Your guests are responsible for keeping your business afloat, buying your products and supporting your brand whenever they feel inclined to do so. If you lose their confidence, or if you lose their trust, they may choose one of your competitors instead and leave your brand forever.
Fortunately, there are a great number of strategies that you can use to increase guest confidence. Today, we'll be looking at some of the top strategies to increase guest confidence within your email marketing techniques.
What Is Guest Confidence and Why Does It Matter?
Guest confidence, or customer confidence, refers to the amount of confidence that your prospects and customers have in your brand. Do they see your brand as a leading authority in this space? Do they trust the things you say? Do they genuinely believe that you're going to deliver the products and services you've promised? If the answer to all these questions is yes, your guest confidence is very high.
High guest confidence can help you in a number of different ways, including:
- Data analysis and customer understanding. Better understanding the confidence of your guests can help you execute a number of positive changes in your business. If guest confidence increases in response to the release of a new product or a major change within your organization, you can feel confident that that change was valuable.
- Brand reputation management. Customer confidence is also important when managing your brand reputation. In fact, guest confidence is one of the best ways to indirectly measure the reputation of your brand. The better your brand reputation is, the easier time you'll have attracting new customers to it.
- Sales performance and purchasing potential. When guests feel confident in your brand, they tend to be much more likely to purchase products from your brand. Increasing guest confidence in your email marketing campaign can therefore help you achieve higher sales revenue.
- Reviews, referrals, and future opportunities. The higher your customer confidence is, the more likely your customers will be to provide good reviews, referrals, and future opportunities.
How to Increase Guest Confidence Via Email Marketing
So how do you use email marketing to increase your guest confidence?
There are several worthwhile strategies to try, including:
- Send a variety of informative emails. Informative emails are always helpful. You might be educating your customers on a specific topic or providing them with information on the next steps in their forthcoming purchase. The point is, you're providing them with information and you're serving as an authority in the process. Send a variety of different informative emails, including welcome emails that provide onboarding instructions and update emails that are automatically sent when your customer goes through different phases of an important process. The more you inform your customers, and the more consistently you do it, the more they're going to come to trust you.
- Include personalized video in your emails. Personalized videos carry tremendous potential in your email marketing strategy. Unlike static videos, these videos are completely customized for the person accessing them, with different visuals, different audio, and different written prompts. Because these videos are so individualized, they're seen as highly relevant, and they do a much better job of capturing the attention of viewers. Once you include personalized videos in your emails, you'll find that guests naturally trust you more – and they’ll see your brand as a bigger and more prominent authority.
- Deliver on your promises. One easy way to violate customer trust is to break your promises or do something other than you intended. If you deliver on your promises, and do so consistently, guest trust will do nothing but grow. This applies to several phases of your email marketing examples; initially, you'll need to explain to your customers exactly how you're going to use their email address. Later on, you'll need to pay close attention to the accuracy of your subject lines and teases.
- Watch your timing and frequency. Keep a tight leash on your email marketing timing and frequency. It's tempting to send as many emails as possible as often as possible, but if you spam your audience members, they're going to lose trust and confidence in you. Instead, send off emails to increase the effectiveness of your strategy, but not so much that you're annoying your customers.
- Be clear and error-free. As much as possible, keep the content of your emails as clear and error-free as possible. If your customers have a hard time understanding your emails, or if they have a hard time accessing them because of performance issues, their confidence in your brand is going to be shaken. By contrast, if your emails are always perfectly polished and free of error, they're going to have much more faith in your brain moving forward.
- Fix and apologize for mistakes. When done properly, apologies are powerful. Occasionally, despite your best efforts, your brand may make a mistake, such as sending an email at the wrong time or including inaccurate information in one of your emails. If and when this happens, try to fix the mistake as quickly as possible and then apologize for it. If all your email recipients get a quick apology email explaining the situation, they'll feel much better about it.
- Provide free content whenever possible. People love free content. This is especially true if the content helps them make an important decision or provides them with information they never had before. Adding free content to your emails, in the form of newsletters, white papers, or books, is a great way to secure the competence and loyalty of your recipients.
- Ask for feedback. Finally, ask your email recipients for feedback. Just by asking, you'll be increasing their confidence that you care what they think. Collecting data on their email preferences can also help you refine your email marketing tools further.