Bombarding your customers left, right, and center with offers and marketing messages isn’t usually the best way to go about things. Even if you see a small surge in your click-through rate, this will likely not translate into long-term sales that grow sustainably over time.

To give yourself every chance of better connecting with your customers, take a look at these nine tried and true content creation tips:

1. Offer an experience

These days it’s not enough to send an email and ask someone to sign up for a service or buy a product. You need to offer something more than your competition.

People crave experiences because they can share them with friends. Retelling the story offers something deeper than material things because you can explain exactly how events unfolded and bring the story to life. Think about how you can offer an escape from the status quo so can put your brand front and center.

This could include something like signing up for exclusive members-only content, or sharing a video tour of your headquarters. The second idea could be especially useful for businesses that manufacture a product for consumers — it gives you a chance to let your customers see what lies behind the curtain.

2. Connect outside of email

We’re all social creatures, so indulge that side of your customers and expand your email funnel by connecting with them on social media.

Not only is this a great way to push your brand further and faster into the hearts and minds of customers, but it also allows you to casually interact with them as often as you want. Keep your social content low-key but engaging and you’ll build a following in no time.

Just to make on thing clear here. I’m not talking about ditching email marketing. Rather about using it as a vehicle to grow your social media following so that you can continue connecting with contacts in other areas of their digital lives. This will open up a whole host of other marketing opportunities.

3. Listen

An email survey is a great way to gauge the opinions of your users. The secret is to keep it quick and easy to complete so that contacts can fill it out in under 2 minutes. Stick to a dozen questions or less, and where possible, use a categorical (multiple choice) format. That way you’ll find it a lot easier to track and analyze the results.

It’s also a good idea to offer an incentive so that you increase the response rate. Free entry into a prize drawing or discounts on their next purchase can both be very effective for this.

4. Adapt content to your readers’ preferences

This point follows on nicely from the one above — listen, listen, listen; then act!

Also, take into account the seasonal events and latest trends sweeping your industry. We all love a festive email when December rolls around, so make sure that you don’t miss these kinds of chances to connect with your customers.

5. Write your emails in a personal way

Receiving an email from a friend is always nice because it piques your interest and provides a more emotional connection.

Friends don’t write in formal sales language. They talk to us in a casual and friendly tone. If you mimic this relaxed style in your marketing emails, you can increase your ability to form an emotional connection with your customers, which boosts engagement with your emails.

It’s all about adapting your style to the audience sitting in front of you. What works at a board meeting won’t be of interest to someone reading your email in front of the TV, for example.

If you’re struggling to come up with a causal and engaging writing style, there are a few different tools and online services that can point you in the right direction:

• Your Dictionary: Offers online tutorials and a powerful interactive thesaurus that will help add new depth to your writing.
• Hot Essay Service: Connects you with a team of seasoned professional writers that will craft your new style of writing. You can have them start from scratch, or polish up some existing copy.
• Inc: Offers advice for entrepreneurs and small businesses who are looking to stand out from the crowd.
• Grab My Essay: Ideal for fast turnarounds when you want to launch your campaign before the competition. The professional touch will allow you to tailor your campaign to what your customers want.
• Survey Monkey: Gives you access to downloadable templates so that you can quickly and easily create customer satisfaction surveys.
• Supreme Dissertations: This professional writing team specializes in long form text. They can also assist with fine tuning any existing text.
• Rewarded Essays: By searching for a professional writer with the desired skills you can have someone put the finishing touches to your campaign’s copy.

6. Avoid the jargon and buzzwords

Nobody likes jargon (except maybe the people who already know what it means). Even if it’s more convenient to use this type of language internally, your customers couldn’t care less about it most of the time.

Keep the jargon to an absolute minimum and focus instead on getting your message out using simple, everyday language. If you’re struggling, try asking a question designed to provoke a response, like “Do you wish you could pay less for your TV package?” This gives you the perfect opening to paint a picture of your lower cost service without having to say much at all up front. You can let your customers’ brain fill in the blanks.

