Marketing 101: It's All About Trust

Permission Marketing.  The Clue Train Manifesto. 
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It seems like every few years another marketing idea or meme hits the business world and people spend millions of dollars trying to implement it.  Sometimes these are good ideas, sometimes they're bad ideas.  But let's talk about the essence of marketing: Trust.  If, as we argued earlier, marketing is the creation of demand then for a purchase to occur the the purchaser must trust the seller.  Otherwise why would you give them your money?

I just added an announcement list to my Marketing 101 stuff and the process of thinking it through made me write this essay about trust using a simple "Sign Up for My Announcement List" example.  You'd think that this would be just so easy, and the code is easy, but people don't want to give out email addresses anymore so now you have to work at collecting it.  Here's how I think it should be done.

How Do You Establish Trust?

This is just so simple that most marketing drones have forgotten it or just never learned it.  Here it is: Be honest.  Be open.  Tell the truth.  Admit your errors. 

Take a look at the sign up form below:

Yes, this is probably larger than it has to be.  And, perhaps, it could be written better.  But here's the important part:

• The user has a very clear idea as to what's going to happen
• The user has an exact description of what data's being captured and how it will be used in our cookies page.
• There is a quid pro quo exchange of my email address for his.  Even though it's lots of places, putting it right in front of the user where I'm asking for his or her address makes it real.  Adding the phone number is probably not needed but it emphasizes the humanity of it all.
• The user has the ability to opt out at any point with the delete cookies link at the bottom of the cookies page.
• It's simple: Only 1 field
• It caters to the audience: My readers are smart, generally engineers themselves so why hide the inner workings?
• It allows for that all too embarassing human frailty -- poor memory.  Given that we've all gotten two copies of email newsletters at one point or another and HATE IT then this tells the user that this isn't going to happen without forcing him or her to admit to something embarassing (i.e. poor memory is usually a sign of age and who wants to be reminded that they're getting older). 

Did I make too much of this very simple trust example?  I'm not 100% sure but I do know that this is a signup form that I would actually use and that says quite a bit to me since I average 100+ pieces of spam per day.

Oh and by the way, that signup form above is live and you can sign up if you want.

It's very, very cool to be a marketer that can code his own stuff...

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