Trust Issues -- A Sure Way to Kill a Marketing Campaign

Today I received a Linked In message from someone I don't know describing a free assessment tool for using social media to generate leads. The word FREE was used 3 times in all caps, so it caught my attention, of course, (FREE is a trigger word), and I clicked on the link to the web page. The page itself had some good persuasive design, but Trust alarm bells started ringing, and before long the entire interaction had gone down the drain.

Three critical Trust factors were violated in this interaction:

Trust Issue 1: Insincerity -- The original linked in email started with: "I think you attended one of our free training classes on Generating Leads using LinkedIN and or Facebook in the past."... I don't remember attending any training classes on this topic, and the author even says "I think"... so it's an amazing testament to the word FREE that I even went the next step and clicked on the link. But my Trust alarms were activated by that first sentence, and that colored the rest of my experience.

Trust Issue 2: Mispellings and grammatical errors -- At the web page itself there was a grammatical error and a mispelled word. I know this sounds small, but these are Trust issues. I was already on alert because of the original email, and seeing these errors in the copy of the web page made me wonder how legitimate these people were. STILL the copy at the web page was persuasive and I was willing to fill out the form for the free assessment. Willing, but not able! Read on...

Trust Issue 3: Usability issues and errors -- I tried to fill out the form 4 times! There were numerous unexplained errors... One of them said that Field #6 requires numbers... well, none of the fields are labelled as Field #6, but I counted and I think this was the phone number field... I did have a number in it... Another error was that there was a text box labelled "Additional Request". I had no idea what to put in there, but I got an error message saying it was required! I tried 4 times to fill out the form, but kept getting errors. Now my trust had eroded down to zero. Not only will I not be getting my free assessment, or buying their service for $199 -- I will have a hard time trusting the company, and I even have written this blog post, passing on my trust issues to others.

Lesson -- Make sure you aren't violating trust. Although each of these trust issues is small on its own, together they create a Trust 3-alarm fire that chases away potential customers.