“The more they pass their heart around, the more jaded that they become.”
I never thought I’d reference a Drake lyric when discussing conversions, but it’s actually appropriate for the topic we’re about to dive into. I’m talking of course about the buyer’s journey.
Allow me to explain.
First, let’s examine the lyric. What Drake is making reference to is how women can become more suspicious of a person’s motives with every break of their heart. The more they try to love, the more suspicious they become of perfidy and that they may get hurt again.
We’ve all been guilty of putting our trust into someone that turned out to be deceitful. You learn from your mistakes and take that newfound experience with you, but you also become dubious of a person’s intentions. As a result, you sometimes paint with a broad brush, rather than tacking it up as a singular event.
Now, let’s apply this to a potential buyer on your website and why they’re cautious about buying. We’ll conveniently ignore any financial issues and assume that the buyer is well-off, but remains hesitant about pulling the trigger on a purchase.
There are several reasons for this, and one of them is they don’t want to get burned and garner the loathsome feeling of buyer’s remorse again. This, too, we’ve all been guilty of. We’ve all seen a shiny new product and allowed a salesman to smile in our face and convince us that “You absolutely need this!”, and “How much it will change your life!”, and “How life will be so much simpler and easier!”
Then we bring it home and realize it does nothing that was promised. Not only are you out however much money you spent on it, you also feel bamboozled. You always believed that you’d never be the one to make a poor purchase, yet here you are now with five three-packs of Shamwow’s when you could have just bought ordinary paper towels for more than half the price.
You just might require counseling if you let people know about your purchase and become a source of mockery as the ‘Shamwow Guy’.
Naturally, you become more guarded. Your arms become shorter when you reach into your pockets and you catastrophize every future buy. You don’t want to lose out on anymore money and you certainly don’t want to feel like you were bested, so you question each purchase more and more.
Now you’re looking at the purchase button with a cart full of books, just to use an example, and are hesitant to buy. Because some books you’ve bought in the past haven’t been as resourceful and helpful as you thought, however, maybe you reconsider this haul.
You question it, and the more you question it the less likely you are to buy. So you decide to wait another day when you have more money, or if you could find it online for free, or if you even really need them anyway.
The full cart is now left in purgatory, overflowing with books that will never be read by their prospective buyer.
It’s up to the marketer to navigate the buyer through this process and prevent them from abandoning for one reason or another. There needs to be a level of trust between the buyer and seller that promises the buyer they are going to receive exactly what they’re expecting.
Transparency is an effective way of bridging this gap between seller and buyer. If you’re selling a book, why not allow the buyer to get a small sample of what they’ll be buying by offering them a chance to read a few pages first.
Amazon and eBay excel at transparency because they provide access into the seller’s habits. There’s a star rating, a counter of how many sales they’ve made, access to their full online store, a description of the product and reviews of the product from other buyers. In my experience, the first thing I do when buying a product on Amazon is look for the seller with the most customers and highest star ratings.
Let’s say you’re a traditional seller, though, and don’t rely on individual sellers to set up camp on your website and sell their products. I liked this suggestion from Copyblogger:
“Everything on your site needs to show you can be trusted: Real contact information. Your photograph. Thorough responses to FAQs. Clear, reasonable calls to action.”
Putting a face to your product shows potential buyers that they’re not dealing with some faceless corporation that could care less if you’re satisfied or not following your experience. When a seller puts their face and name to their product, they’re plunging into precarious waters because they’re putting something as important as money on the line: Their reputation.
A person only has one name and one face. If they’re deceitful, it will follow them everywhere because they staked their reputation on it. If John Smith sells a lemon of a product, it would only take me one Google search of John Smith to know not to trust him, especially since his face will be accompanying him in those searches.
Everything you do when selling a product needs to revolve around creating a trustworthy environment for your buyers. The product is an extension of yourself and your identity. It’s your idea come to life, so treat it as such. If you thought it was a good enough idea to turn it into something tangible, then you need to be honest with your potential customers.
Trust is difficult to cultivate, especially with someone you just met, mainly because of their past experiences. Your buyer’s jaded and you need to lay it all out there that you’re different. The only way to break through someone’s tough exterior is to make yourself vulnerable first by genuinely letting buyers know who you are and what your product does.
Once the customer is satisfied with their experience, the all-important foundation of trust has been laid.