7. Be genuine

Deep down everyone knows that you’re sending your email to try and grow your business, so don’t be disingenuous and try and hide it.

Instead, try to show your passion for what you do by focusing on the benefit that you provide for your customers. This will allow you to introduce your products and services in a way that will keep people intrigued. This is ideal for leaving the sales talk behind and getting down to the core topics and problems you want to address with your customers.

8. Be relatable

No matter how big your business becomes, you need to be relatable. People don’t want to feel like they’re being spammed by a faceless multinational corporation. Most prefer to receive messages from people they can understand and people who can empathize with them on a human level.

Talk in a way that is normal and straightforward. Don’t be afraid to use your own first name to give your email message a “face.”

Focus on positive messaging like why your product is the best, not on negatives like why your competitors are no good. Highlight any community or charity initiatives that you’re a part of so you can establish a connection that way too.

Brand building is all about making your business pop into the minds of your customers when they think of things they enjoy. When you get thirsty on a hot summer’s day you picture Coca-Cola. When you want to stay out of the shade you think about a Yankees cap. If you want your brand to grow in the same way, focus on linking your products and services to everyday events your customers encounter.

9. Segment your email list

The final piece of advice I have for you today is to segment your email contact list. By breaking your large contact database into smaller groups with similar interests or characteristics, you’ll be able to target key demographics with more tailored content.

This is a great way to show your customers that you care because you’ll be much more able to speak to their needs and offer them something of genuine value.

The post How to Create Emotional Connections With Your Email Marketing Contacts appeared first on Sendinblue.

Relationship marketing definition:

Relationship marketing refers to the marketing tactics and actions related to creating and maintaining a personalized relationship with prospects to guide them through the purchase process and continue to foster customer loyalty throughout the customer lifecycle. It’s a more customer-centric approach, as opposed to transactional marketing, which is more focused on the product and the act of making a purchase.

It’s always easier to get something from someone if you have a good relationship with that person. Conversely, if you try to ask something from a lead that doesn’t know you and has never been in contact with you before, you’re not going to be very likely to succeed!

That’s where relationship marketing comes into play. It’s the art of getting to know your customers and developing a relationship with them before you ask something from them.

Instead of focusing on promoting your products and being overly salesy, take the time to introduce yourself, let prospects and customers get to know you, and make yourself available to answer their questions.

How, why, and for whom? We’ll cover everything you need to know about relationship marketing in this article!

Test-drive your relationship strategy with a FREE Sendinblue account >>

Some context

Relationship marketing aims at developing a qualitative relationship between your brand and your customers or people who you want to become customers.

«Know, Like, Trust »

The principle “Know, Like, Trust,” is at the foundation of relationship marketing because it allows you to understand the evolution of your client relationships within a certain framework.

Before making a purchase, customers pass through three different steps:

1. Getting to know you
2. Deciding that they like you (and that they want your products)
3. Placing their trust in you

This evolution takes time, and it requires you to really take the time to develop meaningful relationships with your customers.

A more human approach to marketing

The era of B2B (business to business) vs. B2C (business to consumer) marketing is over. Now, it’s all about H2H marketing — Human to Human.

People don’t really buy products anymore — they buy values and a brand; a story. That’s why relationship marketing is so effective and so important.

How is relationship marketing different from traditional marketing?

Mass marketing vs. individual conversations

The main difference between traditional marketing tactics and those related to relationship marketing is the level of individualized and personalized communication for each client.

Whereas traditional marketing consists mainly of targeting large audiences with the same message, relationship marketing works contrarily to establish a personalized conversation with each client at the right moment.

To accomplish this effectively, you can use marketing automation to send messages triggered by specific actions taken by your customer, and a CRM for collecting all of the data related to your customers’ behavior and interactions with your brand to better understand where they are in the purchase cycle.

Short-term vs. long-term

Traditional marketing tactics are generally more focused on short-term goals, such as quickly generating more sales for a specific marketing campaign.

Relationship marketing, on the other hand, is about engaging with clients and prospects to create a relationship in the long term. The objective here is to build trust for products with a more complex purchase cycle and bigger price tag, as well as increase retention and extend the lifetime value of your customers.

