Us marketing people tend to bandy about platitudes like “people need to trust you before they buy from you” without really digging into what they actually mean.

Of course people need to trust you before buying from you. Duh.

But what kind of trust? Trust is complex and multi-faceted.

I trust my Mum to love me and think in my best interests. But I wouldn't trust her to fix my computer if it was broken.

When it comes to buying online courses there are a few different levels of trust involved. One of them you might not normally think of.

Obviously, people need to trust you're not going to take their money and rip them off. That goes without saying and I would expect everyone reading this has the sort of business that's already established that kind of trust.

But with online courses, it needs to go deeper.

Courses are complex. It's really difficult to tell from a course description if the course is quite right for you. Especially if the marketing focuses only on the benefits you'll get from it and not the nitty gritty details of the course.

Is it at the right level or is it too advanced or not advanced enough? Does it cover tactics you have the skill or desire to learn? Will it work for your particular type of business?

Because of that uncertainty, I'd want to know if the people providing the course “played nice” with buyers.

In other words, if you bought the course and discovered it wasn't a good fit would it be easy to get your money back? Or would you have to go through all sorts of “did you complete all the exercises, can you prove you actually implemented what we taught” kind of nonsense.

For many courses I'd also want to know that the seller would go the extra mile to make sure I succeeded with the course.

Maybe it's just me, but I find that when I take a course my situation often doesn't quite fit with the examples being taught and I need to ask questions to apply the knowledge to me specifically.

Will my questions go unanswered? Will I end up getting feedback from someone employed by the course creator who can parrot back the party line but isn't expert enough to tweak the advice for unusual situations.

Or will the expert themselves give me the best of their thinking to help?

These are all questions of trust.

They're all things that can't really be quantified or controlled by contract or service level or known for certain in advance.

They're about whether you trust the course provider will be looking out for you. When the need arises, will they go the extra mile to help?

Of course, we don't analyse that stuff rationally before taking a decision to buy. We just get a good feeling about them and it makes it easy to buy.

Or we don't get a good feeling and we hesitate.

What gives us those good or bad feelings?

It's all the interactions we've had with that person before. Either in real life or more likely with online courses, from our online interactions.

Do they come across as a nice person in their emails? If we message them, do they take the time to answer and try to help us?

The impression you give about what sort of person you are is often as important as the “value” you give in your emails.

And that's where the final, more surprising role of trust comes in.

Because you only get to make a good impression on someone if they're actually paying attention to you. If they actually open and read your emails (or your social posts or whatever way you communicate with them).

That final level of trust is “do they trust you to always send them useful, interesting communications?”

If so, you get the chance to build the other levels of trust you need.

If not, it's game over. 

If your messages appear in their inbox but they don't trust they'll get something useful from them, they'll stay unopened. And you'll never build that deeper trust needed for them to be ready to buy.