With email campaigns it’s simply the nature of the beast. It’s gonna be an uphill battle for you to get people to read your stuff if your email has a title of:

“Maybe Someday You Could Get Somebody Interested Using This Technique….maybe”

They might as well TRY to get your attention.

Your reaction is understandable, and anyone advertising trust work has to take it into account; it’s probably a bad headline.

But at the same time, if you think about it a bit, you’d probably agree that a great deal of trust actually does take place “in an instant.”

We have this platitude that says “trust takes a long time to build…and a moment to destroy.” In fact, that’s more false than true. My life’s work is trust, and I’ve written about this particular topic at:
http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/844/Top-Trust-Myths-1-of-2-Trust-Takes-Time

Certain aspects of trust do require time: any sense of reliability, for example, literally requires the passage of time. But other aspects of trust–the more emotional assessments we make about others’ intentions, or their ability to empathize or relate to others–those judgments we make in a moment.

As in most things trust-related, it depends on the context.

(For what it’s worth, I would also share your skepticism (which sounds like it was pretty instant, by the way) based on the headline. But that doesn’t mean the content is ridiculous; it’s quite plausible).

Two things, though:

1) Not everybody does this (God knows); and

2) I can well imagine a set of tips that don’t build *active* trust—the kind a donor has for an organization for example—so much as a more passive kind of trust. Making sure your website looks professional, all the links work, pages are titled appropriate things, etc.—all the things that search engines look for to give a website a higher quality “score”—are chosen precisely because they allow a user to trust that what they’re looking at is authentic and doesn’t have any sinister ulterior motives.

Maybe this isn’t “trust” so much as “lack of mistrust”—just because someone’s staying on your site doesn’t mean they’re ready to email you a routing number so you can go back to being prince of Nigeria. But clarity of presentation on the web does build implicit trust, and organizations ignore it at their peril.

Anyway, love the work ya’all do. Thanks for doing it.