Trust Does Not Come First in Marketing

Trust is the single most important ingredient for any successful relationship, business or personal. But before trust is established, something more essential has to take place first: transparency.

Trust from day one

To properly engage your customers and start building trust from day one, you have to be transparent.

We live in an age where trust is broken and misused daily. Customers’ intolerance for not being treated as they deserve grows exponentially. It takes one wrong call, or one improperly handled service case, to lose a customer for good.

As the saying goes: trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

If you want customers to have trust in your marketing, it is paramount that you make the first leap of faith: that you trust your customers before they trust you back.

Share your story and values

If you work in production, share your methods and processes, get your employees in front, share their stories. If you are a medical company, share your innovation processes and let your customers tell you what they feel.

No matter the industry, the keyword is story. Share it, as detailed and as honest as possible. Let your customers be the judge.

Be especially transparent about the data you collect, and give customers an easy and obvious way to manage preferences or unsubscribe. Hiding those options frustrates people, and they lose trust as a result.

Every time you send a message, it’s not a machine on the other side. It’s a person.

Archive: this article dates from an earlier phase of our work, when marketing automation was our main focus. We have kept it online because the thinking still holds, but it is not where our practice sits today.