I Can't Believe This!

Hi Martin,

Devil's advocate here.

Are these 'churn 'n burn' marketers?

What if reputation is the one factor they are willing to sacrifice on the basis that they know that the new prospects won't be affected by it, because it's unlikely that even if a majority of their less new prospects/customers slag them off, it makes no difference? Example at hand - even though you have explained that it looks dumb here, the effect is null and void, as due to obvious reasons, they can't be named.

So they have no need to measure reputation, because they know it will plummet as people get jaded by their tactics - it's a sacrificial lamb.

Therefore the pitch doesn't lose effectiveness because the only demographic that matters is newer prospects, with the rest being pitched to 'just in case'. Often, marketers will use tactics like 'if you didn't like that, just unsubscribe' messages sent to certain subsets of the list that they want to unsubscribe, because they don't buy and have seen through the tactics.

The tactic is still just as effective on those at the start of the funnel. And knowing that as they travel further down the funnel and become expendable, it allows the marketer to hit them really hard at the sweet spot, because it doesn't matter about reputation - it's sacrificed. Therefore all energy is focused on maximising the sweet spot.

Isn't this the reason for so many comments we see about hard pitches? Is it because there are (viewed from a certain basic level) two basic approaches -

a) reputation builder

b) churn 'n burn

If 95% or more fail online, then perhaps b) is not so crazy after all. Add to this the fact that many reputation builders claim that regardless of how hard they try, they are 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' due to the nature of the market and when someone fails due to laziness or procrastination, even with an adequate blueprint at hand, they look for someone exterior to blame - IE - the marketer who sold them a blueprint that 'doesn't work'.

So logically, if they are b) then they aren't going to spend time tweaking pitches in order to avoid making the older prospects think they are dumb, they will instead spend that time copying, tweaking and testing anything they can swipe from others that seems to be working at that point in time on the 'sweet spot' for maximum revenue at that point in the cycle, would they not?

Overall, perhaps they are not (as a priority) looking at the life-cycle of a prospect from start>unsubscribe in terms of how to maximise revenue throughout the life-time of the relationship, they are honing in on a certain period early on and maximising revenue in a variety of different ways - affiliate promo/promo of their own stuff/upsells/OTOs - then re-imbursement for farming them out in list swaps once they start the 'jading' process.

What percentage of their list reads/receives every email, like you may have done? If it's a small percentage, they might be banking on 'damage done to subscriber base is worth the profit made' by repeating an obvious lie.

I totally understand your point, but I'm attempting to give a logical answer to the question posed - we should not assume that every list builder is a reputation builder. It's natural to focus on the damage to reputation, but we need to consider how much damage is actually done and also that regardless of bad rep, if you have an army of affiliates only interested in getting paid, they tend to continue to say nice things as long as they keep getting paid.

D.A.