Customer Trust – Online Transactions
February 23rd, 2009 // 1:18 pm @ Fox
“Trust me. Give me your money or credit card details and I promise I will send you the goods/service. Scouts honour … promise … cross my heart.”
Trust is so important in online transacting. It is not like the customer is going into a bricks and mortar shop and buying something they can see and touch, and take home immediately. When purchasing online it is like flying blind. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it and you can’t guarantee getting it. It is a virtual sale and you may end up with virtually nothing.
How do you know you can trust an online company to deliver what they promise to and not rip you off? In two words – you can’t.
So why would you deal with a company that you don’t know from Adam?
At the end of the day it is always a risk. Here are a few tips to reduce the risk:
- Read the About page on a website. Sometimes they do not tell you much, but other times it may have a bio of the CEO or photographs of staff members and the company vision or mission statement. You can get a feel for if the site and business is genuine.
- Look at the Contact page of the site. Does it have a location listed? I am very wary of any business that does not have a phone number, fax number and physical address. Simply filling out a contact form is not enough for me to trust a company.
- Is the business or site affiliated with any industry bodies? Are there any icons to show accreditation? This often depends on the industry, but displaying affiliation or accreditation icons helps to establish trust.
- Check the privacy policy, terms and conditions and support information. This is often overlooked. How many times have you filled out a form only to be bombarded with SPAM forever after? If the business is international, don’t expect to have easy come-back with your local country laws. What happens if your parcel does not arrive? What happens if you are not happy with the service? Often terms and conditions will say that you (the buyer) are responsible for anything damaged in the post, or missing in the post, or an unsatisfactory purpose.
- A big one is checking that any form you submit, particularly with your credit card details, is a secure form.
This means that any personal or financial information is encrypted and secure. How do you tell if the form is secure? Always ensure the URL (web address) has https and not http in the front. 
A little padlock icon appears either down in the bottom right corner of your browser or top right. Each web browser shows things differently.
If you get a security warning popup do not enter your credit card details. This happened to me with a transaction once. I immediately stopped the transaction and phone the company to tell them that their security certificate has expired and their form was no longer secure. They had no idea what I was talking about.
- Testimonials from satisfied customers are good up to a point. Genuine ones can help build trust, but how do you know if it is genuine? You would not believe how many business owners write their own false testimonials. I have always had an ethical problem with false testimonials. I believe that potential customers can smell a rat from a mile away. Over-enthusiastic customers writing soppy testimonials doesn’t shine my shoes, but testimonials with a name, title and business (which can be checked) are more likely to build my trust.
I know a one-man commercial business where the staff photograph comprises of the business owner, his brother, his father and two administration girls from another office. His little business of one looks like a much larger concern. I wonder if anyone noticed the family resemblance.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln:
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Claim Your Business In Google Maps
February 14th, 2009 // 9:35 pm @ Fox
Do you know if your business appears in Google Maps?
Judging by the number of unclaimed businesses in Google Maps, it seems many business owners do not know that they need to claim their business.
What happens if a business is not claimed?
Before a business is claimed, the listing is open to editing by the community at large. This means that ANYONE with a Google account can edit the location of the business and add information that is not correct. This can potentially leave room for business listing to be hijacked.
This is an excellent post titled Microsoft’s listing in Google Maps Hijacked (oops by me) which discusses the possibilities of foul play with listings.
How do I know if my business is vulnerable?
When you go into the detail for the listing, you will either see ‘Provided by the business owner’ or ‘Claim your business’.
Once your business is claimed and verified by Google, it is locked and can only be edited by the authorised business owner.
Business is too important to leave these details unattended.
Category : Local Search &blog
Can You Have Too Much Web Content?
February 9th, 2009 // 11:24 am @ Fox
Time and again it is instilled upon us that ‘content is king’ when it comes to a website. The experts all say to write as much copy as you can on your product or service, add a blog, write reviews, FAQ’s, articles and so on. Is it possible to have too much content?
The benefits of having a ton of copy on your website include:
- Plenty of information for customers researching your product or service
- A full and comprehensive site seen as an authority
- Loads of long-tail keywords or phrases for people searching
- The more opportunities for people wishing to link to one of the pages
There is a big ‘however’ here. HOWEVER, there are two ways that you can have too much content.
