Stop asking for my email address, marketers
By: Zulie Rane
Tags: Work, Marketing, Product Management, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing

Why is it a radical idea that you don’t need to trick customers into gaining their contact information? Why is it a wild notion that bribery shouldn’t be required when it comes to gaining customers?

Who’s had this experience: you’re on a website, maybe reading information about how to build a mailing list, or optimize SEO, or a better way to reach your clients. If you have any kind of side hustle, this sort of thing will be familiar to you.

You move to switch tabs, and all of a sudden POP — a popup demanding your email in exchange for the top ten ways to make you more money, now!

There is no obvious X to get rid of the popup. Only very small text at the bottom gives you the option to close the box by saying, “No, I don’t want more money.” If you’re like me, you click the latter option, exasperated, and put that site on your mental list of don’t-trust.

Why are so many websites obsessed with collecting our email addresses using brute force? Do they really hope to be able to sell us something down the line?

Everyone’s doing it, so it must be right.

Whether it’s losing your virginity, or jumping off a bridge, this is never a valid reason — except, apparently in the business world. When money is involved, people are surprisingly reluctant to deviate from the norm. If everyone is doing it, that’s an ironclad reason to never experiment with anything new.

Even when the norm is really annoying.

However, I find that businesses who stick to this tried-and-tiresome method are making three ridiculous assumptions:

They assume that the only way they can get our email addresses is by bribing with “valuable” content, coercing or tricking us, using intrusive popups with hidden “x”s; They assume that by bombarding us with low-quality emails we will eventually buy something from them; and They assume that this is a better way of acquiring our money than organically attracting us to their services through quality.

I’ve written before about how I find “free” webinars a massive scam designed to pitch a product or service to me, masquerading as quality content that will help me.

Screenshot taken by author. Email subscribers are “captured.”

To me, that tactic is flawed, the same as strong-arming us into giving up our emails. But because I received nothing of value, I exit the webinar three minutes in, crossing that marketer off my list of trusted sources.

If I watched a quality webinar which gave me value, I’d consider giving my money to them to secure further service. In fact, I recently watched a quality webinar with a company I was doing a free trial with.

After the webinar, I was so convinced of their quality that I signed up immediately. I loved what they put out, and I wanted to give them my money. No coercion, bribery, trickery, or guilt-trip popup text needed.

Equally, if I read a really fantastic blog post about why it’s important to have video editing tool, with lots of convincing arguments and no popup, I might be tempted to drop my email in case they had any more awesome, insightful posts.

Conversely, because most sites have click-bait titles and exit-intent popups, I close the tab as soon as I can. But I think the tide is shifting.

A better way?

I recently wrote an ebook as part of my day job. I passed it over to my boss to look it over before publishing, and he chided me for giving away too much value.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

“People will read this,” he said, “take these tactics, and then go straight to our competitors instead of us.”

I disagreed. Why? Here’s my radical assumption: I think our product is good. I believe it’s better than the competition. I know that when I produce good, quality content with actionable steps to improve someone else’s job, life, or an online blog, they will look to us as experts.

And that shines through my writing.

I don’t think we should bribe people into giving us their emails by creating blogs, webinars, and ebooks which are doctored to not give useful tips. Instead, I want to focus all my efforts into making the very best and most actionable content possible.

Is it so unthinkable that this will bring us customers?

Valuable Customers Find You

Real life example: I needed an email list. I found out through word-of-mouth that ConvertKit was really good. I tried it out — a fourteen-day free trial that didn’t require any card details — and I was hooked.

Look, the product was easy to use. The help I received before paying a single penny was stand-out. At one point, I had a question and the support team said, “Hey, look, we’ve checked out your account — the way you’re doing this sequence works, but it’ll be easier to manage in the future if you alter it to perform this other way.” They went out of their way to help a free-trialler. That’s the way to gain loyal custom.

I don’t understand why it’s counterintuitive that good service and a good product are enough to get me to stay. And look, here I am, recommending it to others for no personal gain. That’s what you get when you have a good product.

When you put all your effort into creating fantastic, valuable content, your customers find you. I use and recommend that email service provider to literally everyone, and if I need to upgrade, I’ll happily pay.

There’s a revolution coming in marketing.

Ten years ago, I would have subscribed to any and every company that promised even a molecule of value, no matter how many dud emails they sent my way.

Five years ago, I watched hours of webinars in the hopes of gleaning the promised skills and trade secrets to gaining followers/email list subscribers/clients that somehow never materialized.

Six months ago, I still believed free ebooks were there to benefit me, rather than the author.

Now? I’m a little wiser. I know how many schemes and tricks there are to “capture” subscribers and funnel them through to becoming potential paying customers. And I’m sick of it.

In biology, there’s a term for when a certain strategy of cheating takes off: frequency-dependent selection.

Here’s an example: poisonous animals will honestly signal through bright coloring that they’re not good to eat. Occasionally, a species of non-poisonous animal will develop that same coloration, trying to piggy-back off the same signaling while doing none of the actual work of being poisonous.

I think the same thing is happening in marketing. Bad marketers have realized that by putting out these hooks or lures, they can get customers to bite. But the same thing will happen as always happens to the cheating species — they’re caught out. The strategy becomes untenable.

The time for honest, better marketing is coming. The consumers grow wise to those tricks, and we become better at seeking out higher quality signals.