How digital-first customers respond to trust-based marketing engagement

Customers are more connected than ever digitally. But how do they connect with brands emotionally?

Through trust, a new Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report suggests. Customers are willing to trust brands, and there are certain issues that are key to that.

Trusting customers. Nearly half (49%) say they mostly trust companies to act with society’s best interests in mind, and an additional 19% say they completely trust this to be the case, according to the report. Under a third say they mostly distrust (27%) or completely distrust (5%) companies.

Since society depends on safeguarding the earth’s resources, environmental concerns loom large in customer trust. This is why 78% of customers say that environmental practices weigh in on their decision to buy. Going green wins trust, and trust leads to buying.

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Service. Another road to trust comes out of how brands that sell products manage everything else. Experience is critical. And this is where the study shows a raising of the bar for customer demands.

In 2020, 80% of customers said that the experience the company provides is as import as the product or services. In 2022, this number jumped to 88%.

Communication. The pandemic also raised the stakes for communication and customer distrust of crossed signals. 74% of customer said that communicating honestly and transparently was more important to them than before the pandemic.

Why we care. The digital customer is a moving target. This means marketers have to continually update their best practices to deliver higher quality experience. And they have to meet high expectations while remaining transparent and not appearing to jeopardize the trust of their customers.

That’s the negative side of the exchange, the multiplying challenges and pitfalls of digital experience. On the plus side, it appears that customers are providing more opportunities than ever for marketers to build trust when all the dots are connected.

Read next: Gen Z metaverse users are more trusting and willing to spend

About The Author

Chris Wood

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country's first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on "innovation theater" at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.