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There's No Sizzle Without Steak:
An Important Lesson for E-Publishers
by ListChannel.Com Staff
Peter Boulder of Pepper and Rodgers Group tells a story of a
friend of his who recently visited New York City. His friend
spotted an ad that read something like: "Buy at our grocery
store and if the cashier doesn't smile at you when you check
out, everything in your cart is free."
Impressed, he made a straight line for the store in question
and filled up his shopping cart with everything he'd need
for a week. To his chagrin, the lady at checkout not only
didn't smile, but didn't even look at him. But there was
some consolation in the situation, he thought, and he
triumphantly claimed his bounty of free groceries.
The cashier, however, denied any knowledge of such a special offer. Puzzled, the
visiting gentleman took out his
newspaper and showed her the ad.
"Ah," she said, "look at that date! That's last week's
promotion!"
Now what was wrong with the grocery store's marketing
approach? For a start, of course, friendly customer
service, if you want to offer it, cannot be contingent upon
certain time slots or seasons of the year. Either it's part
of your mission statement, your philosophy of business, or
it isn't. That's pretty straightforward.
But let's say you're not really interested in the
service-with-a-smile concept. (A pity - but your loss!) You
know your cashier's only there for the paycheck, and that's
fine by you, as long as she's competent at her job of
checking out purchases. You don't expect her to take any
special interest in your customers, and you just have this
"smile or don't pay" gig once in a while as a stunt to bring
a few more people into the store.
The question now is: how effective can this kind of
marketing tactic be?
Well, in the case under discussion, it may not be the
ideal way of stimulating new business, but such a promotion
could serve some purpose, up to a point. Conceivably, some
new people, or those that haven't shopped for a while, will
be attracted by the prospect of a winning smile.
The result: a little more money in the cash registers, as
long as the promotion is running and the cashiers are
cooperating. Even once the promotion is over, a few of these
people might have already become habituated to doing their
shopping there.
Now, instead of friendly countenances (which, sadly, it
doesn't really believe in anyway), let's say that the store
decided to offer, during the period of the promotion,
special discounts on certain products, or a brand new
product for free with purchases over a certain amount?
Which of these two promotions is likely to be more effective
in the long run? Surely, the second. Why? Simply because
once the customers have been induced to sample the products
on "special offer", and happily, they find them to their
liking, they will probably continue to buy them at full
price, once the promotion is over.
Nowadays, ambitious entrepreneurs dream up and implement all kinds of ingenious
incentives to drum up business -
contests, referral bonuses, points, loyalty programs, you
name it. Some types of viral marketing also rely heavily on
incentives to persuade people to pass the message along.
All too often, the end result is disappointment - for
entrepreneur and consumer alike.
This usually happens when there's little real relation
between the incentive and the product or service, and the
product, in turn, falls short of the consumer's
expectations. Viral marketers and their willing agents may
succeed beyond expectation in whipping up mass hysteria
about a new idea - which, in the end, turns out to be a damp
squib.
Unfortunately, email publishers who offer incentives to
prospective new subscribers, sometimes suffer the same fate.
Disillusioned newsletter consumers are becoming increasingly
wary about biting the carrots dangled before their eyes.
But if incentive and product are closely connected, at least
you have a chance of success. The most cynical of people
will bite a carrot if they're genuinely convinced that it's
truly representative of a sumptuous repast ahead. If that
conviction is then vindicated and everything's according to
their taste, they'll stay right to the end of the party.
It's hard enough, though, to produce scintillating content
in your publication itself, without being forced to create
additional "bait" or "teaser" material in the form of
special reports or the like. And if your new readers are
disappointed with the final product, the most tantalizing
incentives won't help in the end.
You only have to look at the prominent news sites on the
Internet that repeat virtually the identical stories week
after week, to get an idea of the challenge of producing
consistently good content on an ongoing basis.
Yet, if you really want to succeed, this is precisely the
challenge which you, as publisher, must face. Good marketing
strategies are essential, but marketing is the means, not
the end.
A good marketer, they say, sells the sizzle, not the steak.
But without the steak, there's no sizzle!
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