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Why Building Trust Raises Profits

by | Oct 28, 2021 | Learning, Web Design

A handshake between a customer and a small business owner

Building trust between the consumer and your brand is key to having a successful business. This trust is what makes the consumer take a risk on choosing your company instead of someone else’s. Here’s why trust is essential and some ways you can build it.

Why You Should Build Trust

The Value of Brand Trust

Building trust with your consumers is how you can gain and maintain sales. It’s what keeps people coming back to your business instead of going to a competitor. Research shows that 62% of consumers state they are loyal to brands they can trust. Building consumer brand trust brings a loyalty increase of 7% that can boost lifetime profits per customer by as much as 85%. These numbers are huge and mean that your customers must trust you to gain loyalty from them.

For instance, if you run a small burger business but your restaurant isn’t well known yet, people may be less likely to visit your establishment and risk getting a burger they don’t like or a service that’s not good. This is because they don’t trust your business—yet. 

Potential customers don’t have to wonder what the experience will be like at your competitor’s place because they already know what to expect. They may know the other restaurant has lower-quality products, but the customer may settle because they know what they’re going to get. So you need to get them to trust your business to provide better burgers and a better experience overall.   

How to Build Trust:

Be Informative

Your customers must know what products or services you offer before they can ever make a purchase. Additionally, most customers want to research before buying to ensure they’re getting good value for their money. If you can make your website the place they go to learn more about the products before making a purchase, it will also be the natural place they look once they’ve decided to buy. 

The most important things to have on your product pages to build customer trust include 

  • Product photos—ideally, a variety of pictures for each product
  • A product video
  • Readable, clear, and organized descriptions 
  • Shipping information
  • Recent reviews
  • Your return policy, or any warranties/guarantees
  • Technical specs such as a size chart, resolution, BTUs, or product dimensions, where appropriate

Creating transparency doesn’t stop here, depending on your business and products. Other important things to include elsewhere on your website to build trust might include a bio, testimonials, FAQs, location, a customer service line, a portfolio, and services information. 

If you leave out information, it will be more difficult for potential customers to learn about and trust your business. This decreases your chances of building loyalty with a new customer. Loyalty is what keeps customers coming back, and it’s based on trust.

Be Consistent

Creating consistency in your branding and website design is key to building familiarity. People are often more comfortable with businesses that they are familiar with.

The photo below is a key example of branding inconsistency. The content has nothing to do with the product therefore, people will be less likely to trust the brand because their ad is confusing and strays away from their branding. However, inconsistency in your business’s marketing doesn’t have to be so obvious, however. There are many more subtle ways you may be presenting your business in a way that’s inconsistent with your brand.

A photo of a bowl of rice with a Colgate logo in the corner.

For instance, if you come across a business that uses one logo on their website and a completely different one on their Facebook page, that may come off across as a little shady. You may ask yourself questions like, “Why do they have multiple logos? Are they two different companies? Is this even a legitimate business?” 

For another example, imagine that you run a business selling computers and computer hardware. If some of your products provide detailed technical specs but others don’t, customers could be understandably wary of buying your products, as they’re unable to compare or identify why one computer costs so much more than another. 

Be Accessible

Making your website accessible to everyone is also a great way to build trust. You want to make your site or products as user-friendly as possible. This means making sure people with visual impairments are still able to use your website. Best practices include using high-contrast colors, legible text in a readable font, and alt text (text in an image file’s metadata that describes the images on your website).

2 business cards one with legible text and one without

If you look at the image above you’ll see two business cards. One with legible writing and one with a low contrast font and background combination. This makes it much more difficult to read and excludes people who rely on high contrast to interact with content.

If you don’t keep these design elements in mind when creating your website, you may unknowingly exclude certain people who rely on those practices to consume the content. This can make you appear less trustworthy. After all, you can’t win customers who can’t access information about your business or products.

Be Detail Focused

Pay attention to detail when designing. There’s a big difference between a brand that pays attention to every detail and one that barely gets the content on the page. You don’t want to be remembered because of your lack of detail. Sloppy work or typos can make you seem like you don’t know what you’re doing, thus making you less trustworthy as a brand.

To conclude, having consistent branding and products, easily accessible sites and content, and an eye for detail can help you build trust with your customers and potential customers. Still need some help building trust? 

Contact us today, and we can help work with you to redesign your branding, website, or products to be more consistent, clean, and accessible.

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Why Building Trust Raises Profits

by | Oct 28, 2021 | Learning, Web Design

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