5 Reasons Why You're Failing to Win the Trust of Your Customers‍

Consumer trust is one of the most important drivers for business growth, and it’s also one of the marketing essentials that so many brands can get wrong. So what’s causing your trust levels to break down? 

Earning the trust of your target audience is an extremely difficult challenge. Modern consumers are naturally suspicious of companies at a time when more businesses are coming under the spotlight for a lack of transparency, unethical practices, and their inability to keep customer data secure. 

This is a major inconvenience at a time when trust is more vital than ever before. According to data compiled by Influencer Marketing Hub, 81% of consumers believe that trust is a requirement for buying from a brand, while 86% feel that the perception of authenticity is essential in choosing which brands to support. 

Trust has become a factor in any sustainable sales funnel, but is also highly prone to hindering the overall success of a brand if marketers fail to nurture trust appropriately. 

This makes the battle to build customer trust a goal that’s littered with pitfalls, so it’s worth taking extra care in avoiding the common failings that could hamper your progress. 

With this in mind, let’s explore the five key reasons why you’re failing to win the trust of your customers: 

1. You’re Not Incentivizing Conversions

The chances are that your industry is a competitive one online. This is because the World Wide Web is full of businesses competing with one another on a global scale for market dominance. 

When customers have the option of buying a product from your brand, or a similar one at a competitor, what’s going to make them more likely to buy from you? 

One of the most important and easy-to-implement strategies to build trust here is to offer a money-back guarantee as standard. 

Although most modern businesses will offer some form of refund structure for unsatisfied customers, lots of stores (particularly luxury goods ones) keep their guarantees hidden in the fine print of their terms and conditions. 

This can represent a failure in building a mutually trusting relationship with your customers, and could lead them to question whether your brand is going to give them a difficult time in reclaiming their money should they not be satisfied with your product. 

With this in mind, it’s certainly worth advertising a no-quibble money-back guarantee for all applicable products or services that you sell. Although this approach could lead to a small uptick in returns, you’re likely to see far higher volumes of customers choosing to experience your product and deciding to keep it.

Incentivizing conversions can be far more hands-on than guarantees, and you can position your brand as a caring and customer-first business by adding freebies and other incentives in return for conversions. 

Here, it’s possible to offer freebies like eBooks, gift cards, discounts on future purchases, and even more focused product offers based on customer preferences all to show that you care for customer service. 

2. You Aren’t Using Social Proofs

The beauty of the social proof is that you can use the words of customers as a powerful marketing tool without having to spend time working on your own taglines and content. 

In an age where customers are more suspicious of brands, the social proof is a great way of promoting your products via happy customers. In fact, 98% of consumers read online reviews to learn about businesses, and 76% do this regularly. 

In action, a social proof helps to reduce buyer uncertainty by showing that their fellow customers have enjoyed making the same purchase in the past. Psychologically, it helps indecisive customers to make an affirmative decision by sharing the thoughts of their fellow customers. 

Social proofs can come in many forms, and one of the most commonplace is through customer reviews. The power of reviews has become so strong that Google often offers aggregated reviews alongside the locations of businesses on a global scale. 

This means that encouraging positive reviews from happy customers is essential, and should always be encouraged after a purchase is made. Offering the chance to win vouchers or discounts in return for reviews can be another great incentive to ensure that you stock up on positive reviews via Google. 

Additionally, 88% of customers favor companies that respond to customer reviews, and this can be a straightforward and quick process to build more trust among your target audience. 

Social proofs don’t have to be limited to customer reviews and can come in many different forms. In the example above, we can see how Starbucks uses a positive customer post on social platform X to notify followers of an upcoming promotion. As an added bonus, the account replied to the customer to continue driving the positive sentiment. 

By using your social media presence to engage directly with customers, you can invite users to share images and videos of them using your products and use repost features to convert user-generated content (UGC) into key marketing materials that can grow audience trust. 

3.Your SEO is Falling Behind Competitors

To leverage growth as a brand, you need to not only earn the trust of your customers but also the trust of Google. 

