One of the most important business skills you can learn is building trust between you and your customers.
Adding value through relationships is the foundation of creating trust with others. By building and leveraging trust, you will be able to sign customers easier, resulting in stronger, more profitable relationships.
When you onboard a new customer, it might feel like the relationship should be going faster.
They should subscribe to your highest plan. They should already leave a testimonial.
The higher level of trust that you want to achieve seems to take a long time. It’s not easy for you, and it’s not easy for others.
When we are doing something for the first time, we feel uncomfortable. Our minds go into overdrive as we try and cover every base possible.
Here are 8 ways to use copywriting techniques to leverage trust with your customers and have them be loyal for life (or at least longer than one month!).
Building trust by using specific language
You should always translate superlatives into specifics.
Meaning, you shouldn’t label your product as “the best” in a certain category. You need to explain why it is the best – did you ever win a reward or was nominated for one?
People trust facts, not claims.
Use testimonials and reviews to back up your claims
Building trust can go even further by backing up those claims with hard data and facts.
However, you should stay away from fake reviews.
For the longest time, people have been force-feeding you testimonials.
You know the type: a bunch of generic, made-up reviews about how wonderful their product or service is. These don’t convert well because you can assume they’re fake (and sometimes you’re right).
The alternative is the customer story, which is exactly how it sounds…it’s a story from a customer about how your product or service helped them.
A great example would be monday.com. They ask for customized video reviews and publish them on a dedicated page.
Avoiding jargon and talking SIMPLE
Jargon-y terms might seem cool to you, but they are actually pushing your customers away.
Good copy should be like a good conversation with a friend. Conversational writing is within ‘normal’ sentences, but can also include contractions and slang terms.
Write as you speak. Don’t assume your audience understands technical jargon or industry acronyms. Make it simple, and they’ll know you care about them.
You wouldn’t try and sell to a friend, so why do it on your website?
Your visitor is the person that comes to your site and you want them to be interested in what you are promoting. So speak naturally as if you were talking one-on-one with the visitor.
Make sure your language and tone of voice are on par with how you would have a conversation with someone in real life.
Make it about them
People LOVE talking about themselves.
We are all selfish in some way or another and care about fulfilling our needs and wants.
When starting to write copy, it’s always important to remember your target audience. Make sure you’re putting yourself in your audience’s shoes when you’re writing.
You must understand their challenges and concerns, and then lay out the solutions that you’re providing for them.
Avoid words like “we”, and use more of “you”.
Building trust by validating beliefs
One way to reduce customer anxieties is by reinforcing their beliefs and being on their side.
If they have concerns about not being sure of how to use your tool after they sign up, let them know that they’ll get fully onboarded.
If they are sustainability advocates, find ways to validate that – maybe you could plant a tree for every subscription?
Building trust by validating pain
We all have something we want to solve.
People first see your site as a stranger and immediately judge.
They don’t give you a second chance to convert them into a customer. To ensure you lead your visitor in the right direction, you need to convince them that you’re solving their biggest pain.
Each landing page should begin with an Emotional Trigger that appeals to a customer’s primary emotion on which all the marketing efforts are likely to revolve around.
It’s important to understand the root of your users’ pain. What I mean by that is, you need to understand what problem they’re trying to solve, and what keeps them from being successful.
Ask yourself, what are your users struggling with? What roadblocks do they face when trying to achieve their goal?
Mention your competitors
This might come as a surprise, but you shouldn’t neglect your competitors in your copy.
One effective technique would be creating “alternatives” pages where you mention each of your competitors and compare yourself to them side by side.
This is not only effective for convincing your customers that you’re (possibly) the best solution out there, but it also helps with SEO.
This is especially true in the SaaS industry. One of the most effective SaaS SEO techniques is targeting keywords like “*my competitor* alternatives”.
Don’t lie about your competition
If your competitors have certain features you don’t, be bold and mention that.
It’s untrustworthy and wrong to say that you’re the only viable solution out there.
There’s nothing wrong with admitting you aren’t the best. In the end, it will actually get you more clients and customers because you are being transparent about what you can offer.
Think about it. When was the last time you bought an ice cream cone from someone who never seems to stop singing their ice cream praises? I’m guessing never.
We all want to work with people with a sense of humor (regardless of what industry we’re in).