Building customer trust and loyalty isn’t always easy, but developing relationships with shoppers is a great way to attract more customers than ever and entice them to return. Here’s 8 tips that can help you create loyal customers who love your brand.
1. Deliver exceptional customer service
Delivering remarkable customer experiences is something every business should strive to do. But ensuring your customer service is always there to help shoppers and existing customers is crucial to developing trust with them.
There are many ways you can provide a great customer experience. Think about using conversational commerce techniques such as chatbots, creating a personalised experience, and having a customer support team ready at the end of the phone line to answer questions or clear up any issues. By always being there to help, you’ll be able to build and maintain customer trust much more easily.
2. Show the customer love
When visiting a brick-and-mortar store, your shoppers usually see other customers around them. In ecommerce, this isn’t the case. So, one way to gain a consumer’s trust is by showing them why other customers love what you do. According to BigCommerce, 72% of consumers say positive reviews and testimonials make them trust a business more.
Think about adding customer reviews to product pages, so shoppers can read reviews and see your products’ value. You can also create testimonials or case studies to show the value of what you do and add your business’s score on review platforms, such as Trustpilot, to your site.
3. Display your returns policy and contact information
When browsing online, shoppers can’t assess the quality of something in person. That means they must take a little leap of faith when purchasing. Being clear and transparent about your returns policy is a great way to ease their doubts and send positive ecommerce trust signals.
Ensure to include your returns and contact information on your home page and discuss returns on product and checkout pages to boost your conversion rate. Have a clear policy with not too much small print and a frequently asked questions section to explain returns. Also, include your contact information to show shoppers that you’re a legitimate business.
4. Deliver a great shopping experience
It might sound simple, but having a well-designed, easy-to-use online store is one of the key ways you can gain the trust of shoppers. If your browsers can’t find what they’re looking for or run into hurdles when trying to complete a purchase, they’re far more likely to decide to shop elsewhere.
A range of things can negatively affect how much a shopper trusts your site, including:
– Web pages taking too long to load
– Broken links
– Poorly written text or low-quality images
– Bad page design
Continually optimise your website, checking pages to see what’s working and using data to assess if there are problems on your site that are causing shoppers to leave. Use high-quality images or videos to show your products, and ask for customer feedback to optimise your store.
5. Get an SSL certificate
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates a website’s identity and enables an encrypted connection, preventing anyone else from intercepting the information that’s sent between systems. If you don’t have one, your website visitors will see ‘not secure’ in the search bar when browsing your site, reducing the chance of you turning your browsers into buyers.
6. Display trust badges
A trust badge is an icon you can place on your website to help tell shoppers that it is trustworthy. They act similarly to the badges that restaurants display to show their health rating or review scores.
Displaying various badges is an excellent way to gain consumer trust in ecommerce. National or regional third-party organisations often issue these trust badges to ecommerce businesses based on a business meeting specific requirements, such as proving that they store data securely. Payment method or security providers will also sometimes issue badges you can display on your website.
7. Show social media links
Including links to your social media accounts is another way to build trust. Being active on social media helps you engage with customers and show off your brand’s values. Make sure you keep the accounts active by posting regularly and replying to comments promptly.
8. Offer the right payment methods
All shoppers have a preference when it comes to paying. That’s why you need to offer the payment methods your customers want to use when they check out. Offering various methods also helps show that you’re a legitimate seller. In fact, our own data shows that offering the right payment methods is the main reason European consumers return to buy from an online retailer, with 89% of shoppers saying it influenced their buying decision.
A great way to effortlessly accept multiple payment methods and offer a seamless, on-brand, conversion-optimised checkout experience is by working with a payment service provider (PSP). The best PSPs help you offer all the payment options your customers need and provide other products and benefits to improve your business and sell more.
