Monthly Archives: August 2014

08.28.14
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Online customer feedback: Part 2 – dealing with negative comments

negative customer feedbackCustomer reviews, both positive and negative, can be of real value to your business. They can help grow sales and enable you to better understand your customers. In part one we looked at the importance of embracing online customer feedback and part 2 we examine how best to deal with negative comments.

A mix of positive and negative reviews can help improve consumer trust in your business so don’t be afraid of negative feedback. Essentially it’s all about how you deal with comments – the ultimate aim being to turn a dissatisfied customer into a satisfied one. Remember negative feedback has its place:

The benefits of negative feedback

It is important you understand how negative feedback  can actually be beneficial to your business – that way you are better equipped to handle complaints, poor reviews and hostile comments.

Provides a balance. Negative reviews help balance out positive reviews. Indeed as we can see from the research above consumers are more likely to trust reviews when they see both positive and negative comments. Overwhelming positive reviews can actually make consumers question their validity. Of course, it’s about getting the correct balance – clearly a lot of negative reviews is not going to work in your favour either! By balance I mean for example, if you had 15 positive reviews and one or two negative reviews that users can see you have quickly and efficiently dealt with, then you are probably striking a happy balance.

Constructive criticism. Genuine negative feedback can offer you real insight into your products and services. So instead of automatically going on the defensive and dismissing any negative feedback, rather take on board what your customers have to say. After all these are your end users and they may be providing you with valuable insight and information into how you can better improve your product or service.

Educates customers. By responding to some comments, you can actually educate other customers. For example supposing a customer comments that they are having difficulty using a particular element of a product, your answer can guide the customer through the process and point them to where they can find help on your website such as your FAQ page. This information is then there to help other customers who may experience the same issue. You have successfully dealt with the negative comment and educated other customers at the same time.

Feedback on areas outside your immediate control (eg. external suppliers). As a small business owner you may well be reliant on third-party contractors to fulfil certain elements of your business. Feedback from customers about an area which you may have outsourced to a third-party – for example packaging or delivery –  can help keep you in the loop about the service your contractor is providing on your behalf. Too many negative comments may mean you need to investigate the situation with your supplier, after-all it reflects on your business.

Introduce best practice guidelines

Before looking at how to deal with genuine  negative feedback, we should mention those comments that you will need to take a different approach. For example any feedback that is offensive, derogatory or submitted by internet trolls are not genuine comments and you should not be engaging with them. Simply remove them from your website as soon as possible. It is a good idea to put in place some guidelines or rules of engagement that visitors  wishing to engage online must adhere to or risk being removed. For example:

  • No swearing or profanities
  • No personal attacks, bullying behaviour  or derogatory comments
  • No explicit photos or images

Take a look at other businesses forum guidelines and it will help you put together a best practice list for your own site. For example Google’s Product Forum’s posting guidelines will give you a good starting point.

How to deal with genuine negative comments

So, how can you best deal with genuine negative feedback from customers? What is the best approach to take?

Don’t ignore them. You need to deal with negative comments as soon as possible – ignoring them can just make things worse. As we mentioned above, if comments are in breach of the guidelines you have laid out you will need to remove them. If not you need to respond as soon as possible. A quick response shows that you care about your customers opinions and will ensure that the issue is nipped in the bud and doesn’t snowball into something bigger.

Be transparent. If it is your fault (or the fault of a third-party contractor) and you have genuinely made a mistake then don’t try to hide it and don’t be afraid of saying sorry. For example something along the lines of ‘ We are very sorry that on this occasion you didn’t get the service you expect from us, we would like to rectify the situation by…..’. can work well. Also, offering a replacement, a voucher or some other incentive by way of an apology for any inconvenience caused can also be constructive.

Look at things from your customer’s perspective. Try to remember that most of the feedback you get from customers will be genuine. The majority of your customers will simply want you to listen, take their comment seriously and provide a solution to whatever the issue may be. So before you reel off your response without really thinking just take a moment to consider the situation from your customer’s point of view and try to emphasise with how they may feel. Just because something isn’t a big deal to you, it may well be a big deal to your customer. By trying to understand this you are more likely to respond appropriately.

