How to Use Email to Build Trust So You Make More Sales
One phase that your list must move through is credibility. Meaning that they have to believe that you are who you say you are. They must believe that you’re knowledgeable in that you can help them and they must trust you and want to learn. These are the three key faces that we must move someone through:
1. You’re credible
2. You’re knowledgeable
3. They trust you
You could start with knowledge and then move to credibility and then move to trust. I prefer to start with credibility. Here’s why: I believe that whatever you start a relationship with tends to be, for a long time, the thing that anchors people to you.
I would rather people see me as credible first and knowledgeable second, because if they see that I’m credible and we layer knowledge on top, they’re going to believe just as much about my knowledge ability as they do in my credibility.
This is the way I personally like to approach a market. However, you may want to reverse that and start with your knowledge and then move into credibility. For example, you may wish to share knowledge with your list and when this knowledge proves correct you’ll move into credibility. In our marketplaces and in almost every niche there are a few marketers that approach their list this way.
I personally like the credibility piece better because people buy on the basis of trust and not so much on the basis of words on the sales page. Your market will buy it from someone who they trust over someone who has more knowledge. If you take someone who has established himself as being knowledgeable in a specific area, but has not established trust his sales will suffer as a result. Sales suffer until he begins to gain more trust with his target audience.
Think about this. Let’s approach this from an academia standpoint. In school, let’s say that you had two professors: one was extremely knowledgeable but he or she was not very personable. Going to his or her class with something to be endured even though the knowledge was there.
Our second professor was not as knowledgeable but he or she still knew the material. The difference with this professor is that you got along really well with him or her. The professor had credibility with you and you trusted them and you also learn a lot from them. If given the opportunity you enroll into another class they teach the next semester.
You can see knowledge alone doesn’t trump credibility when you have a choice of two more people having the same needed information. When you add the right amount of knowledge to credibility a majority people will choose Professor Number Two.
You present your readers with knowledge and credibility in the beginning and move them into the place where they trust you and they want to learn from you.
Building Trust
Now we ask, “How do we get people to trust us and want to learn from us?” There are several things that occur before person says, “Yes”. In fact, there’s a book called The Seven Triggers to Yes by Russell Granger. What Russell does in his book is go through the reasons why people would trust you and how to build those things into your sales presentation, or your day-to-day conversations, etc. There are a number of things he discusses. Critical things are credibility and knowledge. He also teaches about likability: when people like you they’ll trust you more. He also goes into reciprocity: for example, if you give things to people, they’ll like you more (within reason).
There’s another piece that helps people get to a place where they really trust us. I don’t think Russell covers this very deeply in his book (if at all). But it’s a piece I’ve implemented into my email campaign and I believe this is a critical piece to building trust. It’s the same piece that builds trust in any relationship, it’s the same piece that builds trust in the marriage relationship, and it would be the same piece that would build trust in a running buddy relationship. This piece is interaction and engagement.
When we are interacting and engaging with other people our trust level tends to go up as long as you’re not doing something wrong together (doing something wrong with someone is not going to increase your trust in that person). Meaningful interaction and engagement increase trust.
Think about any relationship you’ve had where you’ve hit a rocky point in the relationship. If both of you want it to get better you talk about it and become engaged again while fixing the problem. When you activate this interaction and engagement, people begin to trust you more.
If we go back to our original premise of people buying more from those they trust, plus when things just feel right, we understand that we must move into a process where they can engage interact with us.
Throughout the rest of this book, you’ll get instructions on how to create all of these interactive, engagement, homework, question-based emails. These will be emails that:
- Either make a statement or ask a question
- Ask a question about a thought
- Ask a question about the statement
- Give out a thought
- Give out a homework assignment (such as a “go out and do this and see what happens”)
Those are the types of emails that we plug in. They really draw people close to us. Once trust is built you can do a training or coaching launch.
As a launch is going, you must keep the trust high, so in the launch portion of the campaign, you’re going to integrate engagement and interaction emails.
These trust and credibility emails are used all throughout your campaigns as you create trust and relationship with your subscribers.