The Two Step Sale.

As any good sales person will tell you, before you can sell something, you must first sell yourself. People are not going to spend their money with people they do not trust, no matter how shiny your web site looks. It's one of the fundamentals of marketing, we all like to see ourselves as "the brand you can trust".

Trust is a valuable commodity on the Internet. In bricks and mortar business we can meet someone we hope to do business with, shake their hand, look them in the eye, visit their shop or office, meet other members of their staff, speak to others about their reputation, all of these help to build trust. So how do we do this on-line?

Make sure your contact details are easy to find on your site.

Invite people to contact you by email, post or phone if they have any questions. Include photographs of your shop or offices on your 'about us' page. If possible include photographs of yourself and your team, put faces to the name. Trust is strongest when it is between people, not just between a person and a brand.

Display the logos of trusted authorities prominently.

If you conduct any form of payment processing on your site you will need an SSL certificate and a Payment Processor. Your certificate provider (Thwaite, Verisign, Trust etc) and Payment Processor should both be able to supply you with a logo. If you are a member of any professional bodies, or are affiliated with any well known reliable institutions tell people about it, and a logo has instant recognisability.

Be up front about your business practices.

If you charge for postage tell people, if it includes tax tell them. If you hide it until the last minute all you get are a whole pile of abandoned shopping baskets.Don't forget a page outlining your Terms and Conditions, including your postage, returns, refunds and credits policies (It's sort of a legal requirement).

Tell visitors what you will do with their information.

Even if you ask for simple details with an on line form of any kind, you should include a statement about how you will store and use this data, and reassurances that it will not be passed on to third parties. If you are going to pass it on, tell your visitors who will get it and why, don't be misleading, some will not like your policy and  may leave, if they feel your are misleading them, then most will leave.

Build a relationship with your visitor, let them interact with your web site.

If you have the time and interest a forum will establish a community and can be a great way to administer support to products and services, but it takes patience and effort on your part. If you or any members of your team have inside knowledge of your industry, products or services, then a Blog can be a great way to harness that insight, but don't forget to keep it informal and real, it's not just an outlet for your latest press release. At the least try a simple poll or a system to allow product reviews, these will give your visitors a means of feeling involved and listened to and that their opinions matter.

Keep visitors in touch with a newsletter.

Perhaps the best way to establish trust, demonstrate your knowledge in your field and keep your brand consistently in front of your visitors. Once a month, or whatever you have time for produce some original content of genuine value and mix it in with a digest of links to news items of interest in your field. Include links to any new content on your site. Keep it short, to the point and offer HTML and plain text versions (some firewalls or office email servers will block HTML emails). Do not ask 20 questions of your visitor before they sign up, just name and email address. Remember this is part one of a two step sale, and this part is about establishing trust, so keep it simple. Once they are regularly receiving your newsletter they will be much more prepared to volunteer details about themselves, as well as to use your services.

Having sold the Brand, anything else is easy

Once your customers have bought into you, it's so much easier to sell them anything else, after all you're a known commodity now, almost one of the family? Just remember that the most important aspect of the first part of the sale is honesty, we are constantly exposed to corporate advertising telling us about how much they 'Care about our customers', when often the experience is quite different. Under sell and over deliver is always going to produce a better outcome than the opposite.

If you would like to talk to Appropriate Solutions about how we can help you to present your brand well on the web, why not contact us and arrange an informal discussion.