But why does it make sense to focus more on long-term objectives like retention and increasing the customer lifetime value? Because it’s generally much less expensive to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new customer.

Additionally, loyal customers offer way more value to your brand than a brand new customer. Returning customers tend to make purchases more predictably and regularly, and they are much more likely to promote your business to other people in your network through word-of-mouth.

Transactional vs. relational

Traditional marketing is essentially transactional in nature (i.e. the ultimate goal is to generate a transaction — or purchase — as quickly as possible). Think ads, prospecting emails, etc.

Meanwhile, relationship marketing is relational, seeking instead to establish a relationship with prospects before trying to sell them a product.

Objectives of relationship marketing

Relationship marketing is focused simultaneously on acquiring new customers and fostering more loyalty among those customers.

Turning visitors into customers (Lead Nurturing)

Relationship marketing starts as soon as a prospect comes into contact with your business for the first time (e.g. clicking on a Facebook ad, finding your site organically from the search results, clicking on an affiliate link, etc.).

No matter how they find you, potential customers will start forming an image of your brand based on their interactions. This is the start of your relationship marketing.

From there, you need to nurture and maintain this relationship in order to transform anonymous visitors into a loyal audience.

You can do this using marketing automation workflows that send targeted messages aimed at moving prospects closer and closer to a purchase through trust building. This is known as lead nurturing.

If you want your lead nurturing process to be effective, it needs to be tightly linked with the key steps linked to progression in the purchase cycle. Once a user subscribes, you can start sending emails that communicate important information about your content, brand, and products according to the recipient’s proximity to making a purchase.

As they grow more interested in your brand and what you have to offer, you can start sending more targeted, sales-focused messages and resources (e.g. sizing guide, case study [for B2B], etc.).

Gauge the interest of your prospects

With lead scoring, you can easily keep track of how interested each of your contacts is in making a purchase from you. This is done by assigning a point value to certain actions that indicate a higher level of interest in your offer (e.g. visiting the pricing page, adding an item to a cart, clicking on multiple promotional emails, etc.).

You can then use your lead score to segment contacts accordingly and send messages that correspond more closely to where each contact is in the purchase decision process.

Extend customer lifetime through customer loyalty

One of the main benefits of relationship marketing is that it doesn’t stop once a prospect makes a purchase and becomes a customer. It continues throughout the entire customer lifetime, working to increase customer loyalty and generate more purchases from existing customers.

Like any other relationship, customer relationships require ongoing attention if you want them to last. Keep in regular contact with them — offering news about your company, highlighting the latest feature updates or product inventory, asking for feedback, etc. This will help keep you top of mind when customers are considering another purchase.

It’s important that your customers remember you, but you also need to give them something they can really connect with. This will help them develop a real link and affection for your brand and product, ultimately leading to more customer loyalty.

As we’ve said in one way or another throughout this guide, the ultimate goal of relationship marketing is to create a relationship with customers that goes beyond a single transaction. This will allow you to make your customers real ambassadors for your brand, which will lead to serious growth down the line.

3 relationship marketing best practices

Now that you’ve got the concept of relationship marketing down, it’s time to talk more pragmatically about how to do it right without tearing apart your entire marketing strategy.

1. Talk to people, not ‘consumers’

It’s important to make customers feel like they are more than just ‘consumers’ and numbers on your marketing dashboard to you if you want to establish a real human connection.

To get relationship marketing right, you have to change not only the way you talk to your customers, but also the way you think about them.

Every one of your customers has their own story, needs, and perception of your brand. That’s why it’s super important to personalize your communications to each recipient and treat them like actual human beings. Small gestures like including their name in your message or sending a birthday email can make all the difference.

To do this, you need to replace your classic bulk email campaigns with targeted marketing automation workflows that are triggered by specific user actions. This gives you much more context to send a personalized and “human” message to the user that corresponds to their interest level and individual situation, which will increase engagement and overall conversion rate.

2. Segment your email lists

Separate your contacts into smaller groups or segments based on similar characteristics in order to create more tailored content.

