Trust is one of the essential business assets. If you intend to improve the conversion rates, perhaps you should start by enhancing your brand trust or you can also hire magento 2 developer. As Steve Forbes says, “Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.” There is no better way of building a reputable brand than earning the trust of your clients, prospects, and customers.
Let us divert a little bit from a business perspective and look at our daily relationships. Trust is the pillar that builds strong relationships between lovers, families, and friends. You do what you say you will do. You fulfill your promises. You show up when you promise to show up. You respect boundaries. These are the facets of a nurturing, positive relationship. This is no different from the business environment.
You should sell to your customers what you say you will sell. You need to secure their data and ensure no data leakages to third parties. Your users want to know that you are a legitimate website. With the many cases of fake websites, your clients are right to be wary about your legitimacy. One hard fact about trust and reputation is that while you might work so hard to build it, it might take less than five minutes to lose it all.
All value-led businesses need to hold trust as a core value. All your business stakeholders (employees and managers) should act consistently with the business values. Furthermore, your website and mobile application versions of your business should have key trust indicators.
The reason why trust is vital to your business is that it helps to increase your conversion rates. Trust signals help to wipe out any form of doubts in a customer who might be debating whether or not to buy from you. Whether you are a newbie just starting an online business or you have been operating for years, you will need the following five trust and security signals to improve your conversion rates.
1. The SSL Certificate Site Seal
First things first- the Secure Socket Layer certificate site seal is one of the essential security tools that assure users of their security. A website with an SSL certificate will have a small graphic indicating that it has been secured with an SSL certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority.
There is no better way to show your web visitors that your website is secure than having an SSL certificate. The certificate assures them that all the sensitive details they share with you are encrypted, and no hacker can reach them. An SSL trust seal is equivalent to a trust mark. It helps website owners to gain the trust of the users almost instantly. Today, most users are wary about their security and would not visit a website if they doubt its ability to protect their data.
As a reminder, you need to buy SSL certificate on every website domain and subdomain. Having an SSL certificate on only a single or few domains could be as bad as not having one. People often think that it is expensive acquiring an SSL certificate for each subdomain. Not with the availability of Wildcard SSL.
A single Wildcard SSL certificate is capable of securing your main domain as well as an unlimited number of first-level subdomains. It is not, given the trust benefits that it will bring to your website.
A split test conducted by Blue Fountain Media reveals that having a trust seal affects trust, increasing conversion rates by 42%. You are missing out a lot if you do not have an SSL certificate. So, stop waiting and acquire one.
2. Review and Testimonial Segment
Your business can build significant trust and a positive reputation from a stream of positive reviews. Apart from just influencing consumer decisions, reviews also help strengthen a business’s credibility, thereby gaining customers’ trust. When designing your website, ensure that you include a review and feedback segment.
Online shoppers will distrust a business that has low ratings. According to a 2020 Bright Local Consumer Review Survey, companies with better reviews and ratings are most likely to have higher conversion rates than those with low ratings. The same report shows that 93% of consumers will use the reviews to establish whether a business has a good reputation.
If you want to earn trust from your customers, you should ensure that you have positive reviews. There are a few strategies that you should apply to ensure that you have positive reviews. They include:
- Asking your customers to give positive reviews and feedback.
- Giving them incentives to provide the reviews.
- Rewarding employees who obtain and gather reviews.
- Exhibiting great reviews by having a reviews section
- Replying to negative reviews
3. Legal Page on the Website
To make your website look more legit, you will need to create legal pages such as privacy policy and terms and conditions. These policies will enable you to establish guidelines on how your clients should use your website. The question you are probably asking yourself is, how do these policies develop trust?
The answer is simple. The legal policies prove your legitimacy. If you have the terms and conditions and the various policies that your web visitors ought to abide by, it just proves that your business is on the right side of the law. This makes your business much more trustworthy than the one that does not have the policies.
4. Contact Information
There is a big difference between a brick-and-mortar shop and an e-commerce store. The former gives users a personal touch. Users can talk directly to the person running the store. For the case of an online store, there is no one to guide you through your shopping process physically.
Having a personal touch builds trust because a customer gets to know who he/she is dealing with. This is not to say that you cannot see the same benefits for your ecommerce store. Setting up contact information is a way of creating a communication channel through which your customers will know you.
Content Management Systems such as Shopify, Magento, and WordPress provide contact form plugins to create your contact list. It would be best if you put in mind when doing so is to make the contacts as effective as possible. Do not make your customers wait too long for your response.
You can also enable the live chat feature. 79% of web visitors prefer live chats because of their effectiveness in providing a quick response. 41% of online shoppers will trust your brand when it has a live chat.
Because customers want to know that they are talking to a genuine website, they will like to send a message to confirm your legitimacy. Providing them with your contact details such as email addresses, phone contacts, and physical location will help them establish your legitimacy and increase their trust in your brand.
5. Engaging Content
Most web visitors gravitate towards an ecommerce store that provides value. The best way an ecommerce website can increase customers’ value is by publishing quality content. Quality blog posts, podcasts, and worthwhile video content can help increase customers’ value.
By giving your customers the right content at the right time, you will earn their trust. Furthermore, poorly structured content could prove that you do not care about their customer’s value, or you might have created the content in a hurry for malicious reasons best known to you.
You must invest in quality content creation. You can employ quality content creators to do the work for you. Always ensure that your blogs are free from spelling mistakes, have good grammar and proper flow. It should be captivating enough to keep your customers coming for more. In doing so, you will earn their trust.
Conclusion
Implementing these trust signals might not be a walk in the park. It is not something that can happen overnight. It requires years of hard work and investments. All the reputable brands you know have put in extra effort and have been patient enough to see their brand grow. However, once you implement all of them, you can reap your fruits of plenty of conversions and high business revenues. Lastly, one signal is never enough. The more trust indicators you have, the more reputable your brand will be. The ball is now in your court to implement all the five trust indicators and see your conversions skyrocket.
