Leverage Trust To Sell More Natural Health Products Online

Trust is the glue in every relationship.

It holds all agreements together and any future of a deeper level of interaction.

Especially between customers and companies in any sale transaction.

In the first part of building the relationship, a prospect must extend an implied level of trust, in order to buy and become a customer.

Without trust you could not have any sale.

Why is trust important to selling health online?

Trust is even more important when buying a product that you ingest like organic, non-GMO food or a natural health supplement or a diet or exercise product or health device where a customer must take action on in order to get the benefit.

For a product like a pair of shoes the hurdle of buying is more or less based on price, and personal taste.

For such a product a customer’s trust is only extended as far as the brand.

But for a health product a buyer must extend his or her trust further to trust that it will actually work.

For a shoe to work it just has to fit.

So how do you build trust to sell more natural health products online?

Online Trust is built, first fast than slow

The formula looks like this:

Building Trust Online = Accelerated Trust + Gradual Trust

You can’t get to gradual trust without passing through accelerated trust.

Think of gradual trust as long-term and accelerated trust as short-term.

Why fast first?

Because prospects move quite quickly once they decide to.

Before that, there is no movement and no decision. But once there is a decision they move quite quickly across the bridge of trust then proceed with caution.

Essentially an online visitor needs to be comfortable in order to decide if they are going to move forward.

In a sense they need to start to trust you before they can fully trust you.

Which is why, accelerated trust is built quickly and is just enough to move a visitor to the next step and ultimately towards purchase.

We see this pattern of fast then slow when we conduct user testing and observe what visitors are actually doing on a web page.

The behavior is always the same.

First the visitor moves their eye or mouse fast, assessing the lay of the land then they slow down.

This is kind of like a peak into the mind of a prospect, you can almost see the wheels turning as a reflection of their mouse behavior.

So, what’s the first step for building trust online?

Start with one small step

People look toward trust-shortcuts as a way to take the first step toward trusting your company and product enough to move to the next micro step.

This accelerated-trust is built very fast, but it can also be lost just as fast.

It is said that all journeys begin with the first step and the journey to deeper trust is no different.

When visitors buy health products online they look for trust-shortcuts as a way to make a decision fast if they should spend more time with the purchase decision or move on to the next product.

These trust-shortcuts bridge the gap between zero trust and the first step of micro-trust.

Shortcuts are signals of credibility and they come in many forms.

The fastest of which are to use trustmarks.

Trustmarks can be a badge, image or logo displayed on a website to indicate that the website business has been shown to be trustworthy, ideally by a third party.

Let’s take the case of Sarah.

Sarah’s husband has plantar fasciitis, a common causes of heel pain, that causes pain and inflammation of tissue, that runs across the bottom of your foot and connects your heel bone to your toes.

She’s researching the topic on Google and found the site HeelThatPain.com

There are some trustmarks in the top header of the site, that include endorsements from professional basketball athletes. Sarah doesn’t quite make the connection, since she sees plantar fasciitis as a sedentary condition since her husband is not a very active guy.

But then she notices the clinically proven results and the U.S. patent icon and is willing to continue to read and scroll further.

In my humble opinion the clinically proven results icon lacks a great deal of proof, you essentially have to take their word for it, at least at this stage of the sales conversation. This is something they should test.

Trustmarks are one way to accelerate trust and move a prospect along the path to build enough accelerated trust in order to buy.

Sarah continues to read the home page of the site. There is some very informative information, but more importantly there are testimonials on the page as well.

Testimonials are also a bridge to a step on the accelerated trust journey.

Knowing that other people trusted this product in the past is helpful to take another step towards a purchase. This is the most basic form of social-proof there is.

Throw on top of that a good strong risk reversals, better know as a guaranteed you have elements that enable your visitor to quickly move to a level of trust that’s just enough to make a purchase decision. Not a deep level of trust. That takes more time and happens slowly, but just enough to nudge the visitor toward trust by deferring their judgement of a poor decision.

literally the rational perspective says, if this decision is a a poor one, then we can always reverse that by claiming the guarantee.

So what happens is, the customer puts off the thought of this purchase being a bad decision, deciding to think about that later, literally 30, or 90 days from now whatever the guarantee period is, in order to take one more micro-step towards trust and decide to buy.

But all these fast elements work together to build trust quickly at a very superficial level and that’s why trust online is build first fast then slow.

What does this all mean for the online health marketer?

Leveraging trust to sell health products is vital to making an impact on your business and the lifetime value of your customer. However, the level of trust that a visitor starts with is different for every market and every type of traffic.

Understanding the marketplace level of trust is key to selling more online. Without a full understanding of the market place trust and without specifically designing optimization split-tests for trust, in the health market online, you can’t get traction.