If you don’t build trust, you’re not gonna sell anything.

What is building trust?

How do you build trust on your website? Heck, how do build trust, period?

A great example is a money back guarantee. It used to work, but it’s so overplayed that it might not work anymore. A lot of people have them.

But building trust is a very important step in The 7 Strategies. Without trust, you’re going to lose sales and leads – dramatically.

Free and informative information is a good start. But there are many things you can employ to find out if you’re ‘selling’ your customers right when you’re on your website (and you can’t see what they’re doing!)

What is the benefit of building trust?

More purchases or leads. Think of building trust as SALES. You’re trying to convince someone that they should stay on your website and buy something (or call you on the phone). Each question must be answered, every fear taken away, every reality defined for your customer. Otherwise, they ‘bounce’ away, sometimes never to return.

More buzz about product. The more trust you build, the less ‘selling’ you have to do in the future. If you take away your customer’s fears, they’re more likely to be convinced that you’re the product or service for them. The result of this is that they’ll talk about you more to others that want the same thing.

Followers and building a tribe. If you build your customer’s trust, they’re going to see you as a leader. And leaders get followers.

The elements of building trust.

It’s about what you say.

You have to provide the correct information for customers to make a decision. That means you have to put onto your website all the information that will remove fear and doubt.

It’s about what you give.

Although writing informative articles is ‘giving’ as well, you can also give physical stuff away. Let’s use a basic example

Free gift inside. Remember the prizes inside the cereal box? Boy, I loved those things. It’s not as big of a deal anymore it seems, but it’s a great example for what we’re talking about. If you can give away something free (white paper, 100% money back guarantee) you’re showing the customer that they can trust you.

You can also give time. 800 numbers and friendly support staff are also trust building things. It shows that you’re easy to reach and helpful. That goes a long way in building trust. A free 10 minute consultation is a nice way for service companies to give something.

Free shipping. Free shipping seems to be a big buzz word. It shows the customer that you’re willing to invest in them – and therefore they invest in you.

What others say about you.

Testimonials. Placing testimonials around your website in key places (a testimonial from an athelete on a sports massage page, for instance) brings real trust into the mix. Someone else thinks highly of you, perhaps the reader should as well.

Accreditations, certifications. Good Housekeeping is a perfect example of this. It’s a seal of approval, and that goes a long way towards trusting you. “I like Good Housekeeping, therefore I trust you.”

Your sales team.

Trust building does not stop at the website. Remember that humans can build trust faster than a label or catchy phrase. It’s not just a sales team, but secretaries, customer service support, anyone in your business that connects with the customer has the opportunity to build trust.

The channels involved.

Your website.

It’s a sales tool. The website is the greatest tool to build trust with, because the amount of articles and information is infinite (in expansion, you have to put the time in, of course.) Think of your website as a salesperson. That website (and salesperson) has to convince, 100%, the customer to buy from you. Each TYPE of customer has to be understood and spoken to. If you do this, you win.

Social sites.

Social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are interactive. Staying in touch and distributing the information that you have on your website is a great way to simply stay in touch. But just publishing information regularly is key in building trust. If your customers are watching you pour out information from The Fountain of Free consistently, weekly, they are likely to trust you more.

But that’s not all. If you can react to your customers through social sites, like simply answering questions they post, you can build trust in the eyes of all you follow you.

Your newsletter.

Your newsletter is the true measure of your ‘tribe’ size. They are the ones that really want to hear all that you say. That does not mean they want to buy immediately, but they are, in a very real sense, your true followers.

Once you have that level of trust, you can start to create incentives. But that happens next week in our Strategy 5: Generating Sales & Leads.

The tactics involved.

Content.

Content building. The more informative you can be, the more people trust you. What if you were a shoe company. Would put a shoe size chart on your website be key in selling shoes? You bet it would. The customer would trust that they are getting the right shoe.

Writing articles. I remember when I was in college and the axiom that professors lived by is “Publish or perish”.

Let’s say you write an article that is informative to the reader that buys your product – on which hiking shoe is right for them. The article has to be rich in detail, informative to the customer, and topical. Being topical is key since the right type of article is going to make that customer reading want to buy your product. See how that works?

Quantity vs. quality. Although the quantity of information (number of articles you write) is important, the quality of the content is key. If you just write to ‘get something up there’, then you’re just going to waste a big chunk of your time writing, but it’s never going to bring you customers.