An example of how you could do this in practice is to separate contacts into “new leads,” “qualified leads,” “loyal customers,” and “top customer” based on their lead score and where they are in the purchase process.

With segmentation, you can easily show your contacts that you’re not just sending them messages randomly, but rather you’re taking into account their specific needs and situation. This makes them much more likely to place their trust in you and stick around for the long run.

Not only does this help with converting leads into customers, but it will also make it easier for you to upsell or convince existing customers to buy more from you. You can emphasize the relationship that you have with them and communicate very exclusive offers based on their level of engagement.

Pro tip: You can use marketing automation to automate your segmentation. Set up specific conditions (e.g. user matches specific behavioral patterns, contact reaches a certain lead score, etc.) and dynamically segment contacts into your targeted list according to these conditions.

3. Create a conversion funnel adapted to your customer journey

The conversion funnel (also known as the sales funnel) is the path that prospects follow from their first interaction with your company all the way until they make a purchase and beyond.

Depending on how much you’ve developed your relationship with a prospect or customer, they’ll be in a different stage of your conversion funnel.

Normally, the conversion funnel is made up of many different touch points:

• Initial contact (blog article, video, social media, advertisement)
• Contact information submission (eBook, webinar, online course)
• Tripwire (small purchase or free trial)
• Offer 2
• Offer 3
• Etc.

Having downloadable content or resources on your website allows you to position yourself as a leading expert in your industry or content area, while simultaneously letting you collect contact information from visitors for future follow-ups.

If you’re using retargeting, you can even display your ads on social networks and other websites to help speed up the conversion process for visitors to your site.

As customers and prospects traverse through the different steps of your conversion funnel, you can gradually start offering higher-value products.

Is relationship marketing right for you?

We won’t keep you waiting too long, the answer is YES!

No matter what type of business you have or what industry you’re in, relationship marketing is a great investment for long-term, sustainable growth.

Developing deeper relationships with your customers and prospects will help you be much more effective in your customer acquisition and retention efforts, which will ultimately lead to more profits and a healthier business.

Conclusion

So, what is relationship marketing?

• Structuring your marketing communications to build a personalized relationship with each of your prospects and customers
• A qualitative strategy focused on the long term in order to attract and retain more customers
• Creating content that is more tailored to the needs and expectations of individual customers
• Building a conversion funnel that is tightly linked to the different steps of the customer journey to achieve more effective communication

Now that you’re a pro in relationship marketing it’s time to start setting up your own relationship marketing strategy.

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The post What is Relationship Marketing? Definition and Best Practices appeared first on Sendinblue.

Although there is some crossover between the two solutions, the term CRM is often incorrectly used to describe them both. Much of this confusion is due to the fact that many solutions that fall under these two categories include in varying degrees both CRM and Marketing Automation features together in one tool.

For many enterprise organizations (most notable B2B and SaaS companies), implementing a CRM solution is a necessary right of passage for refining and tackling the complex sales and marketing process for their business. But, a less expensive marketing automation solution can be just as beneficial (and much more cost-efficient) for small and medium-sized businesses looking to get CRM functionality without paying a steeper price tag for the advanced features that they don’t need.

The goal of this article is to explain both of these tools — their similarities and differences — in order to give you a clearer idea of which tool or solution is best for your business needs.

Two tools, two separate use cases

Because marketing automation and CRMs are often confused for one another or grouped together in the same software platform, it’s important to understand the different functionalities that separate the two solutions:

• Marketing Automation allows you to better manage and essentially automate your marketing campaigns. All you have to do is set up the workflow and let the software do all of the work.
• CRMs help you manage complex sales processes and better manage the corresponding tasks that arise. It keeps your sales team organized by providing a database that stores contact information and automatically assigns tasks to sales reps as leads move through the sales funnel.