If search engines can view your brand in a positive light, it can have a direct impact on your customers, who use search engine ranking positions (SERPs) as a direct barometer of a brand’s trustworthiness online. 

Building valuable backlinks is the cornerstone of climbing up Google’s SERPs, and the search engine places a high value on reputable backlinks from high domain authority/reputation (DA/DR) sources. 

This means that your marketing efforts must focus on leveraging quality backlinks. One key way of doing this in an effective manner is to conduct guest blogging to publish on relevant high DA/DR websites.

The reason guest blogging is effective is that it offers you an opportunity to showcase your industry knowledge while broadening your audience reach on a reputable website. In adding a link back to your own pages, Google’s crawlers can identify your website as a strong resource for information. 

But how can you discover quality host websites for your content? One strong solution is to use Ahrefs’ Website Explorer feature, which can identify the backlinks of several key websites in your niche. 

Using Website Explorer, you can select a leading website in your niche, and then click to view its backlinks. When looking at the site’s referring domains, it’s possible to order them by domain rating to select possible websites to outreach your guest posting content to. 

This approach is effective because there’s backlinks already exist between websites in your industry, which means that the websites are more likely to accept your content too. Just remember that high DR sites can be more difficult to pitch to, while Google is less likely to favor links from low DR sites. So finding that sweet spot to target relative to your own domain rating is essential. 

While this can be a more time-consuming process, earning valuable backlinks has strong benefits for businesses that extend beyond building customer trust. For this reason, guest posting has become a leading feature for many SEO agencies and a core aspect of the link-building process.

4. You’re Failing to Make Customers Feel Special

If customers don’t feel valued by a company, they’re less likely to trust that their loyalty is going to be rewarded appropriately. 

For brands, it’s essential to make your customers feel special, and that their custom is deeply valued. With this in mind, you should seek to integrate a loyalty or rewards scheme as a fundamental part of your service. 

Here, personalization can be a valuable tool in leveraging both trust and loyalty. If you can gain an understanding of your customer profile and the behavior of your visitors on-site, it’s possible to tailor loyalty rewards in an effective way to to drive stronger purchase intent and build a recurring customer base. 

Utilizing cookies to better understand the behavior of your visitors can be a great starting point to offering them personalized loyalty rewards, such as discounts on a specific product line or a freebie for repeat orders. 

This approach builds trust because it tells customers that their loyalty is valued and actively rewarded by your brand. 

5. Your Customer Service Sucks

An easily preventable way to ruin the trust of your customers is to offer a weak level of customer service. 

90% of customers believe that an immediate response to their questions is essential or very important, while 60% recognize ‘immediate’ as a response time of 10 minutes or less. 

While this seems like a challenging proposition, we’re living in the age of chatbots, and all online businesses can benefit from some level of automation in their customer service responses. 

Chatbots can be easy to train, and offer conversational responses for customers that help them to feel as though they’re talking to human assistants. 

Be sure to not only embrace immediate and around-the-clock response times but also dedicate a sufficient amount of time to supplying your chatbot with actionable information for an array of different queries. 

While quick responses build trust, irrelevant answers can lead to customers feeling undervalued as a whole. 

While the technology isn’t yet fully free of vulnerabilities, creating a generative AI chatbot can be an excellent way to incorporate large language models (LLM) responses to offer more focused levels of interaction and adaptability to customers looking for help. 

These GenAI bots are largely more productive and can automatically generate responses to common queries, offer summaries of customer complaints and resolutions that agents can use in conversations, and deliver real-time product recommendations based on user behavior. 

Valuing Customers is Key

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and the single most effective way to earn their trust is to genuinely value their happiness when browsing your pages or making a purchase. 

If you treat your customers as metrics or sales figures to manipulate, you risk undermining your entire business model and pushing them to the first competitor that offers them value. 

By catering to your customers and adapting to their behavior online, you can offer a more personalized service that makes them feel special for choosing your brand. With the right blend of incentivization and automation, you’ll be able to bolster your lead generation performance and secure more sustainable conversion rates long into the future.