Creative writing.

Just a little creativity goes a long way. For instance, instead of saying, “I am a plumber,” you say “I solve small problems before they become big ones.” Although this could be considered more of a ‘sticky’ strategy, note that how speaking to a person’s dilemma or problem (the benefit to the customer) builds trust all by itself. By saying what you’re going to do for them, you’re building trust.

Creative visuals. Using creative imagery builds trust. Putting your 800 number at the top of every page and the like is a trust build. So is The Good Housekeeping seal of approval is another example.

Identity.

Branding. The more you build your brand, the more people can associate it with ‘good stuff’. And that brand is shared quickly between people. Ever go to McDonald’s because you know what you’re going to get (rather than it’s good food?) Branding in motion.

Social media marketing. Being in the social sphere builds trust because it give you branding. But you can also use social media marketing to answer questions and quickly distribute ‘concerns’ amongst your followers. Where one person has questions, others others have the same question (that never ask). And that gives everyone warm-fuzzy feeling of responsiveness, which raises trust.

Facilitation.

RSS. Make it easy for people to follow you, and therefore build trust. By creating RSS feeds, people can get up-to-the-second information about new things you’re doing, products your adding, and services your giving.

Landing page optimization. By doing LPO, you’re making sure that your message is read and understood. If your customer doesn’t understand you, you can’t build trust. Most of the ‘secondary’ trust issues with websites comes down to if the customer can find the information that builds trust for them.

Metrics.

Using tactics like shopping cart abandonment or usability testing are great ways to diagnose what’s wrong with your wesite. Especially usability testing, since you can see in action the trust ‘break down’ right in front of your eyes.

What you can do, right now.

How to Identify if Strategy “build trust” is not working.

So, you think you have trust issues. That’s fine, let’s see for sure.

No calls or interaction. You’re not getting enough calls from your website. If the traffic is good, but the calls are low, you’re probably not building enough trust for them to call.

What about customer service? Do people feel like they are going to get an answer from you if they call? Do you make it easy to call (800 number) and hours clearly stated?

No sales. If you have an e-commerce website and it’s not making money, it could be a billion things. If you’re traffic is high, but no one is buying, it’s most likely a trust issue. Do people add stuff to your cart and then never complete the checkout? Also a trust issue.

Do something about it.

Usability testing.

Take 5 people right now and show them your website.

Then ask them these 5 questions:

• What don’t you like about our website?
• Would you buy from this website (or give us a call) if you were in the market for X? Why not? What’s stopping you from checking out or giving us a call?
• Would you feel comfortable calling us? Why not?
• By looking at our website, do you trust us? Why not?
• What could we put onto our website to gain your trust?
• What would you like to see on the website, overall, that doesn’t involve trust?

In essence, what you’re discovering above are the key problems with trust – even the last one. You’ll be amazed how much information you can gleam from this process. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s oh-so-telling.

Sometimes the information revealed is more mechanic in nature (I can’t navigate) or visual (I hate that color) but all of it leads to trust, eventually.

Shopping cart abandonment.

I could probably go into very fine detail (the kind of detail that we do here at Think Around Corners) but let’s keep it simple. If you have a product site (you sell something through a checkout) ask the SAME questions (more or less) that you ask above but do it from adding to cart to checkout complete stages.

add to cart > checkout > billing & shipping > credit card > confirm > complete

Make sure that the person talks out loud about their experience and they move from page to page, step to step. Somewhere, they’ll lose trust and you can target that page by simple means. Perhaps is something like ‘there’s no SSL padlock thingie’ that you can fix right away.

Testimonials.

Get tons of testimonials. Also try to get specific types of testimonials. If you have a testimonial about a product (product X) or an aspect (team-building, or turnaround time) use that testimonial on that page.

How many testimonials is enough? Well, that’s for you to determine. But the rule of thumb is get as many as you can, and use where necessary or topical. Leave the original testimonial intact unless there is something glaringly wrong.

In closing…

The most important thing you can do for building trust is to get with your customers, and ask them what they don’t trust about your website. From there, you’ll get plenty of ideas to attack! Asking your customers what why they don’t trust your website is the wellspring of all trust building steps for the future.

Then rinse, and repeat, every month, until you see results. Now, CHARGE!