The Importance Of Establishing Client Trust As An Online Business Owner - 2

By Author: Amy Armitage
Total Articles: 2
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Clips and links

Get permission from the local paper to reprint the article they did on you last year. Post video clips (after getting signed releases) of customers talking about a great buying experience. Link to reviews of both your company and the products you carry. If you have been mentioned in any other medium, from newspapers to local cable, make sure to talk about it and provide copies or links. Anything good that others say about you is great when it comes to establishing trust with new customers and reinforcing it with existing ones.

If your business is also an offline one, you should upload photographs of your store (front and interior), any delivery trucks or service vehicles, special equipment or product displays and anything else of interest. Doing this will indicate that you take pride in your business and your work, and that you run a company that they could visit in real life. It can also help show your expertise, as pictures are clear evidence that you have the right products and the right tools to do your job well.

Guarantees, privacy

Buyers always feel more confident making a purchase ...
... when the product or service has a solid, understandable guarantee. Of course, this is just good business whether or not you are online, but in the cyberspace market it can help you gain new customers who may have been hesitant before seeing the guarantee information.

You will certainly want to collect and maintain customer information, so you should post a privacy policy prominently. You will never know how many visitors actually read it, but it's critically important that they see one, so have a link to it on every single page of the site. Advise your customers that you will never share, rent or sell the information they supply, and even that you yourself won't use it for any other purpose than what they agree to (customer service, e-mailing special offers, etc.). Always give people a way to opt out of having their information collected, as well as declining your e-mail sales flyers.

Testimonials and perspectives

When you get an e-mail or phone call from a happy customer, ask them if you can post the message or the audio clip. Showing a picture of the people and using their names (even just first names and initials) will make the testimonials believable. Consider posting video testimonials, which are easy enough to make with the proliferation of low-cost webcams these days. If you have a brick-and-mortar store as well as an online one, you can make these videos with walk-in customers.

You need to view your website the same way that potential customers do. Look at it and try to imagine what someone who knows nothing about you will learn from your copy, graphics, pictures, video clips and other components. There are a lot of variables to cover when you are trying to build trust in business, and the lessons learned before the advent of the Internet are still important and applicable. Never stop thinking about how you can make your site better, as well as more representative of the professionalism and expertise that you, your staff and your business really do possess. It's a challenge, certainly, but the payoff can make the difference between success and failure.

Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting http://www.lunarpages.com/ from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from dedicated server hosting and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans.