Repeat And Up-Sells Work For The Same Reason: Trust

The Internet has opened the door to a cluster of new marketing practices, but it’s removed something basic, old, and fundamental: the trust conferred by having an address and interfacing with actual people.

You can’t sell online or offline without trust. Marketers don’t often consider this, but there are several sales-chain breakdown points that exist because of the perceived risk intrinsic to buying online. We forgot the concerns we had in 1995, but they’re still there.

Practices that undermine trust include:

  • A cheap website;
  • No physical address listed on the website;
  • No ‘About Us’ section;
  • A thin ‘About Us’ section (e.g. no photos of your employees);
  • No indicators of who runs the website;
  • No telephone number;
  • No physical address;
  • No SSL;
  • Typos;
  • Broken links;
  • Slow site speed;
  • Poor design elements;
  • No customer support staff;
  • Bad information architecture, UX (User Experience), navigation. 

In recent years, not just SSL Certificates, but site badges (PayPal, Authorize.net, McAfee, etc.) have become trust signals.

While you might see ‘Zagat Rated’ or ‘Yelp!’ or ‘Best In The Bay’ stickers on the window of a brick-and-mortar restaurant on Main Street, you would not avoid it because these were missing.

And it has to do with the basic perception of investment, by virtue of an (expensive) brick-and-mortar building and paid employees you can talk to. You would have an address and people to go to if you weren’t happy, or were scammed.

This is not the case for Internet vendors, who can and often do enact ‘fly by night’ practices – the biggest brands notwithstanding.

People need trust in order to pull out their credit card and pay for something  online.

So, what are ‘sales ladders’?

Sometimes, a great website isn’t enough to sell software suite that’s $90,000 a year, from a first engagement.

Yes, there are ‘lead nurturing’ tactics, like email.

But there are also sales ladders. A ‘ladder’ is an up-sell cycle, ideally that provides increasingly granular signals about the needs of your personas, resulting in a series of growing sales that culminate in a bigger-ticket item, sold to a smaller percentage of leads in the funnel. 

Put simply, you don’t try to sell the big-ticket, high-buy-threshold item from the doorYou design a sales ladder that culminates in the sale of that item.

A typical ladder: 

  • Offers initially free things, ideally that provide you insight into who might want items of greater cost;
  • Subsequently offers low-cost items to an increasingly small segment;
  • Provides insights into who wants still more costly solutions;
  • Culminates in the conversion of a high-cost item, proffered to the smallest segment.

This means that if you want to sell dental caps or bridges, you start with a free cleaning. Not only will people accept the freebie, but you’ll be garnering more and more information about who the smaller segments are and what they want. During the free dental cleaning, you (the dentist) might see a cavity and schedule a repair that costs them $600, and which offers $400 profit to you. 

A smaller segment of the people who got the free cleaning will choose to get a cavity filled, but some segment of those people will need a bridge or caps – which are $20,000 apiece, and which provide $15,000 in profit to your dental practice.

The money-maker is the bridge or caps; you eat the losses up to that point.

With each step up the ladder, an offer is made – for a more valuable service – to a smaller and smaller audience as you build a relationship and trust.

Too often, marketers and businesses jump right to trying to sell the most profitable service or product, forgetting that a trust relationship building has to be established for people. They forget the Internet is full of scammers.

Too often, marketers and businesses jump right to trying to sell the most profitable service or product, forgetting that a trust relationship building has to be established for people. They forget the Internet is full of scammers.

If a website or brand is big and established enough, with great brand exposure, a footprint and other validators, selling household-name products, then this might work. You can jump right on Sears.com or Overstock.com to buy a $1,500 bed. But if you’re selling a unique product or service, that’s generally not the case.

The same psychology behind up-sales explains repeat sales: people already trust that brand or company, and therefore there’s little question of their ability to deliver. 

Figures vary, but it’s many times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to re-sell them on a complimentary product from your company. 

In each case, it has to do with trust. When considering your web presence, ask yourself if you’ve given potential customers sufficient reason to believe and trust you. 

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