Having worked with a myriad of small businesses and startups, I’ve seen the stress early-stage entrepreneurs face when they’re faced with a gap between the realities of cash flow and what is needed to survive. When money is tight, startups tend to be reactive in creating more revenue. All too often founders find themselves chasing initiatives that, while revenue-generating in the short term, often don’t yield the highest returns in the long term.

Having a good long-term marketing strategy is key to overcoming this. Your marketing messaging should create real emotional resonance and give consumers a reason to buy and buy again. However, there are four costly marketing messaging mistakes that startups should avoid:

1. Forgetting to resonate emotionally and visually with your consumer base.

All too often e-commerce startups make the error of tailoring messaging to what the teams or founders resonate with. It’s one of the gravest mistakes in marketing for emerging brands. For the most part, messaging tends to almost exclusively focus on the features and benefits–a practical approach but rarely an effective one in a desensitized digital world.

An age-old adage applies here: show, don’t tell. Human beings are visual–in order to purchase, they must be compelled. In order to be compelled, they must first understand. And in order to understand–especially with such short attention spans–they must first see and feel. There’s a lot that has to happen in the first five to seven seconds of a digital interaction with your brand, copy and creative that resonates helps consumers feel the experience, benefits, and value of what you offer. If they can’t visualize it, your campaigns are dead in the water.

When you can use messaging and visuals that speak to the core emotions of consumers, they’re more likely to hit that purchase button much faster. Core emotions are ones like joy, safety, and security, and it’s up to you and your marketing team to ascertain which ones matter most to your audiences.

If you’re looking for an example of resonant marketing that appeals to consumers’ core emotions, study Liquid Death’s marketing and advertising. This edgy water brand’s meteoric rise is in part due to its creative and messaging mastery and command of entertaining pop culture trends, which has really flexed its muscles when it comes to tapping into its demographics’ sense of fun, social connectedness online, and desire for healthier lifestyles.

2. Failing to continue the conversation, even post-purchase.

Once a consumer purchases, it is by no means the end of the customer journey. The work isn’t done. It is both easier and less costly to sell to someone who’s already purchased from you than to get new customers, and continuing the conversation and the relationship is absolutely critical to increasing your customer’s lifetime value and getting subsequent repurchases, much faster.

This back-end retention play matters a great deal when setting out to scale your e-commerce brand, setting the threshold for tolerance for high costs per thousand impressions and customer acquisition cost.

This is the single largest impact driver when it comes to steepening the lifetime value curve:

Set up post-conversion email flows that inform customers what to expect and how to use the products they’ve ordered. Use these flows to ask for feedback, provide use cases of what they purchased, and serve up complementary products that can get them to their desires and goals easier, better, or faster. Let them know they’re a valuable part of your product development process by notifying them of updates, new features, and new variants when improvements to the product or product line are made.

3. Not focusing on demonstrating trust.

E-commerce is a trust-centric business. Clothing companies are asking people to purchase apparel without trying it on for size. Cosmetic companies require consumers to buy without seeing how their shades will look and feel on their own skin. Supplement companies are asking for the sale of products with unfamiliar ingredients to ingest. The list goes on and on. Driving conversions at efficiency necessitates a certain degree of trust: in your products, your ability to fulfil on time, and that a satisfactory remedy will take place should you fail to deliver on your marketing promises.

There is a direct correlation between the degree of trust your acquisition and retention audiences alike have in your brand and the cost-efficiency with which your marketing teams can run marketing and advertising initiatives. Why? Marketing that can prove your brand is and can be trusted will sell a consumer into what you offer much faster and more efficiently than marketing that falls short, here.

Most already know that consumers are more likely to buy if a trusted source vouches for your brand, but what isn’t as readily apparent for many brands is that the type of trusted source matters. Celebrities can often garner plenty of attention, curiosity, and enough trust to drive the conversion for some brands and products, but it often comes down to whether the consumer base trusts the celebrity as an authority of some kind for that particular niche, and sometimes when the celebrity and the niche don’t seem to “match” these types of influencer campaigns can fall flat. A celebrity known for his chiselled physique who looks great for his age would match and resonate rather well for messaging that promotes an anti-aging, organic health supplement, for example, whereas one who isn’t known for their focus on health or longevity may not.

It all comes down to the levels of trust audiences have about their degree of knowledge in that particular space. People can generally sense when an influencer deal has just been thrown in front of a celebrity rather than coming from a genuine place of interest and knowledge in the product. The way in which you build trust matters.

There are many other approaches to this, from communicating risk-free and money-back guarantees and hassle-free returns to showcasing video reviews, social proof, putting the product up against extreme testing, and behind-the-scenes creative on how the sausage gets made, there are endless opportunities to instil trust in your products and the brand itself.

Whatever the approach, just make sure you employ one, ideally many at different stages of the buyer consideration process and customer journey. Brands cannot afford not to talk about how they’ve built trust and authority. Showcase the lengths you go to maintain and uphold that trust, highlight trusted people or companies who trust you as well, and ideate at every point ways to prove your product does what it says it does and will yield a positive experience. Trust is not a marketing communication you want to leave out–it should be front and center.