Few digital customers are ready to take a leap of faith. Countless options and the ease of comparison made them selective, cautious, and unpredictable. They know the competition and have a “give me what I’m looking for” attitude towards business.
Most marketing strategies focus on short-term persuasion techniques for quick wins. Less attention is paid to building long-term trust, although this does promote customer loyalty.
In an age where it is no longer about personal contact, businesses are making big profits by mastering the techniques of building trust in online stores. Here are some good practices to build and increase trust on eCommerce websites.
Ways to Increase Customer Trust
1. Improve Customer Experience
Customers are more likely to explore your online store, shop, and come back next time if your customer experience comes first. With several online stores for the same customer group, it has become extremely important that your customer gets more than he expected.
To improve the customer experience, it is important to focus on the following:
Be transparent
Use certain pages in your online store to convey your open mindset. Transparency targets the emotional aspect of trust. Customer values, not their way of thinking about economics. Therefore, your website should contain more than just disclaimers and vague statements of responsibilities. It should include questions about your day-to-day activities, such as production conditions, working conditions, data protection, and other sensitive issues for customers.
Personalize Experience
Turn on algorithms to track your customer’s shopping habits and patterns. This will help you create a personalized experience, for example by recommending products that are similar to those already selected by the user. It will also speed up the buying process and improve the customer experience.
Improve Site’s Infrastructure
You need to check the infrastructure of your site and do load testing. Load testing is a type of performance testing, collection of indicators, determination of performance, and response time of a site in response to an external request.
Make sure your site can handle the traffic during the holiday season. A website crash can seriously damage your brand’s reputation and jeopardize your sales.
Optimize Page Load Time
Website speed is a vital factor in customer retention. If a site takes longer than three seconds to load, half of the users will leave it. Therefore, bounce rates will increase dramatically if your pages don’t load quickly. It is useful to optimize image sizes and reduce the number of apps and plugins to ensure low page load times.
Use Notifications
You need to send email notifications every time the cart is abandoned without a purchase. You can also create extra discount emails to encourage customers to come back and complete their purchases.
2. Ensure Fast and Smooth Transactions
You need to optimize your checkout page to ensure an instant checkout. It is important that at the time of placing an order, the client does not have any difficulties – everything should be clear, convenient, understandable. There should be no unnecessary elements that would scatter attention, interfere with quick checkout. Here’s what you can do to ensure smooth and fast checkout:
- Choose a secure payment method
- Minimize all processes on one page
- Offer multiple payment options
- Offer a guest payment method without registration
3. Optimize Shipping
Delivery is an important step for your customers. A positive delivery experience can help build trust with the customer and build brand loyalty.
Delivery can cause a number of difficulties when it comes to a sharp increase in orders. You need to make sure your shipping strategy is tested for optimal performance for peak situations like holiday sales days.
Best shipping options for your website:
- Self-delivery
As part of this strategy, the inventory and shipping of all orders are handled in-house. This method will provide complete control over the process. But this strategy also has its drawbacks. When the number of orders grows exponentially, things can get out of hand pretty quickly.
- Outsourcing
Outsourcing the delivery process to a reliable and professional service provider will ensure the smooth processing of all orders, regardless of their volume. Customers will enjoy fast package delivery with features such as tracking and receiving notifications at every stage of delivery. These additional features enhance your customer experience and make them more satisfied with your work. The time saved through outsourcing can be used to focus on other areas of the business.
4. Develop and Launch Promo Campaigns
Nowadays, when almost everything can be shown online is the best time to unleash your brilliant marketing ideas and use your budgets. The pandemic can prevent you from using traditional offline marketing strategies, which means you have to be super creative.
At the same time, be honest and transparent, let the client understand that you can be trusted, and always feel calm on your site. And of course, don’t forget to reward your customers:
- Introduce a dedicated reward or loyalty program
- Offer free gift wrapping and personalized messages
- Add small gifts for free as compliment free gifts
- Organize contests or reward customers with discount coupons
- Ensure prompt resolution of customer issues with the help of reliable technical support
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