One of the most important things a veterinary website can do is inspire trust in the website visitor. In this article, we will explore why “designing for trust” is important, and show you concrete steps you can take right now to make your veterinary website design remarkably effective at opening relationships with new clients.
We like to say that technology changes quickly, but people don’t change much at all. People have always navigated their social relationships based upon the degree of trust they feel. Your lifetime clients come back time and time again for one reason: they trust you. Word of mouth is so effective because people trust their friends.
Even though the relationship with a new client now begins online, we still behave the exact same way! Whether or not we want to take the next step in a relationship with you depends upon whether or not your website gets us to trust you. This is a pretty obvious principle of human behavior, which is why it’s a bit surprising that inspiring trust isn’t systematically designed into more veterinary websites. After all, it is fairly simple to do and has an enormous reward for your effort.
There are a few actions you can take right now to inspire trust in your website visitor. The first is to strategically place different positive reviews throughout your website. This way, as the website visitor browses through your website, you create the feeling in the website visitor that the community is talking about how much they trust you. We’re social creatures, and when our community trusts someone, we’re wired to trust them too.
Another great way to build trust with the website visitor is to embed real (and high quality) pictures of your veterinary clinic in action. It’s hard for us to trust someone that we don’t feel like we know, and we typically get to that feeling through our visual sense. Make the website visitor feel like they are with you in the veterinary clinic, and it will be much easier for them to become comfortable and trust you.
And finally, an extremely important factor in creating trust is the overall design of the website. At this point in the relationship, your website design represents most of the evidence the website visitor has of whether or not they should trust you. If we truly value our pets, we want to know that our veterinary clinic isn’t stuck in the past. Modern website design is about using bold pictures, beautiful typography and an elegant and intuitive website architecture. When you design a truly great veterinary website, the design itself fades into the background and your story is what is eminently visible.
Humans have been navigating social relationships for thousands of years. While the tools we use to communicate with each other change, the underlying emotional needs don’t. Get us to trust you, and the relationship begins.
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