Their trust is not gained easily with simple and old-fashioned tactics anymore. To them, e-commerce provides convenience and variety but also involves potential risks due to lack of transparency in seller’s profile and products as everything happens through online platforms.
Many companies including big brands like McDonald and BMW have implemented transparency in their marketing and succeeded.

According to a study from Statista in 2014, when asked if businesses should be more transparent about what they did, 78% of respondents supported transparency. Meanwhile, only 2% disagreed and the rest remained neutral or had no idea.

Does this fact ring alarm bells in your mind? Do you think that it’s time to change the way your digital marketing works? If yes, then let me ease your mind by introducing you 6 quick ways to apply transparent marketing to your websites.

1. Tell The Truth Only but Selectively

With the help of technology, e-customers today are more doubtful, cautious and actively seeking for all information they want from openly shared worldwide webs. Therefore, you better tell them the truth about your business and how it is going on.

However, be smart when choosing which one to publish as customers only believe in what they can check for. For example, don’t use loads of technical terms to describe how amazing your product is but select certain prominent advantages your product has to persuade the customers instead.

2. No more vague content

In this modern life, online buyers have approached voluntarily and unwillingly daily marketing messages from many social channels. If you want to draw your potential customers’ attention, the first thing is to make them read your whole message.

Many e-marketers try to elaborate their sites with fancy phrases and business jargon. But they don’t know that it will negatively make the audiences give up their reading as readers read best what they read most.

Hence, my advice are to stick with common words, cut up unnecessary adjectives and phrases and trim your text to make your message more comprehensive.

Also remember to back up your words with supporting data and facts from reliable sources like surveys from mainstream media channels or academic researches and studies. This is helpful to clarify the information you provided as well as increase credibility of your sites.

3. Make your weakness becomes your strength

Bearing in your mind that customers don’t seek for perfection but they respect honesty especially in the cyber world. They might not believe in positive information on your website and consider that it is hype.

Nevertheless, they generously accept any negative fact that you admit as the truth because it shows your humbleness, which distinguishes your business with other competitors.

Make your weakness becomes your strength

So instead of talking too much about your achievements, think about addressing your mistakes and what you learned through them and showing that you will not make the same mistake twice. It is the key to open the door for trusted relationship with potential customers.

4. Verify your website

To make your e-commerce business more convincing and reliable in customer’s eyes, you should verify your sites by displaying security seals, testimonials and customer reviews. You can find more useful tips about these methods in my previous post “5 Steps to Avoid Online Shopping Cart Abandonment”.

Allowing real customer reviews won’t hurt your reputation even if you receive negative reviews but effectively increase your transparency. The rating range from very good to very bad and your product/service nature works differently on different people.

That’s why 100% customer satisfaction rating will conversely raise questions. Therefore, your job is to not filter customer reviews, show them on your sites and quickly respond to all of them. Let your previous satisfied customers speak for you and market your business for free.

5. Be a real seller in the Internet

Since e-commerce is based on digital factors mostly, you will build your transparency and credibility up if you share your customers a small piece of your private life as a real person.

It could be your name, phone number and address as well as some pictures of yourself, your workplace and your team generally. These small fractions make you somehow become real, legitimate and reliable in the mind of customers.

Plus, be ready to answer questions and support customers in real time because this is a strict requirement from a trustworthy business. And you can easily get this task done anytime and anywhere by applying live chat software for example Subiz to your website. This tool is now popularly used by many e-commerce and B2B businesses.

Experience Subiz for 30 days for free and see how it improves your online sales and conversion rate.

6. No undesirable surprises

No Undesirable Surprises

Be clear and consistent in all of processes on your websites. You should make sure that every click from customers will lead them to the place or result that they expected or wanted, not some negatively surprises.

For instance, people will be very annoyed if they encounter a required fill-in information form while they are surfing your blog. Or they suddenly receive your weekly newsletter without subscribing or registering to your site.

Customers in general hate thinly disguised sales pressure but appreciate easy and efficient communication. Hence, you should provide them enough resources they need to evaluate and compare your product/service with your opponents’, then withdraw and give them time to make their decision.

I’m sure you will make your audiences happy and create a good image with your potential customers.

In a Nutshell

These 6 transparent marketing tactics will certainly add transparency to your digital marketing in order to achieve credibility from your customers. Credibility means trust, trust results in relationship and relationship earns continuous sales.

With the rise of the Internet and social media, customers will commute easily with each other and share their experience about the product that they have used or been looking for. If you are not transparent, you will be exposed one day and eliminated eventually.