Stop using "aggressive marketing" tactics

Red Rocket has researched over 200 companies for potential acquisition over the past two years, and we have seen many questionable marketing tactics employed by a few of these companies. These companies sometimes border on outright fraud or, at a minimum, abuse their relationship with their customers with overly aggressive marketing efforts. I'm going to share a few of these examples with you, so you don't repeat these mistakes with your businesses. It's hard enough to acquire customers in the first place, only to scare them away in the long run with tactics like the ones below, which could end up killing your business.

A CASE STUDY

We were looking at a dropshipping e-commerce business that marketed a “get a free product if you pay for shipping” offer. That in itself was fine. But I learned that once the customer was in the funnel of their shopping cart, buried in the fine print - very small print - was a little footnote stating that by accepting this offer, they were was also signing up for their $39.99 per month subscription model.

We didn't raise the issue until we saw that their lost customer churn rate was out of this world. The average lifespan of a customer subscription was only two months (not 6-10 months like most good subscription offers). Indeed, customers were irritated to see a $39.99 charge appear on their credit card, for something they had no idea they had signed up for. And to make matters worse, the company made it very difficult to contact customer service to call and cancel the subscription. This drove customers to customer review websites to publicly incinerate this company. Once bad reviews hit the shelves, it's almost always too late to get over it.

When we asked the business broker if he was aware of this situation, I found his answer humorous: "Yes, the founder is aware that he is using 'aggressive marketing' tactics." It was an understatement. He would have been much closer saying "suicidal marketing" tactics!

MORE EXAMPLES

Here are some other examples of overly aggressive marketing tactics we've seen:

By adding Better Business Bureau and eTrust certificates to their website, when in fact they weren't endorsed or highly rated by those services, they were outright lying. Keep the hundreds of positive customer reviews posted on their website and eliminate the thousands of negative customer reviews. It's time to stop the presses and figure out why you're getting so many bad reviews in the first place. Asking their friends to manipulate customer reviews on third-party websites. On a Monday, they had 50 reviews, all negative, posted; when we brought it to their attention on Tuesday, 300 false positive reviews had been added on the same site. Not disclosing to their customers, when pre-ordering, that the products were being shipped from overseas, which could result in 30-40 day delivery times. This led to thousands of disgruntled customers trying to track down what they thought were lost shipments (many of which became missing gifts over the holiday season). Selling a "snake oil" type product, claiming certain benefits of the product that were not scientifically substantiated, and using fictitious before and after photos to enable the sale. Email their list of 500,000, when the tactics used to build the list resulted in a very low quality list, only converting 0.01% of those customers into sales (1/100 of what 'she should be) and angering 500,000 people every week with spam emails in the process. Selling prescriptions of certain hormonal drugs to be used in off-label ways (eg, weight loss in men), when the hormone was originally designed for other purposes (eg, fertility in women). Saying they were featured in their industry's top publications, when in fact they just bought ad space in those magazines and had no featured editorial. Have a shopping cart funnel flow that tried to sell additional products to customers at seven different points during the purchase process. Not illegal, but definitely misguided and abusive to user experience.

Do any of these tactics sound familiar from your own businesses? If so, it's time to stop using strategies like these. And it's time to start building your business in a more credible and customer-focused way.

WHY “AGGRESSIVE MARKETING” WILL KILL YOU IN THE LONG TERM

I know how difficult it is to attract your company's first customers. But if you need to resort to "suicidal marketing" tactics like above, yes...