10 Ways To Build Customer Trust In Your BusinessÂ
People buy from businesses they know, like and trust. You can get your target market to know you by implementing coordinated advertising and marketing campaigns. Your audience may even like the products and services you provide.
But when you build customer trust and loyalty, your audience will buy from you regularly and spread the word about your business.
When some businesses try to be more authentic, they can try to rush through the process of building trust by using tactics that aren’t in its best interest. For example, you don’t want to buy followers or pay people to leave reviews because they won’t be authentic and people will know eventually.
Here are 10 ways to build customer trust and loyalty.
FREE Checklist: Common Business Mistakes You MUST Avoid
1. Don’t Be Afraid To Show Negative Reviews
Reviews play an important role in your customer’s purchasing decision-making process. If you have reviews that seem too good to be true without even one negative comment or only four-star versus five-star reviews, sometimes that can look fake to people. Don’t delete negative comments and reviews for this reason. Instead, deal with them by trying to turn these customers into brand advocates by pleasing them.
2. Avoid Fake Followers
This can be hard to prevent sometimes on social media, but if you notice that you have a lot of fake followers, you’ll need to try to delete them and deal with it. Having thousands of followers but no likes, comments or shares can send vibes of distrust to the audience.
3. Use Real Photos To Build Customer Trust
It’s tempting to always use the perfect stock photos for everything but as a smaller business, being more personal with your branding tends to build trust better. Consider using pictures that you take to match with your content and information.
4. Don’t Send Too Many Sales Messages
While you do want to send as many useful and engaging messages to your email subscribers as possible, companies that send too many sales messages start feeling like scams even if they’re not. Make sure every message you send is valuable to your audience.
5. Get to Know People before Pitching
It’s likely happened before. You accept a friend on Facebook, and within seconds they send you a canned message about their ‘get-rich-quick’ program. Worse, they might pretend to want to get to know you, ask you a question, then send the canned message. Get to know people so that your pitches don’t seem fake.
6. Make It Easy for People to Contact You
Your audience needs to be able to easily reach out and connect with you in multiple ways. Don’t send emails with “no-reply” addresses and don’t hide your contact information on your site and in your contracts.
7. Make Your Return Policies Easy
If you sell products, you need to make it easy for your customers to return them. If you have too many rules and don’t bend, people will see you as a scammer and a fake. It’s understandable to be a little stricter on services, but the fact is, one mad customer can ruin everything. It may be best just to silently return the money.
8. Get More Verifiable Testimonials
When you put testimonials on your website, make sure the links to the people who gave the testimony are working. Your customers will feel better that they are real people. Otherwise, they may think the testimonials are fake.
9. Create High Quality Website Copy
The content that you deliver to your audience needs to be high quality in their minds. That means you should use language that they like and understand. When you develop your content strategy plan, it’s important that you understand who your audience is, while also knowing what your brand is and what you want that brand to represent and to whom. When you put your customer value and satisfaction first and focus on problem-solving, the more that customers will be attracted to you.
10. Don’t Be Mysterious
The days of no one knowing who is behind a brand are over. Your audience wants to see you and get to know you, not just your logo. Don’t be so mysterious that no one knows who you are outside of your business logo.
Free Checklist: Common Business Mistakes To Avoid
“Faking it until you make it”, is a common refrain, but it can be dangerous too. It helps if you are true to yourself and your brand. As you build your business, while you want to use marketing tactics that work, you want to give it time to develop and not rush it by taking shortcuts. What seems like a good idea today could be your worst nightmare later.
Although mistakes are going to happen, you can avoid the common mistakes that are lurking around the corner. Download my free checklist, 10 Common Business Mistakes and avoid the false moves and slipups that even successful business owners and entrepreneurs have made.