Having a list of prospects is one of the biggest assets your business can have. But how do you make sure your list wants to buy from you instead of your competition? People buy from those that they know, like and trust, so it’s up to you to build that trust. Here’s 5 ways to do it.
Build Trust By Being Consistent
The first way to build trust with your subscribers is having consistent behavior. If you think back through relationships that you’ve had or non-relationships that you didn’t want to have, you spot people who have erratic behavior. Everytime you see them they’re doing something else or acting crazy this way or some the other way. They’re into something completely new. They’re just a complete moving target and it tends not to build trust, especially if you’re trying to develop a business relationship.
But we all have friends that we find are interesting. They may be crazy and may be fun to be with, but being crazy is their consistent behavior. If they started acting straight as an arrow all the time, you’d think there was something wrong with them. So if you’re trying to build trust with your subscribers or customers or prospects, you want to have some kind of consistent behavior where they can kind of pigeon hole you and say “Okay he acts like this, I expect this from him when he communicates with me.”
Customers Will Trust You More If You Are Believable
The next thing that helps building trust is being believable. Now, sometimes things that are true are not believable, and there’s kind of a dichotomy there because even if something is true, if the person who’s hearing it from the first time doesn’t have the background experience to believe it, then it’s not believable to them. So sometimes you have to back off of everything that you know about something and only tell somebody enough that they can believe at the stage that they’re at. That’s very important in believability.
The other thing too is in believability, you don’t want to overhype things. There’s a lot of ways to get people emotionally involved in your communications without having to resort to hype.
Presenting Top Quality Will Build Trust With Your List
Another way to build trust is the quality that you present, always remember quality. If it’s your product, obviously you want to build quality into your products and services. If you are in a joint venture situation with people, you want to make sure that their products and services are of the quality that represents you because if you’re introducing people to somebody else’s products and services and they’re not good, that’s going to reflect poorly on yourself.
So we always want to make sure that we’re going with the top quality that people can depend on us. That also plays into the consistent behavior and believability every time that we communicate with them.
Reviewing Products Honestly Will Help Your List Trust You
Another way to build trust is to give your expert opinion and endorsement of things, actually review products. Over the last few years a lot of these product launches and people who do joint ventures and super affiliate marketing, they don’t necessarily use the product that they’re endorsing. They may not even have looked at the product.
A lot of times you’re not even offered the product to look at it. It’s just here’s another launch, let’s get everybody whipped up, excited, emotionally involved and open the gates at 10:00am on Tuesday morning and sell out in 15 minutes. That’s the approach most people are taking these days. You can stand out by not getting involved in those things and it will help you build credibility and trust in the long term.
Share Your Associations With Influential People To Build More Trust
To build some more trust, you can also mention friends of influence in your circle, also called name dropping. Don’t do it too heavily, but if you do know somebody personally, don’t be afraid to mention them in your communications. When you hang out with them, have lunch with them, talk with them, just be real about it.
Be careful who your friends are because whoever you hang out with, people will prejudge you based on those people. So as you build your credibility and you build your trust with people, make sure that the people that you have as your circle of friends are reputable and are high quality people too.
How Do You Build Trust?
Building trust is essential in all relationships, whether personal or in business. What are some additional ways that you build trust with the important people in your life? Let us know in the comments below!
About Donny
I’m Donny. I can sum myself up with four simple ways. Online Entrepreneur. Author. Investor. World Traveler
Contact with your subscribers with automate email like thank for subscribe, and sometime reply subscribers email manually.
They want subscribe with you because they want near with you if you use computer to reply then no point that they subscribe as.
so very true its all about building trust and this is often more difficult than we think. I like all the ideas and pointers.
To my mind building trust is by far the MOST important aim for any online business especially as the net becomes even more congested and competitive
One of my ways to build trust with people is talking like a real person. Nothing gives the impression that you’re faceless more than using completely neutral third person language across your site. This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read since it doesn’t only teach how to build trust with your list but it doesn’t discriminate in anything. In other words the content of the article is all positive and it is a great start of people would get a chance to read this.
Great work!
Juan
Building trust with your customers are the most valuable thing to do. I agree that product review helps in gaining trust. It is also a must that you have tried the product yourself too, some other product review site are basing their opinion to other product review sites which is fake. Testimonial from your customers too are a big help in building trust.
Building credibility is all-important in the blogging world. Of all of your points, consistency seems to me to be the most important. If you consistently produce high-quality content, the growth should follow. Thanks for the tips!
Building trust takes lot of time and consistency is important part of that. Also you need to be expert in your niche to be trusted.
Some bloggers lose trust rapidly just promoting too many affiliate offers and I think this should be avoided as it would make you money in short term but will be damaging for your business in long run.
I totally agree, too much emphasis is placed on short term profits…it can be hard to see the long term effects it may have, but it’s important to keep in on the top of your mind.
Terrific post and just so right. So many people forget the Quality element altogether. Trust is just absolutely the Key word in all of this. Thanks for the post
Quality is one of the biggest things lacking on the internet in my opinion. There’s so much garbage out there that it can be really hard to find quality information on any topic on the web!
So when you do provide that stellar product and actually follow through with what you said you’d do, you really stand out from the rest.
Tyson, you are right. Web is a virtual world and until people connect with the ‘real’ you they aren’t going to trust you. I specially liked when you say “avoid over-hype”. Yes hype can gain you a few readers in short run but this doesn’t workout in long run 🙂 Bottomline is “Trust” & trust gradually comes with quality.
One of the things I’ve been learning about online business lately is exactly as you said, “it’s a virtual world.” You can’t sit down and speak with anyone on the web and there’s many ways to hide behind a fake facade. You’re right, people need to connect with you and get to trust you over time, it doesn’t happen instantly unfortunately =)
I strongly agree, I mean it, with trust from the customers, a sales clerk (is that the word?) could have probably twice more than its original revenue.
There are some more ways I would like to add to the list:
1. Embed a video, show them your real face so they know who you are (no one trusts a mysterious unknown seller)
2. Show your customer reviews and make them sound real (if you made them yourself), use fancy handwriting fonts.
3. The customer wants to know what they get not what you provide, show them what advantages your product gives them. (presumably in a dot/green tick point list)
4. Important of all, provide a freebie and capture their lead, set a good personal chain of email letters to enhance the relationship between you two.
Are these making sense because I’m not sure if I have explained them good enough, but just by reading from your post we can easily understand, ahha.
Well written stuff 🙂
Harrison
Hey Harrison, some good additions there, I really think the idea of video can be used well to show people that you’re real and not just some made up character trying to sell them something.