Received a call here at Area 224 HQ from a dear friend, and here was his question:
Why do I have to jump through so many hoops to get someone’s free report?
In brief, here’s what happened:
Credit: IOC.
- Friend attended webinar for free.
- Friend liked what he heard from a speaker, decided to visit a website to get the “Free Report” valued at “some figure that makes it sound really valuable.”
- When he tried to get the report, he was asked to buy something. He said no.
- Was taken to another page to download the free report.
- Was asked to input email address.
- He was then taken to another page and was asked to buy something else.
- Meanwhile, the email with instructions to download the Free Report ended up in a Spam folder.
- He got confused.
- He emailed the provider of the Free Report.
- Provider sent out another note saying s/he had messed up, suggested a new approach – new link to Free Report.
- Friend lost interest, was confused, felt taken, didn’t want to jump through hoops.
Result: Prospect (my friend) moved into “Will Not Buy” category.
This has resulted in my creation of a new style of marketing: Empathy Marketing.
If you think about it, Empathy Marketing is pretty easy to do: make it darn easy for the prospect to get information from you. Especially if that information is FREE.
You see, FREE needs to mean, well, FREE. Not “Free with strings attached.” Not “Free with email address and permission to send you a bunch of stuff.” FREE.
Area 224 has some newsletters of our own. Sometimes we send out an email when we post something neat on the blog, like this. We often tweet about what we’re up to. Etc.
Oh, and our Real SMM product – the one we’re partnering with Socially Mediated’s Jim Alexander on? We have some FREE stuff there. Like a White Paper that’s a FREE Report. Here’s the link: http://realsmm.com/5mistakes.
Jim and I had a 30-second call about this very subject yesterday. “Down with Rhythmic Gymnastics,” I told him. “I wholeheartedly agree,” he said.
