Remember that guy at the bar, who hit on anyone that moved? Remember how you’d make fun of him after you left? ”So…frickin’…desperate”, you’d say to your friends.
Guess what? People are saying the same thing about your business.
When times are going well, your business smells great. Honest relationships with customers, selling to them because you truly want to offer them something to improve their life.
When things start to go badly, you start to stink. You start to sell things just because you need the cash. You start to think of your customers as a homogeneous group that you can drill for money. You start to have the stench of desperation.
The ironic, and damning, thing about this is that customers can smell it. You think you’re offering “deals of a lifetime”…they smell the stench.
What does this look like? Here are a few examples:
- Spamming your email list with offers and discounts
- Scraping websites for email addresses or buying lists
- Telemarketing
- Putting “Buy”, ‘Subscribe” or “Purchase” links in every conceivable corner of your website.
- Saying things like “If we can just get more subscribers, then an average of 5% will convert, and we’ll make $X.XX”
You get the idea. Look, when things go south, it’s easy to react and start resorting to these kind of measures. The problem is, your customers can smell the desparation on you. No one wants to go home with that guy at the end of the bar.