Remain professional, polite and pleasant.  It’s not always easy to remain calm when someone is having a go at you or your business – especially when you feel that their comments are unfair. Remember when people are frustrated they can be emotional and write things in the heat of the moment, you must however not respond in the same defensive manner. At all times respond professionally, politely and pleasantly even if you are arguing a point or disagreeing with the comment. This way the argument will be less likely to escalate, your customer is more likely to calm down and your professional manner will reflect well with other customers who may be viewing the exchange.  And if you do remain professional throughout and follow through with a solution, then your customer is more likely to return, not spread negative feedback any further and even convert into a loyal long-term customer.

Finally, just think about what you as a business can take away from each complaint. What can you learn from it and what may you need to change in order to prevent more negative feedback on a particular issue.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this post so please do leave a comment.

Image courtesy of Simon Howden at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

08.20.14
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What the Best Brands Do Differently to Win Customer Loyalty

In the past, imperfect or incomplete information led users to depend solely on their own experiences or those they heard through word of mouth from friends and family. When they found a satisfactory brand, they usually stuck to it. Brand loyalty was a form of risk avoidance.

Today we live in the age of information overload. Instead of having few sources of reference for reliability of various brands, we suffer from a surplus of opinions, reviews and ideas from too many sources than we can handle. All this information about brands, their past, their service goof ups or even glowing examples of their competition, has slowly eroded the loyalty that customers held dear in previous generations.

Yet, customer loyalty is not dead. Any Apple fan boy or PlayStation fanatic will testify to that. So, how do these iconic brands hang on to their customers for years, while others find it difficult to get a customer back for a second purchase? Here’s how.

1. It’s all in the Experience

A user experience that makes it easy for the customer to find what she’s looking for, an experience that encourages her to shop more, an experience that removes all friction from the purchase process – these are what a customer takes back home with her, more than the actual product purchased.

User experience does not have to do just with your website’s look and feel or your store’s design and layout. It has to do with every ‘moment of truth’ the customer experiences with your brand. This could be via a customer care call, your mobile app or even via a shipping experience. Work towards making it as seamless, quick and intuitive as possible to make your customers coming back for more.

2. Make Customers Feel Special

A good user experience referred to in the previous point, is one that ends up with a happy customer. However smooth your user interface maybe, no matter how great the product itself is, if the customer does not feel wanted or important, the chances of them coming back to your store are dismal.

You don’t have to do grand gestures to make customers feel special. Something as basic as giving a colorful cardboard hat to a child at a fast food outlet, makes both the child and the parent happy. A study by Barclay’s bank shows that “a smile and a friendly hello is the most common reason (59%) why consumers feel loyal towards small and independent retailers.”

3. Service is not limited to the Customer Care Department

An organization that has the spirit of service goes out of its way to make sure a customer is taken care of in every way possible. Winning brands encourage a culture of service and problem solving. Every single member of the company is seen as a customer care representative – out to help out a customer the minute they need it. When something as important as customer service is left to be handled by just the customer service department, you’re making sure your service will never match up with the best in the business.

Why, even Craig Newmark – the founder of Craigslist – admitted he begins every morning by attending to customer service calls instead of plunging into emails or meetings.

4. Offer Exclusive Perks

It is hard to be indifferent to a brand that makes you feel exclusive. This does not mean that you should start discriminating between your customers. Rather, it means that the big spenders or more frequent buyers ought to get some perks for investing their time, faith and money in your brand.

The airline industry has perfected the art of making a customer feel exclusive with their ever popular loyalty programs. Thanks to air miles earned from specific airlines, customers prefer to be loyal to the one offering points, instead of shopping around for the lowest cost operator. This makes great sense in a struggling sector like aviation, when a customer is self-motivated to avoid other brands using such a simple and cheap solution. Some other examples of exclusive perks that brands offer are airline lounges at airports to loyalty card members, special discounted rates to loyalty club customers in the case of annual sales by high-street retailers and so on.

