The Internet has connected more human beings than any invention in history. Not organized religion, not Communism, not Amway.
Does all this connection make us more trusting, loving, and spiritually evolved?
How spiritually evolved do you feel deleting your 30th all-herbal Viagra spam of the day? Or that email letting you know how lucky you are that a Nigerian millionaire’s widow wants, by some miracle, to wire a lot of money into your bank account?
(I did get a beautiful piece of spam zen the other day: "Your penis will make more shadow than a tree." Very poetic.)
Greater connection means more opportunity — and more risk
The Web lets you attract the attention of more prospects, but it then takes more to get them to trust you. Your potential customers are likely to be stressed out and reluctant to trust. You don’t have a storefront. Your testimonials could all be forged. And your name is FoxyKitty2007@hotmail.com.
(I made that email up. Do not email FoxyKitty2007@hotmail.com. It’s probably a 47-year-old pipe fitter recovering from back surgery anyway.)
Where does this leave an earnest, honest, well-meaning person like you who wants to find a few customers? You could start with a few trust-builders like tying your email address to your domain name, including a phone number on your site, and doing a quick search of your site for really boneheaded typos. But you’ll probably need stronger medicine than that.
You need an irresistible offer
The venerable Claude Hopkins was using this to make lots of money before you (or your parents) were born. It works, if anything, better than ever. Claude had a background as a door-to-door salesman, and he knew how hard it was to separate frugal people from modest incomes.
Claude Hopkins used money-back guarantees and free trials to sell carpet sweepers, ozone cleaner (whatever that is), and, yes, snake oil. (He later regretted the last one.) These tools have been persuading people to take a chance on a new product as long as advertising has existed.
If your message is compelling, people will want to buy. You’ve created desire. But desire is at war with fear. Usually, interestingly enough, it’s not fear of losing money — it’s fear of feeling dumb.
Like a lot of fear, the fear of feeling like a sucker looms a lot larger than the actual reality, if it ever happens. Tens of thousands of people pay significant money for products they never open or use. Tens of thousands more buy eBooks that they either don’t read or don’t find all that useful to their situation. A tiny, tiny fraction of those ever ask for their money back. The irresistible offer seems like it’s going to open you, the marketer, up to a lot of risk. In actuality (unless your product really sucks a lot), it doesn’t.
The irresistible offer gives your customers a break. It lets them have the good experience of trying your product out without risking the bad experience that you might take all their money and laugh at them.
Ways you can increase trust and reduce fear
- Take PayPal. Your customer feels reassured that if you turn out to be some 14-year-old crook in Kuala Lumpur who wants to finance a porn film on their credit card, their payment information is protected.
- Create permission. Before you start pitching anything, collect contact information and give customers something cool and free in exchange. You know, that content marketing thing.
- Be an authority. Know what you’re talking about. Then, learn to look and sound like you know what you’re talking about. People trust authority figures much more than is rational.
- Offer a free trial. Do you ever remember to go back and cancel in time to avoid that first hit to your credit card? Of course you don’t, and neither does anyone else. Don’t be sleazy about it. A customer base of people who can’t remember signing up with you isn’t remarkable, it’s scuzzy. But get customers to try your stuff out risk-free, and you’ll keep lots of them. Again, assuming you do not suck.
- Offer a money-back guarantee. Again, almost no one asks for a refund. You can hedge it if you feel you absolutely have to, but you’ll probably spend more money than you save trying to keep track. And you’ll never know how much business you lost to folks who just couldn’t jump the fear barrier.
- Know what your customers are afraid of. Come up with offers and reassurances that directly counter that.
- Remember that list I mentioned up there, about including your phone number, using an email address tied to your domain, and fixing the typos on your site? Yeah, do those.
By the way, I made that statistic up in the first paragraph. Sure sounded trustworthy, though, didn’t it?
Creative Commons image courtesy of Lepale on Pixabay. What a good doggo.
I’m emailing foxykitty2007@hotmail.com right now just to tell them you think they look like a 47-year-old pipe fitter.
Thanks for the incredible title of this post, and for the link to what will soon become my manifesto and sole purpose in life. Eventually the whole world will read it and everyone will have their phone number on their website and we will achieve world peace.
Oh, and while I’m totally dominating your comments, you want to hear a funny story? In the post you linked to, I linked to a case study I did on The Nametag Guy. You know, the one who is trying to make the world a more approachable place? The one with his cell phone number on his site?
Yeah, he totally never called me back. The irony, it is KILLING me! 🙂
Ah ha ha ha ha! Of course you guaranteed it by blogging about it.
I have to confess, I read the phone number thing with an obvious wince. I’ll add it, I will, I will.