Build an enticing website and people will visit it. Forget to make your website feel secure and they will leave.
Trust is a complicated thing to earn online, and a very easy thing to lose. For a website to succeed it needs to be more than well-run with an interesting USP, it needs to pass all the security and visual checks that help convince customers their details won’t be stolen. If you’re worried your website doesn’t across as trustworthy, here are a couple of tips to make it more secure.
Security
Making sure your website is secure is probably the most obvious, but also important, way to build trust within visitors. With a lot of high-profile breaches in recent years, people are more familiar than ever with what factors to look out for when deciding whether a website is secure enough to trust with their details.
If you don’t have an SSL certificate on your website then you will turn off a large majority of customers, as well as making it nearly impossible for Google to rank you properly. If you are running an ecommerce website make sure you have a secure payment gateway that accepts a number of payment options, from well-known banks to alternative options like PayPal.
When you are making these changes don’t be afraid to be public and honest about it. It will help to make your website look like a group of real people trying to solve an issue, rather than an incompetent, faceless entity. It’s a much better way to go about dealing with the issue than risk stories about a security breach later down the line.
Follow up purchases
Just because you’ve made a sale doesn’t mean you need to drop any sense of professionalism and think trust has been earnt forever. Loyalty to the brand and website is developed in the time immediately after the purchase. A precedent has been set for how websites interact with customers after a purchase, and you need to follow these conventions to earn their trust as competitors have.
Make sure that after every purchase you are sending a professional invoice that outlines the details of their order. For example, Wave’s PDF templates help automate the service and ensure customers get the high-quality invoices they’d expect from a well-renowned brand. This gives the users peace of mind, as they’ll expect to receive some kind of an email backing up their purchase.
Just staying in touch and making sure your emails have all the trimmings of a professional outfit is part of developing trust. Send follow up emails that feature the customer’s name, employee signatures and company branding. This all serves to put the customer at ease about who they just shopped with and gave their details to.
Social proof
Social proof is the phenomenon in which people make decisions based on the actions of someone they trust. People like to see confirmation from people they deem to be just like them. If someone has trusted your website enough to shop with it and then write about their experience, it’s a big sign to potential users that you’re a professional business. Social proof is a crucial element in giving your website legitimacy.
Make sure your website features reviews from genuine users, hosted by trusted review websites like TrustPilot or Yelp. Featuring these well-known brand names next to a positive star rating can sometimes be enough to convince your visitors. Make sure you never pay for fake positive reviews though, as that will tarnish any trust and goodwill you may have already built up. Testimonials from clients and customers can also go a long way towards building trust, with new users being swayed by details about specific experiences of working with you.
Brand building content
You should have a brand-building strategy regardless of what kind of website you operate, but it also serves a purpose beyond expanding your social profile or defining your company ethos. Content that tells the story of your brand and the individuals behind the scenes plays a huge part in convincing a new user to trust you.
Even in the digital age, people want to shop with businesses run by other people. They like having a face to associate a brand with. It helps to recreate the trust you inherently feel when shopping with a brick and mortar store. Invest in producing content that tells these visitors who you are, what your brand’s story is and why they should ultimately trust you.
Trust is just about making yourself seem genuine as it is presenting an aura of professionalism. If your website paints the picture of a faceless business operating out of the back of a warehouse, a more cautious user is less likely to remain on the website.
Make sure your website has About Us and Contact Us pages, as well as a company blog featuring personal insights and behind the scenes content.
Don’t skimp on design
Website design might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about security, but aesthetics play an important part in earning a visitor’s trust. If your website looks like something from another century, that visitor is going to question its legitimacy and move onto a competitor.
Make sure your website has a sleek, contemporary design. It should be easy to navigate, not frustrate users or make them think you’re trying to confuse them. Think about the elements you would expect to see when you visit a website for the first time. Does your website have all of them? If it doesn’t, how can you integrate them in the best possible way and make them obvious to skeptical users? Would you benefit from using a template website design such as Wix? Your website should be streamlined and professional, but it should still look as if it was made by a real person.
Security is the key to earning trust online. People are too tech-savvy nowadays not to look out for the key giveaways of a poorly protected website. However, you should also consider these more content and brand building centric methods, that will play a part in convincing visitors to trust you as people.
Nice read, thanks!