Chapter 5: Building Customer Trust and Loyalty
10 min read time
How people feel about your brand, products, and team (customer and client-facing roles) can impact the growth of your e-commerce store. Developing brand trust hence becomes crucial in both acquiring and retaining customers — to ensure that they are your customers for life.
But this may not be easy, because people have become increasingly distrustful of brands and businesses, especially new and online. However, if you want to run a successful business, here’s what you need to do:
Be honest and open about your products, processes, and policies. Talk about your material/ingredients, brand story, and even feedback honestly, without any deceit. Finally choose to do this in a consistent brand tone and voice, so that your customer is engaged across the purchase journey.
Look at Surreal for instance. They are a high protein, low carb, zero sugar cereal for adults. With an honest and clear positioning, they have managed to break into a $40B industry in just 2 years to become the fastest-growing cereal brand in the UK. While positioning themselves as a joyful breakfast cereal, Surreal has a verbal identity similar to that of Liquid Death, Oatly etc; making it extremely memorable, transparent, and authentic.
To build brand trust in your e-commerce store, start by installing an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS, which displays a padlock icon in the address bar and assures customers their data is encrypted. Choose a reputable CA (DigiCert and GlobalSign are popular options) and purchase an SSL certificate from them.
With the Vitals Trust Badges App, easily add icons near your check-out increasing your shopper’s confidence.
Offer secure and well-known payment options such as PayPal, Stripe, and major credit cards (e.g., Visa, Mastercard, Amex). Add these badges during the checkout counter to make customers feel safe; easily possible via apps like Vitals Payments Logo App.
Additionally, you could offer policy-specific badges like free shipping, free returns, and money-back guarantee badges. Unlike others, they don’t require third-party verification, but it is a reassurance from your business to the customer, reducing the amount of risk they take by purchasing from a new e-commerce store.
These combined elements create a strong visual and functional foundation of security and trustworthiness for your e-commerce store. Here is a quick video that you can watch to understand how to add a trust badge on your website:
Leveraging social proof is a powerful way to build trust and credibility for your e-commerce store.
Implement a Shoppable Instagram Feed App with Vitals to seamlessly display tagged Instagram posts (user-generated content) on your website, allowing customers to see your products in real-world contexts and how others are using them.
Complement this with a Recent Sales Notifications App by Vitals that discreetly shows notifications of recent orders, creating a sense of popularity and demand for your products.
And of course, customer reviews are crucial - encourage buyers to leave text, image, and video reviews to provide comprehensive and authentic feedback. These multi-media reviews offer potential customers a more immersive and believable insight into your products.
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