Easy Ways To Build Customer Trust

If you do most of your business online, or even all of it, gaining the trust of your customers takes a little bit of extra work. When it comes to ecommerce, every small detail either helps or hurts when it comes to building trust with your customers. Product descriptions, photos, reviews, and social media posts will all have an impact on if your customer sees you as a trustworthy brand or not.

It isn’t enough to know you are running a legitimate operation; you have to assure your customers that your business and your products can be trusted. The good news is that once you start using the following strategies, it’s not too hard!

Use Good Branding Techniques

Having a cohesive style across your company website, social media, and printed materials is one of the easiest and most effective ways to build trust with your customer base.

Consistent, strong branding shows customers that you have put a lot of work and thought into your company. It also shows that your company has a clear story to tell and value to add to people’s lives. The story of your brand should permeate every aspect of your shop, from your company logo to your product descriptions. Consistency here is key.

To learn more about how to create a successful branding strategy, read our Branding Guide.

Update Frequently

By updating frequently you show customers you’re here to stay. This doesn’t mean you have to redesign your entire website every few months, but it does mean you should be regularly updating banners, social media copy, and your product listings to keep content fresh.

If a customer is interested in your product and heads to Facebook to look at your profile, it doesn’t look good if there haven’t been any updates for over a month. This gives the appearance that you aren’t staying up-to-date on trends and that you aren’t concerned with providing your customers with updated information.

We’re constantly monitoring our website and have a daily deal that we post about on our Facebook page.

Showcase Positive Reviews

Inspire trust from potential customers by showcasing positive reviews from past customers. You worked hard to get those positive reviews, so make sure you use them to your advantage. When customers see that others have had a positive experience shopping with you, it gives them confidence in shopping from you as well.

We have an entire Customer Testimonials page on our website for this very reason!

Interact With Your Customers

If you get a question or comment from a customer, don’t ignore it or put off answering. Quick response times and interactions with customers is an easy way to show that you value customer concerns and opinions.

By interacting with customers regularly, you’re also showing that your business is active. Personal interactions are also more likely to build a loyal customer base. People like feeling as if they are special, so make them special!

Provide Clear, Informative Product Photos & Copy

Short, vague descriptions and blurry photos are easy ways to turn customers away from your website. It makes your business look scammy and lazy. That’s why it is so important that you take the time to make each product page as nice as you can.

Use crisp photography that showcases your product from a variety of angles. Your product descriptions should clearly state the product features, dimensions, and any other pertinent information that customers will be looking for.

Your photos and copy should be clean and professional across your entire website. That goes for banners, FAQ pages, About sections, and every other page on your website.

Now that you know how to build customer trust, don’t forget to deliver with high quality shipping supplies so your customer’s orders arrive undamaged!

How to Make Your Business Blossom

It’s time to shake off the lethargy of winter and refresh your business for spring. Whether you’re a new business or well-established, it’s never a bad idea to take a look at your business and find ways to boost sales and improve customer service.

We’re bringing you our top ten ways, some big, some small, to help you boost your business this spring.

1.      Update Your Photography

Photography is more important than ever, so take the time to go through your product line and take note of what items need better photographs. Ideally you’ll have more than one photograph of each product. Some examples of additional photographs you’ll want besides the studio shot includes lifestyle shots, detail shots, and shots of the product from different angles.

You might also consider changing the feeling of your business by adjusting the tone of your photographs. It’s spring, so consider using more natural light with clean backgrounds. Some of your products can likely be re-branded for the season, so if you have the manpower test this out on a few items!

2.      Check Your Shop Stats

If you don’t have a routine in place to track your businesses analytics, now is the perfect time to start! If you’ve not set up analytics, do it. If you have, take a close look at those statistics. Make notes of what products are selling and which ones are not. How is traffic arriving to your website?

You may also want to check your business data across different timeframes. You can check out your shop stats by week, month, or even for a year. Pay attention to what times of year you are selling the most products. Knowing the busy and slow periods of your business can make it easier to build your business strategy.

3.      Update Your Copy

Your copy is important not only as a tool to convey information to your customers, but for search engine optimization. Your product descriptions should highlight the most important aspects of your items while also answering customer questions.

Don’t focus only on product copy, though. Take a look at your About section, as well as any other page on your website that you may not update often. There may be errors you never noticed, or there simply may be a better way to convey the message you want to put out to the world.

4.      Reflect On Your Brand

What makes your products and your brand unique? How does it stand out compared to the competition? What can it offer to your customers that other products or companies cannot? Take some time to reflect on these questions. Record your answers and use them to improve your marketing strategy.