Marketing automation: A tool for automating your marketing communications

Marketing Automation lets you save time by automating repetitive marketing tasks, including:

• Targeting and sending marketing communications (email campaigns, text messages, Facebook ads , etc.)
• Dynamically segmenting your email contacts based on their behavior or characteristics
• Lead scoring and lead nurturing to build a more effective marketing funnel

As mentioned in the intro, this automation is accomplished by setting up “marketing automation workflows,” which are essentially just a set of rules, predefined conditions, and actions that you define in your marketing automation software. These rules and conditions trigger specific actions that accomplish whatever actions or tasks you include in the workflow. For example, you can set up a simple workflow that automatically sends a welcome email to your customers when they sign up for an account or subscribe to your newsletter.

With advanced automation tactics like lead scoring and dynamic segmentation, you can easily develop a sophisticated marketing strategy with campaigns that target your leads and contacts with more granularity based on their characteristics (age group, gender preference, geography) and behavior (purchase history, website activity, previous engagement with your campaigns, etc.). The more targeted your message, the better engagement you’ll see with your campaigns overall.

This illustrates why marketing automation is particularly effective during the lead qualification phase in addition to being very helpful for building customer loyalty down the road. It’s a very versatile solution for scaling your tedious (but still important) marketing messages and targeting.

For example, you can program campaigns that only target contacts who have completed a certain number of purchases, or perhaps a re-engagement campaign that is automatically sent to contacts who have been inactive for a certain period of time. The possibilities are endless!

CRM: A tool for streamlining the sales process

CRMs are, first and foremost, databases that store all of the information you have about customers and potential customers that can be used to better understand and improve the relationships you have with them.

The most notable CRM functionalities include:

• “Profiles” for each contact in your database
• Historical data about all the past interactions you’ve had with each contact
• An overview of your conversion funnel and sales process
• Mapping the steps of your purchase cycle and a list of contacts who fall in each of these steps

While Marketing Automation takes up the mantle of sending communications on your behalf when contacts meet certain criteria, CRMs act as an informational relay to enable sales reps to establish contact with individuals once it becomes relevant to do so (e.g. setting up an initial sales call, scheduling a sales demo, re-engaging inactive leads, etc.).

More generally, CRMs allow you to visualize your sales process and conversion funnel to prioritize and streamline your operations and be more efficient with handling leads at different stages of the purchase cycle. Depending on how you organize your sales team, this could enable you to, for example, assign small but qualified leads to a newer salesperson, while larger and more challenging leads can go to a more experienced executive on your team.

Nowadays, there are many CRMs that integrate aspects of marketing automation into their solution, but these tools are much more expensive and less user-friendly than a dedicated marketing automation tool.

Quick recap:

Which solution is best for you?

Choosing the ideal solution will depend on your purchase cycle and how your customers interact with your business:

• Short purchase cycle: Common for B2C and eCommerce businesses, this type of business doesn’t usually require extensive contact with customers before they make a purchase. If this is your business, you’ll benefit more from using a marketing automation solution.
• Long purchase cycle: Common for B2B and SaaS companies, longer purchase cycles usually call for a more direct approach involving intervention from a sales team to convince buyers to convert. This system is much more suited for a CRM.

Marketing Automation: Best for eCommerce businesses and bloggers

If you’re not selling a product or service that requires a significantly large financial investment for the customer, marketing automation will likely have a much greater impact for your organization.

That’s because marketing automation workflows are great for handling simpler problems or goals that arise from common scenarios and behavior occurring over the course of your customers’ journey. While the approach is more targeted than sending out a standard email marketing campaign, it cannot replace a human for more complex scenarios that usually come with expensive and comprehensive products that you see in the B2B and SaaS industries.

Abandoned cart emails are an excellent example of this concept in action. By setting up an automated email to follow up with shoppers who abandoned a cart on your site, you can win back a significant amount of revenue that you would’ve otherwise lost — all after just a few minutes of setup and little to no maintenance afterwards.

This automated approach works well because the reasons people abandon carts can be easily addressed at scale without requiring too much individual attention. The same cannot be said for a customer who is on the fence about signing up for an expensive monthly subscription to a SaaS product.

