7 Ways to Boost Your Consumer Trust
If you polled your consumers right now, would all of them say that they trust you? Are you 100% sure?
More than ever, competition is fierce and customer loyalty hard to come by in almost any market. Consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical as they receive Dozens or perhaps even hundreds of brand messages daily, both obvious and subtle. To add to the problem, it seems that businesses are constantly under investigation by different organizations and authorities. No wonder consumers find it challenging to trust the businesses they deal with.
So how to snag and keep that elusive customer loyalty? The answer is to make your brand stand out with transparency, truthfulness, and reliability.
Here are seven practices that will help your business or marketing campaign earn the trust of consumers.
Human Element
The formation of one sincere connection with a customer can lead to something incredibly powerful and will lay the foundation for long-term advocacy and loyalty. The result is a solid and sustainable bottom line.
So how can you make that magical connection? Start by humanizing your brand. If your brand comes across as a living, breathing entity rather than just a corporation, customers will be happy to work with you. Try to make this kind of humanization a focus of your marketing campaign in order to make this happen.
It helps to talk directly to potential customers and give them something they can relate to. Your marketing campaign will be more effective if you use it to communicate with customers in a personal and direct manner, avoiding generalizations. Also keep current on popular trends.
Choice
One key element of consumer trust values is “human-centricity.” The choice is a key component of that.
How many times have you happily signed up to download a podcast or listen to a webinar, only to be immediately spammed with extraneous “stuff?” That represents an immediate betrayal of trust and an infringement on a relationship.
By offering choice to your readers, you demonstrate a very human respect for their needs. Once you’ve done that, you can follow up by consistently delivering on the experience that your audience expects.
Protection
The topic of cybersecurity is now on everyone’s minds, both personally and globally. Consumers try to protect their private information from criminals.
Always demonstrate respect of this concern by keeping private information safe. Make sure that you consistently back up data, store information on secure servers, and encrypt email attachments. Just these three simple actions will help build trust for your brand.
Participation
It’s easy to provide a place for customers and community to make their voices heard by giving feedback. Take it to another level by acting on their suggestions and requests. This shows that you truly listen to them, a very basic and simple way to gain both trust and respect.
Relevant Offers
Any value propositions should align with your brand’s overall corporate values. Remember that your value proposition gives your product measurable value by explaining how it solves customers’ pain points and why they should choose your brand over that of your competitors.
Although value propositions traditionally reflect an overall brand, it’s even better to establish one for each individual campaign that you launch. This helps you maintain your focus on the needs of the customer.
The 3 key components to great customer service are content, help and understanding. These elements show that you put your customers first.
Availability
A very common mistake for businesses is unintentionally making themselves unreachable. Unless you are easy to get in touch with, all the targeted time and effort that you have put in your marketing campaign may go to waste.
Give your customers multiple options for contact: email, instant chat, web forms and telephone. But don’t substitute contact forms for more personal forms of contact! This can make your website unpopular with visitors. Show your customers that you care about them by making it a priority to respond promptly to questions and requests. This will help customers develop trust.
Keep Promises
Prepare to follow through with promises for things like refunds, free shipping, or the timely completion of requests. In every circumstance, just do what you say you are going to do. It’s that simple.
Every online interaction that you have with your customers has its own undercurrent. Any message that you convey about your brand is a promise. And each time a customer chooses to download, buy, or subscribe is an agreement. They promise to engage with you and your brand as a direct result of your own promise to care about their experience and provide something of value.
In each promise-and-deliver interaction, you are really negotiating for further and richer engagement. Your delivery on your promise determines whether you build a relationship or lose a fan.
There is seemingly no end to the choices through which people navigate on digital media, which offers over 150 million blogs and 500 million tweets per day. It’s important to give consumers a reason to engage by delivering on the value that attracted them in the first place. Consumers are constantly reminded by ads and links that they have almost too many options. You can’t afford to forget to put them first or to demonstrate the importance of negotiation. Without this knowledge in the forefront, you may be spending money just to drive people away.
Caution: Losing Consumer Trust is this easy!
A study conducted by Sweezey of over 400 B2B buyers revealed that 71% of consumers have been dissatisfied with the content they downloaded from a business. This resulted in 25% of that 71% saying they would never read content from the business again. And 49% of consumers said that one bad experience with content seriously impacted their trust of the brand.
The truth is that consumers really don’t have to engage if they don’t want to. Lacking a full, rich experience in which their needs are recognized, it’s easy for them just to seek this experience elsewhere.
Many people believe the process of differentiating a brand is quite challenging. But in fact, it’s much simpler than most realize. You can set your business apart from the norm just by establishing trust and developing marketing campaigns that are customer-centric.
Over To You
Have you found any simple ways to build consumer trust? Please share them in the comments.
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Raymond Stokes
Latest posts by Raymond Stokes (see all)
- 7 Ways to Boost Your Consumer Trust - September 6, 2016
