How Your Marketing Campaign Can Destroy Your Business

Today, I'm going to look at a pet peeve of mine - the fake offer.

We've all gotten the emails - "I'll buy your dinner if you take a presentation." Most of the time, you probably ignore. Not as much as the "take our meeting and we'll enter you in a drawing." That gets deleted faster than you can say "lottery? No thanks."

But every so often, the service, offering, etc. could be compelling. You've got some time, and you might learn something, so you take up the offer. Then as you get qualified in (or out), the other side goes radio silent.

Oh, LEGALLLLLLLY, they didn't break their promise. You never get the presentation, so you don't qualify for the prize. But they make the decision to not present.

This happened to me last month (guilty party shall remain nameless). The offer came through a daily newsletter - $50 to take a call to learn about XYZ. The topic wasn't directly my current role, but certainly has been in the past and will be again in the future.

I got two very innocent-sounding emails asking some qualification questions from an opportunity perspective

• What's your current budget for XYZ?
• How are you currently managing XYZ?

After I answered those questions, the rep, the emails, etc. just disappeared. One week into my vacation, I was cleaning out my inbox and came across the initial newsletter - "heyyyyyy, I never got the presentation nor my $50 card." So I proactively reached out to ask about getting the intro.

Instead of asking for time or offering some times, I got an offer for two different pricing options - I could spend $A on the fly or I could pay a reg fee of $10,000 dollars to access their "savings" and then a link to the self-service start page.

What a crock of S%$#!!!!!!

Well, I'll NEVER do business with them. And I unsubscribed from the newsletter this morning. So they not only poisoned their own well, but also their vendor's.

What can you learn from this if you're a marketer?

If you make a marketing offer, then deliver the goods. Don't loophole people out of getting whatever the offer is. And don't use the sales team to save your budget by qualifying people out. If they don't want to give presentations to just anybody, then DON'T MAKE AN OFFER THAN JUST ANYBODY WILL TRY TO GET.