Trust is a precious asset that can determine the success and longevity of your business. Of course, it has to be earned and authentic, but your website can and should convey that trust. If you’ve built and earned a high level of trust through your business practices, the last thing you want is that trust to be dissipated by your site.
What are the factors that come into play in creating a website that enhances this trust? Here are four factors. I hesitate to call them factors to establish trust. These just enhance or strengthen trust.
Enhance Trust through Design
Design plays a crucial role in demonstrating trust. I list it first because the design of a site can influence trust — up or down — as the first thing a visitor sees. Design conveys trust in a twentieth of a second.
(Here’s the first 20th of a second of the word “trust”).
After that first 50 milliseconds, the visitor has already formed trust patterns that endure for the rest of the visit. Colors matter — multiple studies show blue as enhancing trust. Another design factor that has been shown to be important is typography. Even the font selection can affect the perceived difficulty of a task, where harder to read instructions promote a lack of confidence in the activity being instructed, therefore a lack of trust in the instructor.
Enhance Trust through Empathy
Know your customer, not just as an abstraction, but as a real, living breathing person, whose life extends beyond the role in which they might consider your product. This is especially true for B2B websites. When I ran a team of product managers, I stopped a meeting after the third or fourth reference to “the dealer’s shelf”, loaded the team into my car and drove over to a software dealer (back when they had stores!) to look at the actual shelf and talk to the actual dealer. Create your personas after talking to real people, and get as much of a 360 of them. Dive in to how they feel, not just how they think and act. If you can respond to those feelings on your website, you show empathy, and you build trust.
Enhance Trust through Story
Don’t be so focused on your own story as a business that you don’t address, first and foremost, the story of your customer. Make your story authentic, and your connection authentic. Don’t just focus on the external attributes of your products and how they meet the external needs of your customers. Also show the internal attributes of your brand and how they meet the aspirational needs of your customers. This is the essence of brand development. Write your case studies to reflect the stories of your customers so that prospects can clearly see themselves, if not in the exact situations, but allowing them to generalize your offering relative to them.