5. Wow your customers on a regular basis

Doing a great deed once in a while makes for a happy customer. But, in most organizations; this need to impress your audience to make them keep coming back is truly a flash in the pan than part of the organizational philosophy.

A pioneering brand like Virgin Atlantic takes the job of ‘wowing their customers’ on a regular basis very seriously. From a free chauffeur driven car to and from the airport, in-flight beauty therapists and manicurists for business class passengers, or the world’s first ‘Drive Thru Check-in’; Virgin’s customers definitely know brand loyalty extremely intimately. In founder Richard Branson’s own words, Virgin’s philosophy is to “catch people doing something right”.

5. Wow your customers on a regular basis

6. Savings vs. Making a Connection

With the economy having barely turned a corner from the recent financial crisis, cutting costs wherever possible is fashionable. A common favorite for cutting costs is the customer care department. Automated call centers are cheap and help a healthy bottom line for one quarter. But what your brand really needs is to have healthy bottom lines in every single quarter to come. This does not come by pinching pennies on things that matter.

A real person on the other end of the phone line costs money – 35 cents vs. $7.5 dollars – but the relationship that you’ll build with that personal touch will payback your $7.5 manifold in the years the customer keeps coming back to buy from you.

7. Make them Feel Like You’re One of Them

While alienating customers is what no brand ever wants, they try very hard to make customers feel special, well treated etc. However, the best brands in the business don’t just proselytize their concern for the customer, they actually go ahead and make the customer feel like the brand is one of them, part of their lives.

Red Bull, the legendary energy drink maker, goes out of its way to make its customers feel like they are on their (customers’) side. They create brand ambassadors by being a buddy to their customers. Every year, Red Bull creates and sponsors wildly successful events in the various sporting fields like dirt bike racing or skateboarding putting its brand in the middle of all the youth. Its own sports and wellness magazine, Red Bulletin, gives users health advice, tips to take up exercise and so on. In the process Red Bull has ensured it has made itself a part of their customers’ daily lives.

Make them Feel Like You’re One of Them

8. Happy Employees make Happy Customers

We spoke earlier about customer service being everyone’s responsibility in a company. For an average employee to go out of their way and help customers, they need to be motivated enough in the first place. If your company fosters a culture of distrust, disrespect and lack of communication, your employees are not happy by any stretch of imagination. Expecting unhappy employees to keep your customers happy is a tall order, if not outright impossible.

On the other hand a happy motivated employee who loves his job and the organization, would exude positive vibes to everyone around them, including your customers.

9. Consistently Awesome

Your brand is only as good as your last customer interaction. Truly great brands go out of their way to ensure that every single interaction that a customer has with the brand is great.

This means consistent product and service delivery across every single channel you operate on. That’s a tall order, but then who ever claimed that winning a customer’s heart for life was going to be a walk in the park?

10. Express Your Shared Values

A recent Harvard Study found that customers don’t really care for engaging with their favorite brands. What they really do care about is the fact that their chosen brands share the same values as them. Hence it follows that an environmentally conscious user would prefer a Timberland while a health conscious user might go for Jamba Juice.

These shared values are engendered when brands stand up for what they believe in and share these beliefs with their customers through actions, not just words.

11. Say Sorry When You Screw Up. Really Mean It.

Much as we all would like it, no one is perfect including the biggest brands in the world. Mistakes can and do happen, and there’s only so much you can do about avoiding them.

However, the hallmark of a truly great brand is when they own up to their errors and put things right immediately. A brand that refuses to own up to the error in their ways risks losing customers’ trust and their wallet share. A good case in point is Lululemon and the 2013 incident with their see-through, easily damaged yoga pants. CEO Chip Wilson brushed off the whole issue by saying that his company’s yoga pants weren’t meant for overweight women. The public outcry that followed became even worse when Wilson’s ‘apology’ was so insincere and superficial, that it became the next PR disaster that the brand had to struggle with.