But marketing automation isn’t just reserved to revenue-related tasks like abandoned carts. If you’re a blogger, you can set up an automation workflow that sends welcome emails to your new subscribers and uses their behavior to learn more about their preferences. This ultimately enables you to tailor the content of your emails to each individual subscriber based on the things they find most interesting, providing a better reader experience and leading to more engagement and loyalty in the long run.

CRM: Best for B2B and SaaS enterprises

Adopting a CRM solution should be a priority for any business that deals with a prolonged purchase process, or those for which intervention from a sales rep is a must for successfully completing the sale.

This is often the case for businesses in the B2B sector, especially companies that provide SaaS (software platforms that are available online rather than installed locally) tools.

Investing in an expensive software tool comes with many consequences and a deeper time investment for the buyer. That’s why these types of businesses usually require a sales person to guide prospects and leads through the final steps of the purchase process, providing any information they might need and reassurance that it’s the right solution for their business.

With this type of sales process, CRMs are extremely useful for keeping things organized. They allow you to easily visualize where each contact or lead lies in your sales funnel and know exactly which steps your sales team should take for each of these contacts in order to maximize conversions.

Integrating Marketing Automation with your CRM

For more advanced businesses, the ideal solution might still be combining the functionalities of both of these tools with the help of plugins or software integrations.

The advantages of linking marketing automation and CRM are undeniable: you can cover your entire conversion funnel, from collecting contact information from new leads to building more customer loyalty after they’ve made a purchase.

In this case, the goal of your marketing automation strategy would be to funnel in new, “qualified” leads to your CRM, passing the torch to your sales team so they can finish the process.

Luckily, Sendinblue offers integrations with many of the most popular CRMs on the market, including Salesforce, Everwin, CXM, Intercom, and more.

Advanced Marketing Automation features in Sendinblue are available for free in all plan levels for the first 2,000 contacts. Why not try it out today?

The post Marketing Automation vs CRM: Which tool best fits your needs? appeared first on Sendinblue.

And what’s more effective at communicating your trustworthiness than a long list of past customer experiences, online reviews, testimonials, etc? Many established businesses rely on their positive track record to acquire and retain their customers.

But what if you’re just starting out and don’t have a strong positive track record yet to win your customers’ trust. How do you build the same trust and reassurance with new customers?

Here are a few tips to help you overcome this hurdle and build up a reputation and track record that will help you continue to grow as your business matures.

1- Map out your customer journey

As Consulting.com explains in its guide on establishing yourself as a freelance consultant, the whole point of starting a business is to help people solve their problems and achieve a desired goal. The more desired that goal is, the more people are willing to trust you if you can help them achieve it.

Understanding your customer journey is the most essential step for building a business that provides customers with this type of solution. Once you know how your customers get to know you for the first time, what makes them consider your product, how they research to learn more about you, and what makes them buy from you, you can speed up the buying process by optimizing each of these steps.

An HBR article explains that you need to consider the following framework in your customer journey map:

• Actions: What is the customer doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to move themselves on to the next stage?
• Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?
• Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from moving to the next stage?
• Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in the way of moving on to the next stage?

Needless to say, all of these questions should be answered according to actual data rather than hypotheses– you can’t over-complicate your customers’ journey. For starters, try to break down your customers’ interactions into three general categories:

• Awareness
• Purchase
• Post-purchase

Then, figure out how your customers enter each of these phases and how they can successfully pass through them. If your customers spend most of their time on Twitter, it makes more sense to focus on a strong content strategy for Twitter, and you might consider spending more on Twitter advertising. Get to know your customers better by talking to them, taking surveys, using social media monitoring tools (such as Google Alerts) and web analytics tools, competitive analysis tools, etc.

To give you an idea of what this should look like, here is an example of a customer journey map by Dapper Apps, an Australian-based mobile app development company.

Source

2- Be responsive

One of the most important aspects of a trustworthy business is reliability — especially in times of trouble or technical difficulty. Reliable businesses are human and responsive. Your salespeople and customer service are at the forefront of this part of your business, representing your reliability as a whole. The more human (read: empathetic/understanding) and responsive they are, the more reliable and trustworthy you’ll be in the eyes of your customers.