Make sure your tone, graphics, packaging, and social media all reflect the answers to these questions. You want not only to do what your competitors are not, but to be true to your brand across all aspects of the company.

5.      Share Your Story

People are craving personality, so make sure you show it. Corporate responses and posts are a thing of the past. Give your customers a look at work behind the scenes. Let them get a glimpse of the employee culture at your company.

While you don’t need to give an entire history of your business, customers like to see where you’ve come from. Show how you’re involved in the local community. Highlight the people behind the brand to inspire trust. This can be through social media, on your company website, or both!

6.      Create Social Media Routines

You likely already have a presence on social media, but if you don’t have a routine for social media posting, you’re missing out. A social media routine can save you a lot of time and stress. While some platforms benefit from spur-of-the-moment posts others, such as Facebook, are great for scheduling posts ahead of time.

Creating a social media routine can seem overwhelming. Start by breaking down the tasks you need to do daily, weekly, and monthly. Daily you should be checking each social media profile, replying to comments, and working on new content. Weekly you should be scheduling posts and checking your stats. Monthly you should be creating a social media strategy and coming up with new experiments. You can use these guidelines to build out a proper social media schedule.

Bonus: 5 Social Media Strategies For Small Businesses 

7.      Consider Customer Feedback

Take a look at reviews from your customers across various platforms including Google and your Facebook page. Take notes from these reviews to see what shop policies can be updated to better serve your customer base.

If you don’t have a lot of feedback, don’t be afraid to reach out to your customers requesting it. You can’t make improvements to your business if you don’t know what customers like and what they hate. When looking at feedback figure out what you can change, what you can’t, and how you can improve your business overall based on what your customers are saying.

8.      Meet With Your Employees

Your staff is another great way to get feedback on how your business is operating. Check in with specific projects and also the work your employees are doing on a daily basis. Brainstorm ways you can improve the business with them. Ask for their ideas, and don’t just ask, but put them into practice if you think it could work.

Not only will this help your sales, but it will have a huge impact on employee morale. The better your employees feel about their work, the harder they’re going to work, especially if their ideas are being tested.

9.      Get Your Workplace Organized

Whether you want to get your space, shipping area, or documents organized, now is the time to do it. Getting organized can take a lot of time, but it will make your business run more efficiently down the line.

It will probably feel overwhelming at first, and that’s okay. Break your list down into manageable tasks to make your given project easier to handle. Make sure you let your employees know when something is being re-organized so they’re not caught off-guard, and also so they’re prepared to be more patient with hiccups that may come up during the process.

10.   Celebrate Your Milestones

Take some time to celebrate the successes your company has had. Share good news not only with your family and friends, but across social media and with your employees. If your company reaches a big milestone, celebrate! Reward the hardworking members of your team!

You should be proud of your accomplishments. Think about those accomplishments and what that success means to you. What can you do to keep that momentum going? When you use this thought process it becomes easier to keep your business growing.



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How to Get More Done in Less Time

No matter the size of your business, everyone is looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their workplace. When you’re running a business there is always something to do and never enough time to do it. Today we’re here to teach you how to get more done, and how to spend less time doing it.

Re-Asses Your To Do Lists

This takes a lot of time initially, but it will save you a lot of time down the road. Look at all the things you need to do and break them down into different categories. From there, create a monthly to do list, a weekly to do list, and a daily to do list. This makes all of the tasks seem more manageable. With everything organized you don’t waste time trying to figure out how to balance all your tasks.

Track Your Hours

For one week, write down each task you do in a spreadsheet along with an estimate of how much time you spent on that task. Once you’ve done that you have physical evidence of what tasks are taking up most of your time. More often than not, people discover that they are spending too much time on tasks that are not essential. With this information you can make changes to your work habits to improve efficiency.

Create a Routine

For businesses where the tasks are constantly changing, this may seem impossible. What we mean by a routine is not to do the same tasks at the same time each day. What your routine looks like each day is up to you, but what you should be doing is creating a basic formula for your day. Get to work at a set time and check your email. Review your to do list. Take your lunch break at the same time each day (or try to). By setting some basic routines you will better time your tasks.

Spend Less Time on Daily Tasks

Speaking of routines, one thing you want to avoid is spending too much time on daily tasks. These tasks make it challenging for you to make any headway in your to do list. It is important to find ways to accomplish these tasks more quickly. Take a look at your daily tasks and break them down into specific steps. How can the amount of steps be reduced? Which of these tasks could you train other employees in so you have more time on your hands for other tasks?

