If your potential customers don’t trust your brand, your product, your service or your business, they will be incredibly reluctant to purchase from you. According to Web3, 98% of B2B customers only buy once a certain level of trust has been established. How many times have you, or your sales teams, put in an enormous amount of time and effort building a relationship and establishing trust with a potential customer, only to have their reputation dwindled by their unprofessional looking website? Maybe too many times to count.

Everyone has an eCommerce store these days. It’s incredibly important that your online presence reflects the same attitude you brought to your initial sales meeting. Otherwise, you’ll stay stuck wondering why the client didn’t follow up with you. To help get you on your way to gathering more trust online, we've bundled some quick and easy steps to incorporate into your online strategy:

1. Use Client Testimonials & Reviews: 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Use testimonials that focus on the unique selling points of your products and services and place them throughout your website.

Don’t have any testimonials?

Refer back to your emails, meetings or phone messages with recent customers and build out a testimonial based on previous praise and ask for approval. If it’s okay with them, place a photo of your customer along with their testimonial. Also, don’t clump all of your testimonials in one area on your website. Spread them across key areas of conversion i.e homepage, services, product page, and checkout page.

2. Leverage Trust-building Facts About Your Business: Include a thank you page that highlights a customers impact. Provide tracking information about their impact, how projects work, or about their contributions to your service. Use business awards or recognition. Share a list of business awards, certifications, or recent contributions to the community at large. This will clearly define and establish your credibility to your users. Use logos of well-known awards and recognitions that you’ve achieved on your website’s homepage.

3. Exhibit Features from the Press: Provide past and current press releases or publications to beef up your trust and credibility. By providing a face to a name, your customers will establish a human contact point, which will help develop a greater opportunity for connection. Use logos of well-known publications that you’ve been featured in on your homepage.

4. Highlight the Number of Current Customers: If you have a large enough database, use that number as a trust-building fact on your website.

Use likes or shares counters to your advantage. If you have a large enough social following, place social counters on your website to create social proof.

If you have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, connect them to your website so new visitors can see that real people—maybe people they know—have successfully purchased from you in the past. Social media is becoming a benchmark for identity verification nowadays; it’s very difficult to fake a well-connected Facebook account, and it helps reassure new customers that you do not exist in a vacuum and have helped real users just like them.

5. Develop a Great Design & Implement a Trusted Payment Gateway: Look at other world-class leaders in design from your industry and aim to achieve a similar level of design quality on your own website. Produce a blog with quality content. However, before launching into your first blog post, develop a content marketing calendar of creative ideas, so you have a clear and structured pathway to success.

Use a trusted payment gateway. If you’re accepting payments, do yourself and your customers a favour and use a recognized payment gateway. These companies exist to facilitate highly secure payments for online businesses, and customers are far more likely to complete their purchase if they know their credit card information is being processed by a safe provider.

Blog Tweetables:

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For eCommerce solutions, contact us or see: Creative Copy for Customer Success

Graphic: Dribbble