To give you an idea of how important this is, just take one look at the data. According to Customers that Stick, 82% of consumers in the US said that they stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer experience.

However, improving your customer service is not necessarily limited to teaching communication skills to your sales and support reps. What if your employees are nice enough, but they’re not well supported or equipped to address your customer’s needs and issues at scale?

Although the behavior of your employees is an undeniably important factor, creating a culture of problem-solving and support among all of your employees is the master key to providing a superb customer service.

Identify where exactly in the buying process you’re experiencing the most churn, identify the reasons for the exodus, and work to systematically address the issue. Eliminate the siloed organizational approach by sharing your business’s objectives and customer personas with all the departments or roles, and align their activities. Value your customers’ feedback (feedback management software such as Osifeedback are great for collecting and managing your customers’ feedback). Finally, make sure your employees are satisfied and able to collaborate more easily by providing the necessary tools and education to do so.

3- Show your human side

At the end of his presentation for the 2015 World Domination Summit, Derek Sivers reveals a couple of secrets that he and his team used to grow CDBaby. And guess what? The first secret he mentions is the fact that they actually answered the phone (for which he gets a round of applause from the audience!).

Answering the phone and talking directly with customers is a great way to prove to the customers that your business is made up of real human beings; that people across the table are capable of understanding their interests, problems, and complaints, rather than just a part of some faceless revenue machine. It actually goes without saying that pleasant human interactions help build trust and increase customer retention.

The second secret Derek used to scale CDBaby was turning the seemingly mundane things about the business into something more fun. For example, he used personalization in his transactional emails to show the name of the recipient as part of the sender name, meaning Sarah could receive an email from the sender “CDBaby loves Sarah.” This seemingly small tactic was a cool way to connect with customers in a new and unique way.

They also had fun with customer funny customer requests, like ordering pizza every time an album by a customer (singers of course) was asked to be replaced or responding to a customer jokingly asking for a plastic squid. When the customer saw a real plastic squid in the package with his order, he went nuts and posted this video on Youtube, leading to awesome word of mouth and organic engagement.

4- Look professional

Unless you’re a very popular brand in your niche, people still judge your credibility based on your looks. And with the explosion of online shopping over the past decade or two, people are very adept at telling whether or not your website is professional and credible. A study shows that high prototypicality of a website (i.e. a website that includes many of the “standard” elements customers expect from a certain type of site) boosts credibility among visitors.

According to GoodFirms’s web design research, “flat design, expressive typography, broken grid layouts, virtual reality video, voice user interface and search” are all trends that are getting more and more popular for internet users. They also go on to explain that low conversion rates are often a strong signal of poor website design:

Check out their detailed analysis of the latest web design trends that can improve conversions and try incorporating them with your site using A/B testing to see how they affect performance. Implementing common web design trends like this is a great way to improve your website’s conversions:

You can either hire a good web design company to do the designing for you, or you can dip your toe in and do it yourself with the help of an intuitive WordPress page builder such as Thrive Architect.

To conclude:

Digital Vidya explains that digital marketing departs from traditional marketing because it provides a two-way communication channel where “businesses can communicate with customers and customers can ask queries or make suggestions to businesses as well.” But many businesses fail to take advantage of this essential element when launching marketing campaigns. Trust almost disappears when we fail to listen to customers and identify what matters most to them. At the end of the day, what determines the success of any business is whether we can be a trustworthy companion of our customers or not, so it’s in our best interest not to forget about this in our marketing.

Although different tools and tactics like bulk email marketing campaigns have made marketing at scale much easier — particularly with the advent of advanced features like marketing automation, businesses still need to put the work in if they want to gain their customers’ trust.

But unlike established businesses, new businesses don’t have the privilege of a solid track record or social proof to bolster their credibility. That means they need to do everything they can to prove themselves trustworthy to customers and leads. This trust can still be earned by following the steps mentioned above, ensuring that, above all else, you’re putting the customer first.

The post How New Businesses Can Build Customer Trust When Starting Out appeared first on Sendinblue.