12. Listen to Your Customers

Customers like to be heard. Especially in the current social media age, their voices reach brands directly, instantly.

A good brand keeps its listening ears on and bows to the customer’s needs and opinions as it knows that customers make the brand.

Listen to Your Customers

When Gap launched its redesigned logo in 2010, they faced massive criticism of the new logo from all quarters, especially customers via social media. Customer savvy Gap, put its ego aside and heeded the voice of the user to revert back to its old logo within a week of launching the new one.

13. Show gratitude, Say ‘Thank You’

A brand that gives back to customers and to society at large says through its actions that ‘sales are not all we care about’. For any customer, it is crucial to know that he /she is looked upon as a real person who’s contributed to the company’s growth, instead of just another nameless, faceless statistic.

Anytime a customer appreciates your brand, reach out to them and thank them. Social media is a wonderful platform for exactly this. Create regular email campaigns that thank repeat customers for their business and encourage them to continue showing their love for your brand with their wallets.

Conclusion

Loyalty is the result of a history of positive experiences with a brand. You don’t need gigantic marketing budgets to foster customer loyalty. Just a resolve to treat every customer like they might be your last customer will help ensure that you’ll not see the back of your loyal customers anytime soon.

(Image Source: 1, 2, 3)

08.14.14
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How customer reviews can help grow your online business

Part 1 : Embracing customer feedback

word of mouth marketingWord of mouth has always been one of the most successful ways of promoting a product or service. People trust the personal recommendations of friends and family above even the most innovative sales techniques or advertising . But where once word of mouth was primarily the domain of local businesses and limited to personal recommendations from friends and family, the internet has seen word of mouth marketing explode. In recent years we have seen a massive boom in customers sharing their opinions on products and services via specific review sites, digital media, social media networks, discussion forums,  blogs and online retail sites.

“The most influential element driving purchase decisions today is word of mouth.” Word of Mouth Marketing Association

The rise of word of mouth has also seen a change in the traditional purchase journey, having a direct impact on consumers decision-making process. Never before have consumers had so much product and service information at their fingertips. Nowadays, very rarely would I purchase a new item without first checking out online product reviews or would I book an unknown hotel without having a quick peek at a site like Trip Advisor. Online reviews and customer feedback are an integral  part of word of mouth marketing as a way for people to recommend products and share their opinion with others.

In part 1 we look at the benefits customer feedback can bring your business and how to encourage it. And in part 2 we will examine how best to manage negative customer feedback.

The benefits customer reviews can bring your business

As a key part of a customers decision-making process, we take a look at the many benefits positive customer feedback can bring your business.

  • Help drive sales: Since so many customers now look at reviews prior to making a purchase positive feedback can help drive your sales. For example, supposing a customer was deciding between purchasing a product from you or a similar product from one of your competitors (all other variables being equal), if your product had no customer reviews and your competitors had positive customer reviews, the likelihood is your competitor is more likely to make the sale.
  • Improve conversion rates:  Customer reviews are a great way to win over wavering purchasers. They can address and remove any  lingering doubt a prospective customer may have over making the final purchasing decision. For example suppose I was wavering over whether to buy a particular dress as I had concerns about how the garment would stand up to washing. A customer review stating that they had found the garment kept its shape well after washing is going to help remove any remaining doubt I have and mean a higher probability of an actual sale. 
  • Improve brand trust and credibility: Online businesses who embrace customer feedback are more likely to benefit from improved consumer trust in their product or service. It helps enforce brand credibility by conveying to customers you are confident in the quality of your products and service, you value your customers opinions and are a transparent and trustworthy business.
  • Additional sales tool. Positive customer reviews can work for you as an additional sales tool. You will find many customer reviews outline the different features and benefits of a particular product or service – helping you reinforce your sales message to prospective customers.
  • Build customer relationships. Providing the opportunity for customers to engage with you by being able to provide feedback on your products and services, shows your customers you that you value them – their opinion matters to you.
  • Research tool. Customer reviews are a great, qualitative method of getting some feedback from customers as to what products are working well and what could be improved. For example if a number of customers are highlighting a similar issue with a product then you know it is something you probably need to investigate. Remember we can all learn from a bit of  constructive criticism.
  • Helps SEO. Including customer reviews on your site is an additional way of adding fresh relevant content to your website helping with Search Engine Optimisation.