- If the content is not meaningful, there is no point in having lots of content. Meaningless dribble will not give customers much information on your product or service or encourage people to link to it. It is very easy to write a few hundred words on a particular topic, but boring and trivial will result in a high bounce rate.
The content needs to be informative, compelling and easy to read. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience and think about what information they need, or what copy would interest them.
- It is not recommended to have too much copy on one page, particularly if it is just massive blocks of text. This is not how people read online. Many websites, particularly corporate sites, make the mistake of treating the online environment in the same way as the offline environment. Where offline you can read a book, magazine or article with lots of block paragraphs, online it does not work this way.
Online readers tend to scan web pages looking for something that will attract their interest. The use of headings, bolded text, bullet points, images, links and plenty of white space is much easier to read than just text.
It is fine to have a few hundred words per page providing it is broken up into easy to read and manageable chunks.
Trust and Name-Googling
February 5th, 2009 // 3:19 pm @ Fox
Years and years ago, when search was first becoming mainstream, I remember typing my own name into Google, as I am sure everyone did at the time.
Shock…horror…..the first page results were full of headings such as “Talk sex with Lisa Fox”, “Lisa Fox Sex Romps” and worse.
What if my corporate colleagues were to search on my name? Would they think this was me? I checked it out. Nope. She didn’t look like me.
Today I searched on my name again just out of curiosity. Well, it looks like Lisa Fox’s romping days are over. I can’t see her anywhere.
There are a lot of people out there with the same name as me. We have:
- Lisa Fox, presenter of Australian art
- Lisa Fox, children’s book illustrator
- Lisa Fox, Green Party of Canada
- Lisa Fox, actor
- Pray for Lisa Fox (this must be someone talking about me)
- Lisa Fox, Episcipalian who testifies to sufferings
- Lisa Fox, attorney at Fort Lauderdale
- Lisa Fox, Miami/South Florida Real Estate and Design
It is human nature to be curious and see what is out there for our name. It is also common for customers to search on the name of a company CEO. Often this is part of researching a product or service and can be part of building trust. Potential customers like to see that the online business is somewhat tangible, and there is someone there with a face.
When analysing search terms in log files for businesses I have optimised, I have often seen the CEO’s name or the name of a senior executive. Another business I worked with sent a newsletter out to subscribers a few times a year. When we added a photograph and name of the CEO to the newsletter, we were swamped with responses from subscribers. Suddenly, the business had a face and subscribers felt a ‘warm and fuzzy’ regarding the business.
Adding a photograph and short biography of your CEO may not fit with your business, however if it is possible to add this, it can make a significant difference to the trust relationship with customers.
Links – The Annoying ‘Click Here’ Habit
February 4th, 2009 // 1:03 pm @ Fox
There are 1,310,000,000 results found if you search on Google for the phrase ‘Click here’. That is over one billion web pages that use this phrase. Quite incredible!
The use of this phrase started way back when the Internet was new and the general user did not understand how to navigate from one page to another, or understand what a link was. Often links were quite hard to find as they did not necessarily appear as they do now, and the user didn’t understand that you could click on the old blue coloured text to go to another page.
Usability and accessibility concepts were still in the future, so to make it really clear to the user what to do, the ‘click here’ phrase was implemented to identify where a link was.
Click here to view our report
Click here to contact us
Click here to read the case studies
Or my favourite, that one that thinks the user is a mind reader:
Usability, accessibility, search engine optimisation and good old logic came into the fray and it became recognised that the link should have descriptive text to describe where the link goes. Internet users today are savvy and understand what a link is.
Contextual link text are the words contained within the link that have meaning to the user and a search engine. ‘Click here’ does not tell a search engine what the link is going to. The link text is like a sign-post telling search engines such as Google what is on the linked page. In the case of a ‘click here’ link, it is telling Google that the next page contains information about ‘Click here’.
The above examples of links would be better if the click here was removed and the link text displayed:
View our report
Contact us
Read the case studies
If you feel your users are really not that bright and still may not get it, then leave the ‘Click here’ if you have to, but move the link text so that it is descriptive link text.
Click here to view our report
Click here to contact us
Click here to read the case studies
The ‘Click here’ is one of my pet hates. If I am on a website and see this, I leave.
