proof on your website and landing pages to build customer trust.
More recently, companies in different industries also make use of notifications. Using a tool such as crowdy.ai, you can easily display notifications to visitors on your website. For example, you can show how many buyers or visitors you’ve had in the past day or any specific period of time. Another feature allows you to show recent purchases, sign-ups, or any other kinds of conversions you prefer.
Listen for customer feedback
There are multiple benefits to collecting feedback from your customers. You get to learn how they think and what might be some of the bottlenecks in your system, both of which allow you to refine your offer and improve your product or service. Most importantly, collecting feedback shows your customers that you care about them and value their opinion.
Much like everything else in sales nowadays, you can automate this process with various feedback and survey tools. Whether you send feedback forms through emails or put widgets on your site, one thing is crucial: place an open box for visitors and customers to leave their suggestions. If you want to go the extra mile, you can let individual customers know when their suggestion has been accepted. This method of building customer trust has multiple benefits for any business. Since it is easy to implement, it really is a no-brainer.
Provide on-demand customer service
A happy customer is a customer that trusts you. Unfortunately, making your customers happy is not as simple as providing a product or service to use. A lot of times, the only thing that helps is having a dedicated customer service team. Unfortunately, budgeting towards customer service is not very high on the list of priorities for many companies.
According to Hubspot’s research, there is immense value in customer care that goes even beyond building trust. Data from this research reveals that 50% of customers would buy more from a brand after having great customer service experience. Not only that, but 86% of customers are willing to pay 25% extra to get better customer service. Finally, great customer experience goes beyond a single transaction. The research also revealed that 77% of customers shared their positive experience with others.
One of the most effective and efficient ways to deliver a great customer experience is to build trust through personalization and responsiveness. Using a one-to-one text messaging platform to manage your personal relationships with your customers is a sure path to build customer trust faster.
Establish credibility and authority with customers
A prospect can decide not to purchase from you within seconds from landing on your site – all thanks to lack of trust. First, make sure to have a valid SSL certificate so that your prospects and customers know that their data is safe with you.
The second step to take is using trust badges. Beyond testimonials (which we mentioned above), take the opportunity to display logos of companies that worked with you, websites which published you, and major corporations that trust you, etc. This is an efficient way to leverage the reputation of other brands to easily build customer trust.
Moreover, make sure that you have secure payment gateways. If you offer payment options such as PayPal, Google Pay, Stripe, or any other service, make sure to let your customers know. Display logos of these providers across your sites. The best places for these would be on your home page, sales page, and cart page.
Finally, don’t skimp on your website development, design and copy. A poorly designed website is a red flag for many prospects that yells - your company is not to be trusted. Avoid issues such as slow loading speeds, poor SEO, low-quality and outdated design, messy copy with grammatical errors, etc. Your website is your storefront and you want to instill confidence in your target audience. Do not give your prospects and opportunity to question your credibility and authority.
Conclusion
Building customer trust in the digital age is becoming increasingly important, as traditional marketing methods no longer work as they used to only a few years ago. In order to connect with your customers’ and win them over: be honest and transparent, leverage social proof, make sure to listen to them and ask for their feedback, establish credibility and authority, and deliver a great on-demand customer experience with personalized text messaging at scale. Ultimately, a customer that trusts you is a happy one and that’s all that matters when it comes to building a successful business - customer happiness.