customer feedback7 ways to encourage your customers to give feedback

So how can you encourage feedback from your customers? Obviously the best way to ensure positive reviews is to offer a great product, exemplary service and all round excellent customer experience. However there are also a few ways that you can help things along and prompt customers to feedback.

  1. Have product reviews visible on your website (both positive and negative).  Customer reviews should be somewhere visible on your website. And make sure you have a balance of positive and negative reviews. Overwhelming positive reviews can look a bit contrived and less believable.
  2. Ask for it. Don’t be afraid to contact customers who have recently purchased a product to solicit feedback. Customers who have just received a product or service are usually more willing to take time out to write a review.  A simple email a week or so after customers have received your product expressing that you hope they are enjoying their new purchase and asking for some feedback work well and show customers you care.
  3. Make it simple to submit a review. Make it as easy as possible for a customer to submit a review. If the process is complicated and they have to swing through hoops – customers simply won’t do it. If you have a review page then make sure the link is clearly visible and use it in email correspondence.
  4. Respond to comments . Show customers that you appreciate them leaving a comment by replying to them. This applies to both positive and negative comments (we’ll  examine the best way to respond to negative comments in part 2 of this bog). If someone has taken time out of their day to offer feedback on a product or service, comment on Facebook or read and remark on a blog post, then try your best to respond. It shows you value what they have to say and increases the likelihood that they will engage with your business again.
  5. Offer an incentive.  You do need to walk a careful line here and not over incentivise . What you don’t want is people sending in product reviews just to receive an incentive as these reviews are more likely to appear insincere. However entry into a monthly free prize draw can work well. Or,  you could send an incentive after they have submitted a review as way of a thank you. This way you know the reviewer hasn’t been influenced by the incentive alone .  
  6. Interact on your social media sites. Try to create an environment where your customers see a face behind the business. Remember people like to deal with people. So interacting on social networks, writing blogs and so on can convey  a business that is interested in engaging with their customers which in turn makes customers more likely to respond.
  7. Exploit customer feedback to its full potential. When you think about it you’ll realise that you can actually receive customer feedback in a number of different ways – not just through customer reviews. You may have some feedback during a telephone conversation with a customer or in an email exchange. Some of these me of these off the cuff remarks can make excellent testimonials that you can use on your website (just make sure you ask them for permission).

Customer feedback in the form of reviews, questionnaires testimonials, ‘likes’ and ‘sharing’ can all have a positive impact on your business. So finding ways to encourage customers to converse with you makes sense. In part 2 of this blog we will be looking at how to manage negative feedback.

 

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this post, so please do leave a comment.

Thumbs up image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Survey Form image courtesy of tiramisustudio / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

08.06.14
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10 Things Missing In Your Site Design

Web design is such an organic field of work that every day, there’s some new insight being uncovered, some new dimension being revealed that will make visitors to your site stay on just a tad bit longer. From white space to parallax layouts to responsive design, there’s some new ‘it’ thing that’s always on the brink of sweeping web design world by storm.

However, while fads come and go; some design basics stay true irrespective of which year it is. These are the fundamentals that you simply cannot afford to mess up. Stuff like the Gutenberg Rule of eye movement.

Dimitry Fadeyev explains the Gutenberg Diagram below as he breaks down the process in which the human eye consumes content on a page.

The Gutenberg Diagram

The Gutenberg Diagram

Fadeyev elaborates, “The Gutenberg diagram splits up a page into four quadrants: the “Primary Optical Area” in top left, the “Strong Fallow Area” in top right, the “Weak Fallow Area” in the bottom left and a “Terminal Area” in bottom right. It suggests that the bottom left area of the page will get least attention as our eyes scan the page from top left to bottom right and that our glance would end up in the lower right portion of the page.”

