Why Cybercrime Hurts Online Startups
by Frank Jovine on 05/04/2009 in Business, Internet
There are many new startups launching online businesses each day. These new startups are finding out that it’s a lot harder to market their products and services using marketing techniques such as; Email campaigns, PPC (Pay Per Click), and Banner Ads.
Why is it so hard?
The latest increase in cybercrimes has put potential consumers on the defense. If you do not have a well known brand, it’s more than likely that new customers will hesitate to open any emails or click on any ads.
Internet Fraud is at an all time high. Spammers, hackers and fraudulent businesses have raised the level of caution and it’s now hurting legitimate startups. There has been a lot of news about internet security breaches, Identity theft and other malicious crimes.
How to Build Trust with Consumers?
Trust is the most important ingredient that will provide consumers a level of confidence to do business with you. In order to build this trust, you need to provide the consumer with the following;
- Earning trust with users can be accomplished by providing good web usability and comfortable user experience
- Disclosing your physical location (if applicable)
- Offering guarantees and return policies
- Highlighting affiliations such as BBB membership or your involvement in trade associations
- Explaining what information you’re collecting, why you’re collecting it and what you’ll do with it when you’re done.
- Featuring customer testimonials and/or reviews.
These tips are a great start in building trust, which leads to happy customers. Happy customers lead to returning customers. Returning customers lead to word of mouth. Word of mouth leads to more visitors. Visitors turn into customers.
seobro
May 4th, 2009
This is good advice. A picture of the owner, physical location of your warehouse, and an 800 number help assure the viewer.
Many scams are fly by night so I often check to see if the biz has been around for a while. This hurts startups, but in time you get your props.
Colin
May 4th, 2009
Sound advice Frank.
With the financial crisis hitting so many the increase in fraudulent, malicious and phishing activity has seen a massive boom for the criminals.
There are many who still fall victim to the many scams that abound without doing any background research, which is essential when buying and selling online and as the saying goes : ‘If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is!’…especially with the increase of pyramid and Ponzi fraud schemes.
Frank J
May 4th, 2009
Even the good guys get affected. I know that Google is working on something to keep those misleading web sites from appearing in their index.
James
May 4th, 2009
If you see physical products like we do, encourage your customers to make “package receiving” videos and post on youtube.com . you can embed in your site to show visitors and have a very legitimate source of feedback for customers to view/visit. a customer did it first and it’s now become our best WOM marketing tool.
Kikolani
May 4th, 2009
On the testimonials, if possible and especially for a graphic design or programming company, try to get a link to the customer’s site as well. I find that I don’t trust testimonials where it just lists “This product is great” from Jeff in Missouri. Anyone can make that kind of thing up, and there’s no way to actually confirm it as a reference.
~ Kristi
Frank J
May 5th, 2009
Kristi,
You have to also watch for bogus testimonials as they’re easy to write. Nice comment!
Sanya
May 5th, 2009
I think a good web design which looks serious and business type also important. Many people make snap judgment just by their instinct. A serious looking design with not many distracting ads and graphics and persistent design with good color combination will let them stop and read further.
Frank J
May 5th, 2009
Sanya,
It is very important to have a web site that has a good user experience. I agree with your comment!