For E-Commerce Marketers, Sales Is Still A Matter Of Trust

How can brands use the power of trust to connect with consumers online? Other customers’ reviews are important, as well as effective strategies to manage risk perception.

Salespeople in physical stores are able to generate a sales uplift through trust alone. Studies show that trust in a salesperson can increase the likelihood of a customer making a purchase by over 50% and doubles the probability of high customer satisfaction.

In addition, if that salesperson finds not just the right words but also the right time to touch a customer’s arm or hand, then she/he can double the willingness of customers to buy a product.

But trust isn’t just built through the sales staff. The in-store atmosphere—the space, smell, and the appearance of other customers—can also boost trust, and with it sales and satisfaction. These influences are enough to bring out the green-eyed monster in e-commerce marketers like myself and make me think: how can we tap into this power of trust with consumers when working in an online sales environment?

Finding Trust Online

The good news is that not having a physical salesperson or store doesn’t mean you can’t build consumer trust. If there’s one thing the internet has taught us, it’s that if consumers can’t find their normal sources of trust—such as a salesperson—then they’ll look for other sources.

For example, people trust reviews from complete strangers when deciding about buying a product online, or in the case of Airbnb, when deciding about hosting someone they’ve never met before. The internet has led to the emergence of trust seals too. Have you ever looked for a trust seal before paying in a physical store? Probably not, but we know that a significant share of online shoppers are influenced by trust seals when deciding for or against completing the purchase of a product or service.

Website visitors also gain trust from the quality and “store atmospherics” of a website, just like pre-internet shoppers did with physical stores. However, offering the industry-typical trust builders of reviews, trust seals, and a well-built website is not always enough. Some brands and industries require more anti-anxiety efforts.

Anti-Anxiety Strategies

While most digital marketers are aware that the perceived risks of purchasing their products influence their sales, little guidance is given to marketers to determine which “anti-anxiety” strategies best mitigate higher risks.

We recently worked with a U.K. mattress startup company that sells a relatively expensive memory-foam mattress online. Research compiled by the IPA shows that nearly half of U.K. mattress buyers buy a mattress from a brand they trust, and 66% buy based on them feeling comfortable when trying a mattress in a physical store. This data signified that a seal and customer reviews would not be enough to build trust in such a brand.

As a result, we conducted an anxiety audit. We deployed a survey among mattress buyers, ran on-site polls, and created a social media listening programme to determine where and how trust could be built.

The audit revealed, among other things, that simply by making detailed information on its “one hundred-night trial” more visible, the company could build much higher levels of trust. This change alone increased conversions by 27.6%, measured in a test of the original against the modified website.

Another great source for anti-anxiety strategies comes in the form of behavioural economics—a field that started out 30 years ago to investigate irrational influences in economic decision making.

One of the many lessons that marketers can learn from behavioural economics is the availability heuristics effect—people perceive something as less likely to happen when it is hard to imagine, and more likely to happen when easy to imagine.

For example, ESET, an IT security company, addressed this phenomenon in a campaign that tried to convince customers that they need antivirus software. The struggle here is that a significant chunk of people cannot easily imagine a digital virus attack, so they don’t believe such an attack is likely to happen to them.

ESET’s campaign solved this issue by comparing a digital virus to a human illness: “Your children catch colds. Your computer catches viruses.” The message boosts the perceived risk of an antivirus attack in a clever way, by making it not just something common but, thanks to an analogy, also easier to imagine. You’d try to protect a child from a cold, so why not a computer from a virus?

Gambling is another brilliant example of how consumers’ perceived risks can be altered using unconventional anti-anxiety tools.

Gambling has always fascinated economic researchers, because betting with low chances of winning makes rationally no sense. Yet gambling is a massive industry in countries across the world.

One key reason behind this is our emotions. As Sridhar Narayanan of Stanford University documented, the majority of people who gamble do so because of associations of gambling with fun. This means that the emotional motive of having fun is winning over the known rational fact that gambling comes with a very low probability of success. This also explains why the industry often markets itself digitally as “fun.”

For example, U.K. bookmaker Paddy Power’s tweets offer “betting and sports news with a side of mischief,” such as using a chicken kiev when discussing a football match located in Kiev, or featuring the “grab transfer news of the day.” This digital strategy makes it clear that we should not take betting too seriously, because if we did, we would be more rational and most likely not bet.

There’s no doubt that finding out how to build trust and manage risk perceptions in an online environment is challenging, but it’s also very fruitful. By using extensive research and testing strategies to understand your consumers, you’ll be able to create more trust into your brand. And you’ll soon be cashing in the chips.