SoloSEO

If You Want Customers, Don’t Scare Them Away

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 21st, 2007

Many of us in the Internet Marketing world may not use mass physical mailings very often, but they are a very traditional form of marketing. Note the back of this mailing I received the other day. You might first notice it has a rip in it. Yes, that was my first instinct after seeing what you may not notice with this small image. Yes, the envelope flap is actually PRINTED onto the envelope to make it look like an envelope with a flap.

Was there something important inside? I will never know. I don’t know who it was from or what the contents were, but once I saw the fake envelope flap I knew it was worthless.

We can easily scare people away from becoming a customer, or even potentially being a customer (i.e. me reading the document inside this letter), in many different ways. Here are a few to think about:

1) Not delivering the expected content. Example: A PPC ad that says “Dining Room Furniture” but after you click you go to a super furniture warehouse, where you then have to find the dining room furniture. Another example, your ad says you have a certain product but you don’t at all.

2) Worthless content. Having content that doesn’t even make sense, or just as worse has poor grammar/spelling, or is scraped from some other website and claimed to be your own.

3) A long ad page for what appears to be a decent product but that uses lame marketing gimmicks to attempt to convince me that my money is worth it, all the while making me shake my head in disgust that people actually believe and buy this kind of stuff.

Seth Godin wrote a book called All Marketers Are Liars that is a fantastic read for anyone who owns their own company, runs a business, or is working on branding themself or their blog. He talks about telling authentic stories, even if they end up making the customer tell themselves a lie. I highly suggest you read the book, or get the audio book. This mass mailing was not authentic from the start, it was a total fake. At least make me open it to find out it is a scam.

What are some other things that scare you away immediately? What is something you are doing on your sites that scares your customers away?

Visited 1486 times June 21st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Entry Filed under: Advertising, Content and SEO, Customer Perspective, Marketing