A Question of Trust
The key to a successful site is gaining the trust of the visitor; very difficult to come by given the current climate.
If your visitors don't trust you, they are less likely to stay on your site to see what you have to offer, let alone think about doing business!
First Impressions
The first impression is always a lasting impression; so take some time in getting it right. Take a good look at your site. How does it compare to other sites that offer a similar product or service to yours?
If customers were forced to make a choice to do business with a company who looks like:-
- they've spent considerable time and money on their website
- they've thrown it together in the space of a day
...they would, more often than not, follow the money.
Most experienced Web users can spot a cookie-cutter site at a glance, after all there is only so many combinations of working through the do-it-yourself site-builders that come as part of various WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors.
Not to say that there is anything wrong with all the various programs and scripts that can help to get your site up and running quickly; but sites produced using the same methods tend to look surprisingly similar.
Even so, such a site would probably illicit a more favourable response compared to a Website that looked more like one long page of Times New Roman text.
The Personal Touch
If your visitors like what they see and how they are treated, they will want to spend more time on your site. A personal touch, whenever possible, can make all the difference - but how can you make your visitors feel more at home without asking them invasive questions about what they like?
You shouldn't have to ask for personal data to make them feel welcomed!
A good site owner will know their target audience and so have an idea of what it is that they look for when they visit the site. You can use this as a starting point, just make sure that links and items of interest are in a prominent place and always accessible.
One way to personalise the anonymous user experience is to use session cookies to track the user's activity throughout the site. Depending on the pages they visit and the keywords they search for, you could offer different products, services and other links of interest which could increase activity and interest in your site significantly.
The Page You Made!
Amazon uses session cookies to very good effect. While a new visitor is not required to create an account when they first start using their site, their searches and choices are being logged and compared to previous visitor activity.
When a theme emerges, products are offered beside the searches and product details they are looking at being highlighted as "the page you made". While items offered on this are no more than an educated guess, it can only help with conversion rates as it offers a personal touch without having to ask for any information.
Perhaps this is why Amazon is so well known and trusted as an online retailer. A seasoned bargain hunter will likely find items cheaper elsewhere online, but while other companies may offer items to supplement those already in the shopping basket - few will extend this to offer products similar to previous items viewed or searched for.
When it comes to personalising the experience for visitors who would rather remain anonymous until they are ready to buy, Amazon could teach us all a thing or two!
A Sense of Identity
If you are serious about doing business online you really should have some information about who you are (as an individual or a company), particularly if you hope to gather similar information from your visitors or want to sell online. How can you expect people to trust you if you make it difficult for them to find out more about you and your company?
A genuine company really ought to provide details of a mailing address somewhere on their website; along with a current phone number should anyone decide they would rather do business the old fashioned way.
Absence of such contact information is just one of the many clues that people pick up on to help them decide whether a company is legitimate or not. Any company unwilling to share a mailing address, or that collects mail from a PO Box, is often assumed to have something to hide.
We're Listening
If you want to earn the trust of your visitors you need to make them feel valued. Encourage your visitors to contact you by making it as easy as possible for them to do so; here are just a few of the ways they might want to make that first contact.
- Via email
- Via an online form
- Via instant messaging (either through a site applet or a particular program)
- Via a message board
- Via telephone
- Via snail mail
While the majority of visitors are unlikely to want to contact you, it is very reassuring to know that they are able to do so whenever they feel the need - wherever they are on your website. For this reason it is a good idea to be consistent about your links to whatever methods of contact you have available. If you are going to offer feedback and rating facilities on one of your articles, then it would be best to do it for all of them.
Make contact links part of your Website's furniture. A valid contact link on every page can be a very reassuring sight.
The more opportunities you provide for visitors to contact you, the more confident they will be that you will be available to offer them help when they most need it. Even when you are unable to help answer their questions, you can earn yourself some brownie points if you can point them in the direction of someone who does.
Something for Nothing
Unfortunately, we have all developed the attitude that we can get just about anything on the Internet for free if we want it. Why should we give away personal information to get access to a site when we can get similar content elsewhere?
One easy way to lose visitors is to ask them to register with your site before they can even access it. This might seem like a good way to collect email addresses to follow up, but you would have to question the validity of the vast majority of those collected at this stage as a visitor can not be sure a site is going to deliver whatever it was they were looking for.
If you want to offer a subscription to your premium content, then give them access to a free quality sample... only sites that are the online version of a quality print publication are likely to get genuine payment for content unseen at point of purchase.
Reluctance to tell the Truth
Visitors to your Website will no doubt be reluctant to part with their personally identifiable information without a good reason for doing so. If you really want to know more about your visitors without alienating them then you need to be careful.
The truth is that information provided over the Internet in "good faith" is open to misuse in the foreseeable future. Many of us have made the mistake of parting with our email addresses to access a Web page or free service in the past, only to find we have been added to various mailing lists who claim we signed up to receive mailings of interest via one of their partners. Such emails are sometimes the result of us not reading the small print or terms of service, but oftentimes unwanted emails come from lists gleaned from unsecured databases, Web scrapings or even lucky guesses.
As a result, visitors are reluctant to share anything more than their name and throw away email addresses. If they can avoid giving you correct or complete information to get what they want from your site, the chances are they will; simply because they fear that the information collected will be used inappropriately in the future.
Privacy is Priority
Because visitors are reluctant to share their personal identifiable information, then you should have a privacy policy on your site. Anyone who is paranoid you will sell their information will probably be interested to know what data you collect and exactly what you do with it before they even think about completing the form.
This is your opportunity to let your potential customers know what provisions you have in place to protect their personally identifiable information. They want to be reassured that their credit card details aren't kept on a shared server where there is the possibility of someone getting in by hacking a user's account. They want to know what steps you've taken to protect those parts of the database containing their information that others aren't meant to see. They want to be sure that you aren't sharing anything that can identify them with your partners unless they explicitly say it is ok for you to do so.
While it is a good idea to have a privacy policy link on every page of your site, a link beside any form on your site would help to put a few minds at rest. Special care should be taken for anyone with a site that is designed for, or known to be used by, children under the age of 13; there may be a legal requirement for the site to honour the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) - see http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.htm.
Too Close for Comfort?
When designing any contact forms, think twice about what information you insist on collecting. Do you really need an address and telephone number to respond to some feedback when a single valid email is all that is required? Wouldn't you rather like to know what they have to say than to lose the feedback altogether?
Whatever information it is you hope your visitors will part with; you should be sensitive to their needs. As a general rule, you should not ask them for information which you would not give yourself. It is only courteous to share those details with your visitors that you expect to ask from them.
The best way to gain your visitors trust is to simply expect nothing from them.