How To Increase Consumer Confidence To Increase Sales

When you’re looking at the business world in the biggest form possible, you’d be surprised to know that consumer spending is the number one fuel to most service-based countries. In the US alone, consumer spending amounts to almost 70% of the gross domestic product.

You can imagine how that number is important to the US alone, one of the largest economies in the globe; if we shrink that further down the magnifying glass, the number is basically telling how important consumer spending is for most businesses as consumer spending has become one of the arteries in fueling certain economies.

Now you might ask, what’s this to do with consumer confidence? Well, without consumer confidence, people would be less likely to spend their money. That’s not a good outcome for everyone involved, both for businesses and the consumers themselves.

Consumer confidence issues have the ability to shake economies and disproportionately impact smaller startups and local shops.

How important consumer confidence is for your business

Consumer confidence is a key indicator of whether or not a person is willing to spend their hard-earned cash for the services or products you provide.

Building confidence in your products and services with existing customers is a great way to expand word of mouth sales as well as carving out space in the market—and keeping your competition at bay.

This is one of the key benefits of having great consumer confidence for your business. It builds customer loyalty as well. Keeping existing customers with your business is as important as gaining new ones and keeping consumer confidence high is a vital part of maintaining both.

You can say that consumer confidence is a key part of communicating with your market audience. You don’t necessarily use any words, call-outs, fancy graphics or advertisements but growing confidence among your customer base through different methods is pretty much the same as saying “trust me, I can provide what you need” without having the need to express it.

Here are a few more benefits that you would get from increased consumer confidence:

• Increase customer retention

• Promote sales

• Establish brand ambassadors

• Expand on your business presence

• Gain valuable customer feedback

• Clients will welcome interaction

• Increase customer tolerance

No doubt prioritizing consumer confidence as one of the pillars of your business can gain you plenty of wins in the market and you’ll also be supplementing existing strategies that you’re using to great effect.

With that said, how can you increase consumer confidence for your business? How do you go about gaining and having better sales through consumer confidence?

Step 1: Brand transparency is key

Nobody wants to buy from a business that lacks transparency. People stray away from businesses that try to pitch them a product or service while also hiding details at the same time. You don’t want that.

In one survey conducted by Sprout Social, 86% of Americans believe that business transparency is one of the most important factors when deciding to buy a product or a service.

Not only that but being honest, upfront and admitting to mistakes will make customers more forgiving after having a bad experience with a business. It comes to show how transparency is an important factor and the benefits that it brings weigh in.

Ultimately, brand transparency increases customer confidence that your business will do the right thing when it comes to handling the services and products that they’ve bought. It shows that you’re not in it only for the money but also for the customers that you serve.

Being transparent and honest is the first step to establishing consumer confidence because without trust then customers won’t even be willing to listen or hear you out for what you have.

Step 2: Quality products lead to confidence

Now that you’ve established that you’re honest and true to the heart of the business. You must deliver on your promise with a great product or service. This is step two to gaining high consumer confidence for your business.

Your products are going to be the main source of opinion for most people with how your business operates. This is how customers start sharing your name around and recommending them to their friends, families and even random strangers on social media.

According to one report by Deloitte, 71% of customers said they’d prefer to choose trusted brands when buying. That’s because they know that they’re going to get exactly what they purchased and most likely that is going to be the case

Oftentimes people won’t want to risk buying from brands they aren’t familiar with so it is important to truly deliver on quality products if and when you are just starting out. The same can be said if you’re already in the business.

Quality products will put you at an advantage against your competitors not only because of the value that you bring but also through the confidence that you instill in your customers.

Step 3: Invest in customer support

There are only two ways that customer support usually goes—good or bad. There’s no in-between. You’ve handled being transparent and are producing quality products but what about the customers that are having trouble?

That’s a potential market that you will be missing if you don’t have a customer support service set up and don’t put just anyone out there to handle these customer problems. You have to really invest time and money into this. It’s important to have a reliable customer service team, otherwise, it’ll simply do more harm than good.

Make sure to vet through the people that you be hiring for your customer support team. It will ultimately help you avoid losing potential clients and give you the chance to maximize the market audience that you are gunning for.

Step 4: Correct your mistakes

Accidents, unfortunate events and just simple miscommunication and misunderstandings can affect any business. It’s something that’s inevitable. It happens to the best of businesses and the biggest companies and it happens more often than you’d think.

According to Invesp, 30% of products ordered online eventually get returned to the seller. That’s because 20% receive a damaged product and 23% actually receive the wrong item. That’s a lot of product and service mistakes.

If you’re going to worry about return products and refunds confusing your inventory system back at your warehouse then there are easy ways to handle that such as inventory management tools that you can use to your advantage.

The only thing you need to worry about is if customer requests are indeed valid and even if they aren’t, you can still choose to help them out and gain some reputation points. One solution to help your clients out when it comes to refund and return policies is to make it clear in your website.

At the end of the day, if you want to increase consumer confidence then one of the steps that you need to do is accept that there will always be mistakes through the process of delivering the products or services to your clients.

It’s important that you handle these mistakes professionally and sometimes, biting the bullet of a refund or a returned product is well worth the reputation that you gain along the process.

Step 5: Respond to customer feedback

Another step that you can do to gain consumer confidence is to simply respond to the feedback that your customers give. You don’t always have to think about innovation and product improvements by yourself, you have your clients to help you with that.

It’s also one of the ways that you’re able to keep an advantage over the competition. If you’re having trouble getting customer feedback then don’t worry, there are ways to gather customer feedback without having to trouble them.

Step 6: Keep in contact & communicate

Communication is as important as any when it comes to making sure that you’re still playing an active role in the game. Making sure your clients and market audience know that you’re constantly putting yourself out there is a good sign that business is doing well which means your client base and the potential market audience will have a much more open mind when thinking about your business.

Utilize different methods of communication with your market. Make sure to grab the emails of each visitor that you get a hold of on your website, let them subscribe to your newsletters, reach out to them through texts and many more.

If you are perhaps a business with a gym that sells workout supplements then consider keeping the contact information of each member that you gain. Let them know about constant promos, show them infographics of health tips, and just try to show that you are an active business looking for more customers because doing marketing is promoting consumer confidence.

Marketing is a surefire way to throw out the big words of “We Exist!” to the outside world. It’s a two birds one stone technique since you’re not only attracting new potential customers but you are also showing your presence to your existing clients and that will ultimately boost their confidence not only you’re there but you are also ready to handle more customers.