When a visitor hits their site, they say “Hey, you should buy our product!” Nathan Barry likens this to meeting someone on the street, introducing yourself, and immediately telling them “You know, you should hire me!” That person will look at you like you’re crazy—because you are. Unless you’ve built up the trust necessary to show you’re worth a sale, your visitors will not listen.
Instead, your web site should build trust first, then sell later.
How to build trust before a sale
I advise my clients that, at the early stages of the conversion process, they need to focus on convincing prospects that their company is an expert in its domain—that they are capable of solving the prospect’s problems. This trust-building can come in a number of forms, such as:
- Providing value for free. Perhaps the shortest path to convincing your visitors you can solve their problems is by… well, doing it! Send them emails educating them on the most important things to know about your field (like lifecycle emails), give them a free 30 day trial, or send them a 100 page eBook on the challenges your customers have overcome using your product.
- Displaying endorsements by trusted sources—both general and industry-specific. If you’ve been featured (or mentioned!) in Time Magazine, or if your product is used by a particular expert in the field, make sure your users know it!
- Offering contact. Many companies have found that offering to chat with prospects about a product can have a drastic impact on sales. If you’re a small business or startup, offering a conversation with the CEO will have visitors floored—and you probably can’t talk to too many prospects!
When working with the folks at X-Plane, we used these tactics to great effect.
Using email effectively
While this sort of trust building can (and should!) take place on your Web site, it is ideal for email. After all, a typical visitor to your site has no reason to return. By getting their permission to stay in contact via email, you’ll have many more opportunities to build trust with them.
This is one of the most important suggestions I make for people setting up their first lifecycle email campaign. By providing a true knock-out incentive for signing up, and by following it up with seriously valuable emails (not typical marketing!), you’ll turn visitors into customers at a much higher rate than any other tactic.
Don’t ask for a sale too early, but don’t get in the way of a sale either
So, you don’t want to bludgeon your prospects with an irrelevant call-to-action (“Buy my product!”) before they’re ready. At the same time though, one of the very few Commandments of Marketing is to never get in the way of a sale. What happens if someone who is itching to buy visits one of your early-stage, trust-building pages, or receives a trust-building email? It still needs to be easy to buy!
My perspective is this: treat your purchasing call-to-actions like advertising in the early part of your funnel. It should be immediately visible, but not intrusive. If someone wants to find the buy button, it should be easy, but for the rest of your visitors (or readers), it should be ignorable.
The easy way to do this is to leave your site’s buying button in an upper corner of the screen, above the fold (the top 400 pixels or so of the screen). It should stand out from your menus and branding, while being small enough to not be confused with the page’s primary call-to-action. In emails, I prefer to have the buying link at the bottom (after my signature).
Your mileage may vary
As with all advice on conversion optimization, test before you change. While I believe trust-building is critical for many businesses, I can think of a few industries where the level of trust required for a sale is low enough that you likely don’t need to devote entire stages of your purchasing funnel to it.
For instance, if you’re selling low-priced commodities (e.g., third-party books and movies), you can build all the trust required for a transaction simply by showing symbols of secure transactions and business trustworthiness (like a BBB logo linking to your BBB profile). Lifecycle emails are probably overkill (though other emails, like Amazon’s “suggested for you,” might print money for you).
On the other hand, if you’re selling information products (e.g., a book you wrote), you’ll need to first establish your expertise on the subject. You would likely get a lot of value from an email campaign where you provide serious value to your readers—make them say “If I’m getting this much great information for free, how much will I love buying the book?!”
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