When it comes to business, you have to gain your customers’ trust if you want your brand to prosper. While one-time purchases or sales are certainly welcome, you’ll likely make most of your profit from repeat customers. Of course, they’ll only keep coming back if they know they can rely on you.
This is especially true when it comes to pet-related brands, as many pet parents will only want to support a business if they know it will give them and their pets excellent experiences. If you provide them with top-notch products or services, your happy pet-owning customers will entrust their fur babies to you more often. They may even refer your business to their other pet-owning friends, too.
That said, building a trustworthy brand involves a lot of work. However, it’s necessary to have a customer base that believes in your business for several reasons. For one, people who are loyal to your brand will most likely give you good and honest feedback that you can use to improve your business. For another, you’ll be able to significantly expand your reach if satisfied customers will gladly put in a good word for you.
With all this in mind, how exactly can a pet-related business gain its customers’ trust? We’ve got some tips for you:
Invest in Quality Products and Training
The first way to build customer trust is to make sure that your brand offers only the best experiences possible. You can do this by investing in quality products to level up your catalog or signing up for training to improve your pet services.
For instance, if your business involves customized pet products, make sure you buy wholesale dog collars, leashes, blankets, toys, and other items from reliable suppliers. To be specific, you’ll want to choose suppliers that use high-quality pet-safe materials. You should also check if their products meet any specific standards you have. PrideBites custom martingale collars, for example, are generally considered much safer alternatives to traditional choke collars.
As for service-related pet businesses, you or your employees can sign up for training programs to improve your current processes. This is especially important for certain services like pet boarding or pet grooming. You and your staff will need to know how best to handle pups that can be more sensitive in certain contexts. For example, some pets may be anxious in the presence of other animals or can be quite particular about their food.
Display Your Business Details and Credentials Online
Before putting their money on any product or service, many customers like to first conduct a background check on brands they’re interested in. If they can’t find any information about a particular brand, that’s usually a red flag for them.
In general, setting up a website for your pet-related brand will make it much easier for potential customers to find you and learn more about your offerings. Thus, it’s best to put your brand’s contact details and any relevant credentials online. Credentials can include reviews from satisfied clients as well as any recognition your brand has earned from accredited bodies.
Be Accountable to Your Customers
Unfortunately, not everything will go right all the time. If you own a pet salon, for example, perhaps one of your employees gave a customer’s pet the wrong cut. If you own a pet product store, maybe one of the toys you sold broke while being played with by a customer’s pet.
Should anything go awry when your customers use your products or services, you should stay accountable. This applies whether you couldn’t take care of their pet as they expected you to or if a product you sold didn’t live up to the promises you gave. Regardless of what exactly went wrong, you should step up, take responsibility, and make things right. Doing so will show them that you do care about your customers and their fur babies and that providing top-quality services or products is a priority for your brand.
More importantly, make sure you and your staff do better next time. Put measures in place to avoid repeating any of these mistakes in the future. Should the fault be due to manufacturing errors on the part of your supplier, for example, hold them accountable or start looking for a new, more reliable one. You may also want to put a stricter quality checking process in place to ensure no faulty products make their way onto your store’s shelves.
Building trust in your pet brand may seem like a daunting task, especially since you don’t necessarily have total control over what your customers feel or think about you. That said, you can still sway their opinion in your favor, if you know what you’re doing. At a minimum, you can do this by treating their customers and their fur babies right, no matter the type of products or services that they offer. Taking care of satisfied customers and building meaningful connections with them also ensures that customers will feel at ease with you and trust the sincerity of your brand even more.