Gaining Your Customers’ Trust with 7 Basic Elements in Your Website
Making sure your website is gaining your customers’ trust is critical when 79% of people will immediately go to a competitor’s site if they don’t like what they see on the first one. Gaining your customers’ trust is one of the most important things you can do as a business/brand. The seven elements for gaining your customer’s trust with your site are:
- Harmonious Homepage.
- Simple, Easy Layout.
- Professional, yet Unique Website Design.
- Clear, Accurate Descriptions and Other Content.
- FAQs.
- Reviews/Testimonials.
- Contact Us/Customer Service That Works.
What’s So Critical About Focusing on Customer Trust?
Customer Confidence
One of the most critical parts of a successful business is customer confidence and trust. When customers lose confidence in if they can complete their goals, if the business can do what they need them to do, or even if the business is a legit one, the customers will likely give up trying to complete their goal or try a competitor instead.
Integrity and Reliability
Integrity and reliability are not just something for employees in regards to their bosses and company. Businesses and brands need to be accountable for what they say, claim, and do – the same as people should be. Not only is this important from a moral standpoint, like above, customers will leave and not buy from companies and websites that are unreliable and don’t do what they say they do or are supposed to do. Brands that are unreliable will get a reputation for being undependable and/or untrustworthy; word gets around and reviews talk.
Converting Skeptics
Businesses and brands have critics, whether they know it or not. People listen to criticism and negative reviews when deciding which brand they should try and/or use. Having a loyal customer base will help offset negative reviews when people are deciding if they trust a brand enough to buy from them. Convert skeptics by providing reliable services and being easy for customers to use.
Elements for Gaining Your Customers’ Trust Using Your Basic Website
Harmonious Homepage
The first part of gaining your customer’s trust is to have a great homepage. Homepages should clearly state who or what the website is for, most of the brand’s elements (including logo, slogan, mission statement, etc.), a summary of what products or services the website has, and where customers should go next. There are six main parts to creating an harmonious homepage:
- Bold Branding,
- Easy Navigation,
- Delightful Design,
- Clear Call to Action,
- Socials/testimonials or blog posts,
- Helpful plugins.
Simple, Easy Layout
Whether we’re talking about the layout of a page or the entire site, a layout is the path a user travels to find what they are looking for (most of the time a user is on a site for a specific purpose rather than just curiously exploring). Find the items or actions that users most want to find or complete (possibly by using a red route matrix) and make sure that it is easy and clear for your users to find and complete them.
Professional, yet Unique Website Design
Most people decide if they are going to trust a brand and its website by its design. Make sure your site is professional yet distinct enough that it stands out from your competitors. Most people are visual learners so they like to have visual cues that indicate what to look at or where to go. Good usability in websites does this with colors, images, and logos. This includes cartoons, graphics, and photographs (yes, stock images too).
Visuals can go wrong when they are too bright or distracting from what is important, or when they are important and are too small or blend into the background too much to be noticed. Images that are designed too abstract to understand what they are or are too niche for newcomers also lead to bad usability in a website.
The best colors for design of a website depend on what the website is for, who will be using it, and what the tone of the site and the owners want and like. More professional websites usually have neutral/cooler colors as their main colors with a primary or secondary color for accent to give a formal/subdued feeling. For a more casual and comfortable tone, websites usually have more warm and brighter colors to make their users more calm and relaxed.
Clear, Accurate Descriptions and Other Content
You have and use your own technical lingo whether you know it or not. Bad websites often have words and phrases that mean something special and specific to them, but they don’t define them or ease users into the lingo. Just because you know what you’re talking about doesn’t mean that your users, clients, partners, readers, customers, etc. understand you.
Good websites have their content written in plain language. Unless you are writing for veterans in the field that know exactly what you are talking about, don’t use jargon, slang, or lingo that the readers may not know. Having to look up words just irritates readers. If you must use them, define them clearly in a way that is easy to find and go back to when readers have continued reading the document.
Bad usability websites just put content in without editing or user testing. Don’t do this; have someone (preferably from your target audience) look over your page and give you feedback. Sometimes things may seem obvious and simple, but users find them confusing and difficult. The only way to know for sure is to conduct user experience research.
FAQs
No matter how good a website’s design is, there will be issues with using it. Particularly if you are (and you should be) trying to balance user experience, SEO, page loading speed, and the latest web trends and techniques. There will be common issues that are unavoidable outside of changing a whole part of the design.
For those issues, common misunderstandings, and just plain confusing parts of a website or service, use frequently asked questions to help users understand and overcome these problems. While improving customer trust that you understand them and giving them confidence that they can solve their problems on their own, having helpful FAQs also helps reduce customer service calls and emails.
Reviews/Testimonials
The next element for gaining your customer’s trust with your site is to add links to add testimonials or reviews if possible. Testimonials and reviews help give a brand credibility and indicate to customers that the brand is reliable. Strong Testimonials is a great plugin for this since it has the option to put them on a slide automatically based on how you organize the testimonials/reviews. If you have none, place your most popular blog posts or products here on a rotating slider with 3-4 items on a slide.
Contact Us/Customer Service That Works
Contact pages contain a contact form that users fill out to communicate with a brand or company. Users expect a way to contact a brand, usually done via a contact page; users (and search engines like Google) distrust websites that don’t have one. Putting your email address instead can also work, but it looks sketchy and you will get more spam this way.
Users do like talking to real humans so having an online chat ability special to the website is preferred for customer service and other help. However, an online chat has to be managed in real time 24/7 either by a human (expensive) or a bot (annoying to customers). I recommend creating a contact page as a start and get into the online chat if you have that many confused customers and your brand/company is big enough that you can justify the expense.
Summary
Making sure your website is gaining your customers’ trust is critical when most potential customers will immediately go to a competitor’s site if they don’t like what they see on your site. Gaining your customers’ trust is one of the most important things you can do as a business/brand. The seven elements for gaining your customer’s trust with your site are:
- Harmonious Homepage.
- Simple, Easy Layout.
- Professional, yet Unique Website Design.
- Clear, Accurate Descriptions and Other Content.
- FAQs.
- Reviews/Testimonials.
- Contact Us/Customer Service That Works.
