10 Steps: Making it easy for your customers to trust you
Over my 12ish years of online marketing, I’ve spoken to many clients about what it takes to build trust for your online customers. Many times the small details that I mention, like showing images of the people that work there, address and clear contact information, even simple typos or lack of clarity, seem too small to have an effect on the commerce of a site. They aren’t related to “the widgets” they are selling, aren’t a priority for the development team, and likely don’t have a measurable impact a customer’s action.
I’ve always argued that conversion rates and even offline sales can be affected by this online customer experience. Now here is some great research that shows some of the same simple things you can do that can positively impact a customer’s trust of your site.
Stanford University shares ten guidelines to increase a website’s credibility with visitors. It’s based on several quantitative studies, and distilled into simple guidelines that are easy to apply to your sites. There is a bit more information at their WebCredibility.org website too.
These guidelines are so important they bear repeating here, but I’ll leave the long description to their research site with downloads to support it. If you are trying to make a case for some of these changes, these guidelines and the research documentation would be quite valuable.
10 Steps for Web Credibility
1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
5. Make it easy to contact you.
6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.
8. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).
9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.
How many of these does your site leave out? Do you make it easy to be trusted?
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[...] are things I advise almost daily to my clients, especially the “trust” item. I’ve blogged on that before, as I still see it as a problem on many [...]