Have you ever been to a website to purchase something that made you instantly go — “ummm, nope!” Maybe it had a suspicious payment form. Maybe the visuals or the overall “clunkiness” gave you the ick and made you take a pause.

This is more common than we think and it can make a big difference to your bottom line and public perception of your brand. Let’s face it — people remember sucky experiences.

But let’s fix it! Building trust isn’t a fast process, but it can be one of the most fruitful solutions to take your business to the next level. Time to get started.

1. First Impressions Matter: Make it Count

Ever see a color or logo out in the wild and instantly recognize what brand it could belong to? Yep, thats consistent branding at work. I’m sure you can name a few brands that instantly come to mind!

Maintaining brand consistency at all touch points keeps customers remembering who you are. It’s a simple visual step to ensure a good customer experience at its very basic of levels. Here are a few examples of things to ensure are similar across the board:

• Your Target Audience

• Logo

• Color Palette

• Typography

• Imagery type

• Brand Voice

• Illustrations
  
  

Start to align the above in places like these:

• Email Marketing Campaigns & Newsletters

• Website branding and visuals

• Landing Pages & Ads

• Social Media Channels

• Marketing Materials & Brochures (especially those that go out to clients!)

• Product Packaging

• Internal communications
  
  

2. Say What You Mean & Mean What You Say: Transparent Communication

In a world full of scammers and ulterior motives, transparency and honesty can differentiate your business away from the negative into a memorable and positive experience with your brand. It is one of the pillars of memorable UX — providing clear and honest information and placing it’s priority over a sale, can strongly foster customer empowerment and get customers to their goals more efficiently.

Spammy language, dark UX patterns or even straight up lying about your brand or product will get you caught eventually — you may fool a few now, but this will be short lived. Making your brand intentions and products transparently visible, based in honesty and understandable from the get-go have a greater chance in bringing in customers that will remain loyal and keep your positive outcomes more likely.

Something go wrong or make a mistake? Own it. Be transparent and honest in what happened. Your customers will remember how you responded!

3. Advocate and Invest in UX: Your Customers Will Notice

You’re on a website buying a product: you press Submit Order and you instantly get an error that “Something Went Wrong”. The page resets but all the information you spent ages putting in disappears! Many customers will be so annoyed, they won’t even want to do it again. Your sale? Poof. Gone.

Little moments like this can have BIG repercussions. Investing in not just these seemingly small flow interactions, but also in your customers, can make or break your brand in the end. Understanding who your users are and what motivates them ensures you design specifically for your audience and what they want — this keeps development costs low, keeps you from wasting precious time and resources and keeps those coming back to good experiences.

4. High-Quality & Valuable Content Encourages Interaction

Let’s say you are in the market for a new outdoor gazebo. Take a look at these two primary images from Wayfair for two gazebo examples:

Which one are you more likely to want to learn more about? The image on the right is high-quality and inviting — customers have a higher chance of envisioning themselves owning the product! The image on the left? It’s quality is grainy and doesn’t foster customer imagination!

Make sure your copy and content you are providing also give your customers value. In a world of instant gratification, humans want to read things that entice them, excite them and make it worth their time.

Investing in high-quality imagery and content tailored to your customers and demographics has a higher chance of drawing customers in and having them positively interact with your products and website.

5. Peer Power: Social Proof Can Help Shape Your UX

When users see others just like them engaging with your product, they aren’t just relying on a company telling them that they should like it. They are seeing real humans and seeing (hopefully!) genuine reviews and reactions. The world of influencing has become so powerful. It has moved people to value seeing real humans using products and not just incentivized users.

Investing in social proof can help your customer experience by:

• Eliminating decision-making anxiety

• Improving your credibility

• Increasing brand and product engagement

• Improving conversions

Consider adding testimonials, reviews and real human endorsements to your website. Adding in a zone for customer images will further lend to your credibility! There are many tried and tested apps like Yotpo and Judge.me that have many built-in benefits to show and acquire real human reviews!

6. The Case for Customer Support

It can almost be guaranteed that you’ve had an customer support experience with a brand that makes you go, “Wow. That was amazing.” A great example of this is with the pet-brand, Chewy. News of their superb customer service when a pet has crossed the rainbow bridge always goes viral. I myself received a handwritten card in the mail when it was my cat-son’s birthday!

People remember these moments. People return to great experiences. People will always talk about great experiences and in turn, positively market for you!

Invest in a customer-first approach to customer service. Always seek to improve your processes and your policies and tailor it to your specific customers. Learn what is important to them and lean into it with all your might!

7. Security and Privacy: Safety by Design

Our data is everywhere, whether we like it or not. Our private information is many times necessary to make purchasing decisions. But it’s what you do with other’s data that can make or break their experience with your brand.

While this topic can warrant entire articles, being forthcoming in how you use customer data, ensuring and broadcasting safe payment systems and preventing and mitigating security threats can make all the difference in customers feeling comfortable enough to interact with your brand!

8. Authentic Engagement Ensures an Emotional Connection

Nothing is more frustrating than scrolling a brand’s Instagram page or a brand’s site reviews and seeing canned responses to customer issues and inquiries. Customers can see right through it — there are enough bot experiences on the internet now that you can’t pull a fast one anymore!

While the temptation to automate and respond quickly to issues and reviews can be strong, some people shop exclusively within comments or reviews. They look to a brand’s answers to gauge whether to engage with the brand or product further. We want to know that there is a human on the other end! The digital landscape unfortunately removes a lot of the human element — the brands that are winning are connecting on this human level!

9. Never Stop Wanting to Improve

Brands that seem to have stellar engagement and experiences consistently? They continually improve what they offer. Nothing will ever be perfect — the world’s likes and needs change constantly but good experiences always endure. You can stay innovative, relevant and competitive.

Continuously interact with your customer base. Find out what they are wanting, find out what makes them tick and how you can adjust to them and their needs as time goes on. But never sacrifice your brands missions and values for the next big shiny thing just because “another business did it”.

Testing your products and online experiences are a great way to define, measure and analyze your offerings! A/B test and split your audience to see what really resonates. Conduct usability tests to make sure your experiences work like you hypothesize. But a word to the wise — remain steadfast in what is really business critical and what will really make a difference to your customer!

Conclusion

1. Make sure your brand is physically and digitally consistent wherever anyone can see or interact with it.

2. Be honest and transparent — own who you are as a brand and act with honesty. People don’t want to be lied to!

3. Spending time and effort into improving your brand’s UX can massively differentiate you from the competition.

4. Valuable and high-quality content will always win — this can build strong emotional connections with your customer and foster loyalty.

5. Use social proof to eliminate purchasing anxiety and build a human community around your brand.

6. Define your human-first customer support processes and values — customers will remember thebad experiences with your brand.

7. Invest in and broadcast your security measures to increase the safety in interacting and buying from your brand.

8. Prioritize authentic engagement with your customers. Humans want human-level real interactions!

9. Never stop improving. Spend the time growing your business based off what your customers want and need. You’ll always stay relevant!