Let’s do a quick roundup of little things that you might have overlooked in your web design – things that can cost you big in terms of website conversions.

   1. Showcase the Product

As elementary as this may sound, make your product the star of your website.

This becomes more crucial considering how humans are such visual creatures – 65% of us learn best through images and visual stimuli.

Product Showcase

Travel planning app Tripit does a great job of putting its mouth where the money is. With large images of the app on a desktop and mobile screen displayed upfront on its home page, it gives users a sneak peek into what to expect inside the app without even downloading it.

Showcase your product clearly with large, attractive images, preferably depicting users actually using it. If your website is an ecommerce site, make sure every product has multiple images available from various angles and that the images can be zoomed in if needed.

If your product is a software or an app, show off screenshots of the awesomeness that is your product, allowing visitors to make up their minds easily about it a la Tripit.

   2. Clear CTA

A typical landing page or website homepage has a number of things going on simultaneously. What is it that you want your visitor to do on your site? Is it to check out your product demo? Is it to sign up for your newsletter? Is it to buy products that you’re selling? Make sure your visitor knows exactly what is expected of her while on your site.

Use a single, clear and direct call to action telling your visitors to perform the key conversion oriented tasks that you want them to. Drop words like ‘Submit’ or ‘Know More’ from your CTA and replace them with action oriented copy. Create a sense of urgency to prompt immediate conversions, nudging along the procrastinators among your visitors into action right away.

CTA

Constant Contact’s utterly simple, yet superbly effective homepage has one loud and clear CTA.

Make sure your CTA button stands out from the rest of the page – make it bigger than other buttons, use a color that jumps out from the color scheme on your page – basically make sure it’s unmissable.

   3. Useful Microcopy

Microcopy is one of those little design touches that delight by virtue of being so unexpected. While whimsical microcopy does have its own place, it is more important to ensure that every single element on your page is geared towards one thing only – giving your users what they want as easily as possible, hence increasing the chances of converting them into actual customers.

Microcopy

Microcopy works beautifully in areas like form fields, error messages or even little ‘next step’ pointers across a website. It tells the user exactly what it expected of them without being intrusive or loud. Also, it adapts to various use case scenarios, serving up customized content, instead of having the same microcopy plastered across the site all the time.

   4. Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is the order in which we consume content and images. It is applied in web design by using images, text and their interplay to create a distinct and unmistakable message for the user.

With visual hierarchy, a good designer draws in the user’s attention to important pieces of content using images, arrows or even playing with the size of the text in and around the focal point of the page.

Pamela Wilson illustrates visual hierarchy very simply in her post “Design 101 | Successful Design: Who’s in Charge Here?” with two striking images.

No Visual Hierarchy  Visual Hierarchy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                   No Visual Hierarchy                          Visual Hierarchy Employed

The image that uses clear visual hierarchy (the one on the right) focuses the reader’s attention to the most important part of the message – bit about ‘lowest prices’. Using that as the hook, the ad reels in the user’s interest and offers all important information in a clearly discernible manner.

   5. Speed

While loading up your website with the latest bells and whistles, you’ll sometimes end up with a site that is too bulky to open on slow internet connections (thank God, those are only a handful these days!) or open so slowly that users lose interest and leave the site even before the site is completely loaded. This need for speed is even more important in these days of the mobile web.

A huge factor in slow websites is the amount of graphics content that it carries. Use large images, sure. But instead of using print quality images on your website, optimize them for web use before using them.

Another issue that slows down websites is having no caching information on your images. On the topic of caching images to help them load faster, Mark Isham advices “To cache your images, update your webserver configuration to provide an Expires header to your image responses from the server. For images that do not change often, you should specify a “far future” Expires header, typically a date 6 months to a year out from the current date.”