Set Boundaries

This includes boundaries when it comes to your working hours, taking on additional tasks, and answering questions from your co-workers. If you answer emails at two in the morning, people will always expect you to be available via email. If someone asks you to complete a task, ask about how urgent it is so you can add it into your schedule appropriately. And while you shouldn’t brush off all requests or questions from your co-workers, sometimes you simply won’t have time to assist them. Let them know this, kindly, and offer an alternative point of contact for the issue.

Determine Your Working Habits

Are you sluggish in the morning or do you find yourself getting burned out near the end of your shift? Arranging tasks so that you are working on the most challenging items when you are most productive makes a world of difference. Schedule your day so your more tedious, simple tasks are being done when you are at your lowest point of productivity.

Be Patient

The fact is that all of us go home at the end of the day with things at work we’ve still got to finish, and that’s okay. If you had everything done you’d show up at work with nothing to do. Tackle the mindset that you must get all your work completed immediately. It’s simply not possible, and realizing that can eliminate a lot of stress.

Getting Discovered As A New Business

Whether you’ve started a website, began to sell on Amazon, or just opened an Etsy shop, one of the toughest parts of starting a new business venture is getting found by your target audience. Plus once you are found by your audience, you need to get them to stick around long enough to learn more about you.

A lot of this work begins before you even launch your business, though it is never too late to go back and make changes. Today we’ll cover some of the basics of getting discovered as a new business.

1.      Focus On SEO

Search engine optimization is extremely important when it comes to getting your online business found. Most of the time when any of us are searching for a product or service, we’re heading to a search engine, not a specific website.

This is why organic search is so important, and luckily you don’t have to be a big business with a big budget to get your website noticed.

You want to focus on creating unique content through your product titles and descriptions. Craft an interesting About Page that tells your unique story. Use internal links on your website and blog (but don’t go overboard). Do keyword research, not only into what your customers are searching for, but into what sort of keywords your competitors are using.

Be patient, because SEO is a constantly evolving process and it can take time for you to see the results. The more you work at it, the better at it you’ll get.

2.      Build Trust

When you’re first starting out you don’t have a reputation yet, which means customers may be wary of trusting you. It’s your job to show them that you are a trustworthy business.

You’ll want to make sure your shop is well stocked with plenty of quality products. You’re not likely to buy from a shop only selling  a handful of products, are you? If you’re still working on adding more products consider listing item variations as separate products for the time being.

You’ll also want your company policies, including information on privacy and returns, to be easy to find and easy to understand. This is very important for a new business without a reputation. Not having clear policies is a great way for customers to leave your site.

And, this is important, always reply to your customers and do so quickly. It builds additional trust and your new customers will be impressed at your turnaround time.

3.      Make Sure Your Products Look Professional

No one is going to pay for a product that looks like it has been poorly made, and if your product pages aren’t up to snuff that’s exactly what your customers will think.

The last thing you want is for a customer to make it to a product page only to turn away because you didn’t put the work in to make it look great.

This starts with excellent product photography. Images should be clear, crisp, and show exactly what the product is. It’s even better if you have multiple shots of the item including it assembled and photographed from different angles.

It’s also important that you present your customer with excellent item descriptions. Your words are what will lead the customer to make a final purchase. You should always present the most important information about your item in the first couple lines. Use bullet points and make it easy to find key information throughout the description.

4.      Market, Market, Market

Like it or not, marketing is a huge part of any business, and yours isn’t the exception. There’s no way to go into great detail about marketing in a couple of paragraphs, but we’ll give you a snapshot.

Use word of mouth. Tell your friends and family about your new business and ask them to tell the people they know. Your loved ones want you to succeed so this is a great place to start.

Social media is essential in this growing digital age, so start building your brand by getting company profiles on a couple social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We go into greater detail about social media in our social media strategies post, so check that out for more detailed information.

If you have some money to spend, consider online advertising. This could be through social media ads, Google Adwords, and a whole host of other options.

5.      Use Analytics

The only way to improve is to study the results. Whether you’re using Google Analytics or whatever statistics tool is available to you, make sure you check it often.

You can use analytics tools to track sales, keyword performance, what products your customers are most interested in, how your website is being found, and so much more. You should also do this across your social media channels. Pay attention to what posts have greater engagement and pay attention to what times of the day is getting your largest social reach.

Use these analytics to make changes to your website and SEO. It is helpful to generate reports and keep track of the changes in your stats. This can also be helpful for discovering what times of year you are busier and when business is slow.

Growing your business is a long, ongoing process. It is important that you don’t let yourself get discouraged if the growth is slower than you’d like. Keep working hard to build your business one step at a time.