The Conversation and the Importance of Trust

17.02.2017 |

Episode #8 of the course How to influence your customers to buy more by Chloë Thomas

 

Welcome to our lesson all about trust and The Conversation.

 

What is The Conversation?

The Conversation is a crucial part of the Customer MasterPlan model.

It’s formed from every single interaction a customer ever has with your business, many of which you will never know anything about. It includes every email, every advert, every communication with customer service. It includes every time they hear someone talk about your business—whether it’s their friend, a stranger on social media, or someone on TV.

There is a lot of The Conversation that you have no control over.

The more consistent an impression of your company the customer gets, the stronger your relationship with that customer becomes.

If you’re not in control of it all, how do you make it consistent?

Be consistent in all that you are in control of, of course! Because that is where everyone is getting their impression of you from.

How do you do that?

• Have brand guidelines for how things should look and the tone of copy

• Have a customer avatar that everyone in the business knows

• Make sure everyone in the team understand the values and mission of the business

 

Why is trust so important?

Robert Cialdini introduced the concept of “social proof”—that as humans, we’re more likely to do something if we see someone else do it first.

That’s why if you own a restaurant, you should sit the first customers of the night at the window table, because other customers are more likely to come in if they see there’s someone else already eating in your establishment.

Tu and Fishbach took this to another level in 2005, when they investigated what sort of social proof is the most powerful. They found that preference is more powerful than action (learn more).

What that means is that an email featuring your “best reviewed” products will outperform an email featuring your “bestsellers,” which in turn will outperform an email featuring some random products.

Want some proof? Ok.

American software retailer Krossover added customer testimonials and their review scores to their remarketing adverts in an A/B test against adverts without them—and the ads with trust in them had a 45% better click-through rate, earning enough additional revenue to pay for their whole review software system in just two months (learn more).

Basically, put a trust message in your marketing or on your website and response and conversions will go up.

 

Key trust messages you can use

You probably have more trust messages that you realize. Here’s a few ideas:

• Total review score

• Total reviews placed

• Total number of customers this year/month

• Individual review quotes

• Review scores on individual products

• “Bestseller”

• Security certificates

• Pictures of celebrities with your products

So there’s several ways to really push the response of all your marketing activity.

For the next two lessons, I’m going be sharing lots more ways to improve your marketing and conversions. Tomorrow will be more ideas to get the first purchase—ideas spanning Stages 1,2, and 3.

Catch up tomorrow,
Chloë

 

Recommended book

“The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results” by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner, Nick Toman

 

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