Use a tool like Page Speed Grader that will check how fast your site is vis-à-vis worldwide averages. It’ll also help pinpoint reasons that may be slowing down your site.

Remember, speed is crucial for any website. Even a 1 second delay in page response leads to a 7% drop in conversion rates.

   6. Planned User Flows

Most websites look like a collection of pages designed in isolation, with no relation to one another, no real thought given to transitions from one section to another.

Designing your website based on a user’s expected journey across your site is step one in web design. These expected user journeys or ‘user flows’ as Morgan Brown call them in his article about designing user flows that lead to conversions, help in visualizing where a user arrives from and what path she might take to eventually convert.

User Flows

Conversion in user flows is often measured at page level, but for a website to actually be profitable, conversions are needed at the overall site level. This means sales, subscriptions, viewership, and loyalties. To fulfill this overarching need, designers need to also see how user flows within each page merge into those of the next leading up to the final goal in one seamless action.

   7. Product Recommendations

Research shows that users actually look forward to product recommendations on ecommerce websites. A full 56% of online shoppers would return to a site that offers product recommendations.

Recommendations can be made to returning visitors based on their last viewed items like the ones on Amazon’s home page. You can also offer similar products to what the customer is currently viewing on the inside product pages.

Another option is recommending complementary products to buy along with the product being currently viewed.

   8. Upfront disclosure of costs

Imagine hunting through tons of online shopping sites for that one elusive spare part for a broken home appliance and finally finding it on Site ABC. Super, right? Now imagine your dismay at finding out at the checkout page, just before you pay that the shipping cost is actually higher than the cost of the item itself. Bit of a bummer, I’m sure.

Most shoppers feel the same way and will drop off mid-purchase on discovering hidden costs like shipping or convenience fees at the very last step. This is one of the biggest causes of the abandoned shopping carts epidemic that plagues most ecommerce sites.

   9. Trust Marks

When a user arrives on your site, it’s your job to put them at ease and help them find exactly what they are looking for. A lot of times, even when a customer finds what they’re looking for on a site, they hesitate from making a purchase from the site as they feel insecure about trusting it with their payment information.

This is a very real problem. A Trustmark Attitudes and Perceptions Study in 2013 by Harris Interactive found that 89% of consumers are hesitant to interact with a site they do not trust.

Another 73% from the same study felt that their personal and financial information were safer in the presence of a trust mark.

Use trust marks wherever possible on your website. Trust marks could range from logos like McAfee or VeriSign to your own shopper protection guarantees like the one eBay has on its site and on their email communication.

Trust Marks

It does not matter if you are not an ecommerce site and don’t sell anything on your site. Building trust goes beyond collecting people’s financial data. It extends to them considering your site as a bona fide authority for information that has been trusted by millions of other users like them.

For ecommerce sites, trust marks are almost as important as payment gateways. Place recognizable trust mark logos like McAfee or VeriSig on the payments page to build a user’s confidence in the security of your financial network. Also place them across your site at strategic locations to reinforce this message in a more subliminal manner.

10.  Social Login

One of the major headaches that the proliferation of websites has caused for users is the need to remember tons of username and password combinations. With the security loopholes that are being brought to light every other day, passwords keep getting more complicated and consequently tougher to remember.

What if there was a way around this predicament? Social logins give users and website owners a ready solution.

Social logins are plug and play tools that can be built into your site, which will enable users to log into your site using their social networking profiles. This eliminates the need to create a fresh username and password for your site and makes the user’s web experience completely seamless.

Social Login

The benefit to a website owner is two-fold. Social logins reduce the user’s hesitancy to use your site, while simultaneously giving you rich social profile data about each user via the social login app.

Conclusion

While artistic web design will make your site stand out from the clutter, it’s only websites rooted in web design fundamentals that will give you the returns that you’re hoping for. Invest your time and energies on improving these aspects of your website before you launch into hyper expensive marketing campaigns to promote it.

Lay a strong foundation and your skyscraper will stand tall for years to come.

Image Source: 1