New Website – Pay Peanuts and Get Monkeys
February 2nd, 2009 // 1:44 pm @ Fox
All small business owners want to save money where possible. This is only natural as every penny counts when you are trying to keep your head above water in an economical crisis and you are just a small affair with limited funds.
Rather than going for the cheapest possible solution you can find, you are better looking for value for money and a return on your investment. Your first venture into the online environment is a big decision and can easily turn into a mitigated disaster.
An example that comes to mind is a small business where I quoted on a solution but the owner wanted to look for a cheaper quote. I have no problem with that. Everyone should shop around and research before making a decision.
The requirements were for a business website with content management system for the staff to upload images, specials and other copy, functionality for newsletter subscriptions and all other associated needs such as hosting.
This business owner found a company in India that built the website for a low cost. The end result was a basic site with no content management system and no hosting. The site is poorly coded in Dreamweaver with lots of tables for layout. The business owner frantically hunted around for hosting and found a cheap solution in the US.
So what is the problem?
The customers for this particular small business are basically local at a regional level, with a smattering of interstate customers, but all within Australia. The website was supposed to be aimed at the Australian customer. With no direction or strategy, the domain was registered as a .com and the hosting is in the US. As far as Google or any other search engine is concerned, this is an American business. It does not appear in local search and will now not be visible to the Australian customers looking for this service. It will only appear on a global search and only for the business name. Of course, Webmaster tools allows geographic targeting, but the India company failed to offer any advice and the business owner does not know this.
Has this business wasted their money? Time will tell. Most likely this business owner will come to the conclusion that the Internet does not enhance business and having a website did not make any difference to turnover. A golden opportunity has been missed.
A saying that I heard my mother say comes to mind here:
Pay peanuts and get monkeys
Social Networking – Chianti and Faber Beans
February 1st, 2009 // 5:13 pm @ Fox
An interesting and slightly alarming aspect of the social media phenomenon is the about-face regarding sharing our personal details with strangers. For the first ten years of the Internet, we were all a little careful and wary about giving away too much personal information about ourselves, our thoughts or our knowledge.
For me, giving away too much personal information about myself evoked an image of a Hannibal Lector finding where I live, stalking me and eating me with a nice Chianti and faber beans.
Social media has exploded this private little world we live in. Where once we only used nicks/handles/aliases – now many use REAL names. Suddenly we want to share what we are doing with complete strangers, network with strangers for business, follow them, subscribe to them, add them as friends on Facebook and share their information and knowledge with our friends.
We strive for a conversation with our colleagues, customers and readers, and post blogs, often with a lot of personal details.
This article from The Times Online describes some incidents where bloggers were approached in everyday life by complete strangers who knew all sorts of family details of the blogger. Although this family information was posted on a blog and therefore in the public domain, it can come as a shock when the realisation hits home that complete strangers actually read this stuff and know all about you and your family.
The entire human race is based on communication and the desire to express ourselves, so it is no surprise that social media is just one more step in the online evolution. Think back over the years to times where you have eaten at a great restaurant or seen an awesome movie, or even read a book that shocked you. You couldn’t wait to tell all your friends about it. Love viral marketing! This desire to share something wonderful or something shocking is the foundation of social media.
With the Internet, if you deal with a great business, or are really happy with a product you have bought, see a fantastic website or read an informative post, you link to it, write about it and share it with your friends. This is also the case with a knowledgeable person in a particular industry. You want to know what they know! You follow them on Twitter, add them as a friend on Facebook, subscribe to their posts, network with them through LinkedIn and seek to acquire a piece of this special knowledge.
So, with writing this blog, I faced the dilemma of whether to offer links for my social networks. Would I or wouldn’t I? Is this important? What will be the benefit to the reader, the business and to myself? Maybe my biggest problem isn’t a Hannibal Lector. Maybe it is the thought that no one will want to do the social dance with me. I will be the social wallflower.
You will see the Blax social icons on the homepage. Feel free to subscribe to this post, link to me or follow me. I promise not to bore you with details about what I ate for breakfast or what my dream was last night. This blog has the goal of sharing knowledge and discussing online trends in marketing.
If you are Hannibal Lector, I am the one with the Rottweiler at the door.
Category : Social Networks &blog