trust Archives - Barbara Genest

With more social media and online communication, being genuine and trustworthy are two important characteristics many consumers are looking for from businesses more than ever.

With authentic engagement and communication, you can foster communities that work together to empower each other and your brand. It provides the knowledge you need to improve your products while also helping the members solve problems that can then be used to improve their lives and others. It’s about being real, inspiring your community, and doing your best not to mislead or misdirect them.

The following are five important principles to learn and incorporate to inspire authentic community engagement and grow your business:

Get the Community Involved and Active Right Away

Don’t wait until you have a lot of members to start publishing information and activating the community. At first, your community may feel a little lonely until you get more members but keeping it active and full of information that will still be there when people join is very important to building a dynamic and vibrant community.

Encourage Trust and Integrity

Set the rules of your community to establish trust and highlight your integrity to the group. As you communicate openly with members of your community, others observe and become more trusting of you as they notice how much integrity you have.

Foster Community-Led Solutions

As a business owner, you need to create and or find solutions for your ideal customer’s problems related to your niche and your expertise. The impressive thing about having a community is getting input to create more solutions from the people who need them.

Be Consistent, Clear, and Open with Communication

It can help to create a branding guide that includes your business personality and voice to ensure that all content and communication are consistent, clear, and accurate. It’s a lot easier to be open when you know for sure where your values lie and how to ensure you stick to them.

Empower and Support Your Audience

The best thing about a group is that you will have one of the best advantages in empowering and supporting your audience. After all, you want them to succeed, and if they succeed, you do too.

Create powerful and informed content that serves your members and only your members — meaning don’t just automatically share content that has been shared in other places unless you changed it in some way or added additional meaning to it by connecting it to a success story or a point you want to share. The more personal the content being shared in the group, the more likely your members will come back and engage with each other. Content is how you keep your target audience interested and involved, so make it worth it.

How Community Member-To-Member Engagement Grows Your Business

Email funnels are a set or series of marketing materials that inspire your audience to do something—most of the time in the form of a purchase or to benefit your company in some way. Your emails provide value that persuades your audience to purchase your products, follow your social media pages or become a loyal audience and customer.

At the start of every email, the funnel includes an opt-in that gets your audience’s attention and trust in exchange for their email address. Then once you grab their information, you can start going down the email marketing funnel through well-timed and targeted emails. These emails should be full of information to establish your authority and trust further.

Then you can lead your readers right out of the funnel to your landing page to hopefully turn them into brand-new customers. Lastly, the funnel repeats, or the reader is thrown into a new funnel to further continue the process in the hopes of a repeat purchase. The email marketing funnel never truly ends, as you should always be nurturing your readers and create new and interesting sequences to establish their loyalty.

As you can probably tell by now, email funnels are powerful because:

They Solve a Problem

Your audience is readers because you provide some value for them. You solve a problem in the form of entertainment, education, comedy, or more. It all depends on your niche and why you are starting an email funnel campaign in the first place.

They Are Personal

While you may be sending the same email to many readers, that is not how they see it. It goes directly into their personal email, and frequently they are reading it alone. Even better, it is personalized to them. Making them feel special, important, and connected with your brand. Allowing you to provide more value and then more easily convert them into paying customers.

They Create Brand Awareness, Trust, and Credibility

Emails are another great way to provide your audience education and resources, further increasing your industry’s brand awareness, trust, and credibility. The more you communicate to your audience, the more they get to know you and trust your authority, especially through quality content that solves a problem.

As you can see, if you want to build a loyal audience while turning them into paying customers, then email marketing funnels are a must. In fact, if you are not convinced yet, then it’s important to let you know that many businesses often see a return of forty-eight dollars for every one dollar they spend on email marketing — making it by far one of the most affordable and easiest ways to market and boost your sales.

Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out