Whenever I’m feeling really insecure about myself, I start having dreams about a guy I dated in college. To use the famous line from Sex and the City, he just “wasn’t that into me.”
Generally, he acted like he was doing me a huge favor for graciously continuing to be seen in the same room with me. I clung to that one-sided relationship for two years, convinced that he’d finally change his mind and realize what a fantastic person I was. I just knew that we were MFEO (made for each other).
To make a long and rather unpleasant story short, it didn’t happen. These are the fun relationship “life lessons” you learn when you’re 19 and you’ve watched Sleepless in Seattle one too many times.
Unrequited Love Is No Fun
Over time, I realized that many relationships fail because one person cares more than the other one. Unrequited love is depressing and it generally leads to a whole lot of heartbreak.
Your interactions with customers are a relationship too. During the Customer Love Challenge, you’re encouraged to bestow as much love and awesomeness upon your customers as you can.
I think love is great, but thankfully I’m not that romantic 19-year-old anymore. I’ve fired customers who were jerks – and I thought I was pretty clear on my boundaries. But recently I realized that I was treating my email list kind of like my old college boyfriend: I was bestowing a lot of love on people who just weren’t that into me.
The Pink Carrot Cookie Approach
For years, I read the online marketing wisdom that you need to capture email addresses from your Web site. You lure people with a freebie “carrot” (aka “pink spoon” or “cookie content”) like an ebook and when they give you their email address, and then you email them great information regularly.
For years, I have had sign-up forms for autoresponders and newsletters on all my sites. I’ve sent out a regular newsletter of one type or another to people via email since 2003 or so.
Readers told me they loved all the free information they received and I had great email conversations with a lot of nice people around the world. It felt great!
There was just one problem. When I sent out a promotion telling them about our products, nobody bought anything. Sometimes it wasn’t just a lukewarm response – it was NO response. Talk about feeling rejected.
I did surveys to find out what people wanted. I changed the format from plain text to HTML. Then back to plain text again. Then HTML again. I tried making the emails shorter. Then longer.
Maybe I needed more personality? I added notes from me that I thought would be witty or engaging. Then I removed the notes, so people got “just the facts, ma’am.” I tried including the entire article in the newsletter, since some people don’t like clicking links. But some people said it was too long, so I tried linking to an article on a Web page instead. I put ads on the side. I made a single-column with ads on the bottom.
Nothing worked.
The open rate just kept dropping. The larger the list got, the fewer people seemed to be actually reading what I was writing.
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
After much angst and reflection, I realized that I had inadvertently created a list of people who just want free stuff. Hours upon hours of work creating fabulous free content to give to people had resulted in almost no sales.
Talk about heartbreak.
When we stopped and really took a long, depressing look at what was happening with our marketing, we realized that our sales actually came from people who find our articles through searching online or through referrals of various kinds.
They were not coming from our email lists at all.
Sometimes no matter how much love and free stuff you bestow upon people, they just don’t care. It may seem like they are your customers, but they aren’t. It’s important to distinguish between your prospects and actual customers.
Finally, after more angst, I sent out an email announcing that I was shutting down my newsletter. I told people that it was going away and if they wanted to know about our future conferences and products, they could follow me on social media sites.
Or they could become customers. I got a lot of thank-you emails saying nice things about all the free information I’d provided over the years. Interestingly, most of the emails came from my paying customers.
The other many-thousands of people on the list did what they always do: Nothing.
Prospects vs. Customers
Here’s the thing. Prospects are people who might buy. Customers are people who have bought. There’s a big difference.
The prevailing theory online has been that you give people a whole lot of free stuff and then they know, like, and trust you so much that they are dying to throw money your way. The flaw is that you’re treating your prospects the same way as your customers.
I hate to say it, but prospects may not really be that into you.
Einstein is said to have defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If you’ve been trying to follow conventional wisdom about loving your community of fans, yet making no sales, you might feel like you’re doing something wrong.
But the problem may not be you.
We want you to love your customers. Those are the people who do buy, not those who might buy. You can love your customers, but not be that into your prospects. They’re probably not that into you, either.
Learn from my painful mistake: customers help you pay your mortgage – prospects don’t.
People who have taken the ultimate step of opening their wallets are the people you want to treat with all the love you can muster.
Leave a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I think you’re absolutely spot on Susan; just because everyone does it and tells us it works doesn’t mean it works for us. It’s good to question the perceived wisdom occasionally.
I know in the past I’ve had the same experience you describe, and I did think it was all my fault. Now, I’m not so sure; perhaps I just haven’t got it right yet, and I’m OK with that. It means there’s still hope for me!
Personally I’d say that just the once, was too much for Sleepless in Seattle. And to make matters worse they did a remake called You’ve Got Mail 🙂
Seriously though a great post. And the whole prospects vs customers… another example of the Pereto Principle?
Ryan – I agree that it’s REALLY easy to blame yourself and assume that you must be doing something “wrong” when all the goo-roos says something is supposed to work. Another thing I’ve been thinking about lately is when you say no to something (like I did with my newsletter), it frees up your time so that you can say “yes” to something else. Since I ditched my list, I have been writing more than I have in years. And I’m creating a list of BUYERS, instead of a list of prospects. Obviously, it’s a much smaller list, but making money is a lot better than not making money 😉
Darren – LOL! Yeah, I like that one too. My husband even will watch the movies with me. I think that’s because of Meg Ryan though 😉
You may be right about the Pareto Principle. Except I think it’s a much smaller percentage. I don’t think that 20% of the freebie seekers are buyers. (If that were true, my list would have been responsive enough to keep me happy.)
Excellent points, Susan. It’s so easy to think that what the gurus say can apply to any situation, and it just leads to frustration when they don’t. For all that people are hyping up video, I just can’t get it to convert well with my audience and I’ve moved on to trying other ways to reach them.
Oh wow, I just noticed the little gray “reply” link, so I can reply to a specific comment. Cool.
Anyway, yes, I’ve done video book trailers and not really noticed much from them either. I’m not particularly experienced with video, so again, it’s easy for me to say it’s “my fault.” But then again, it may just not be the right thing for me to be doing either. It makes sense to do what works. For years for me that has been writing articles, so I’m focusing my efforts on doing more of that 😉
Wow! Thanks, Susan. I needed this. To be honest, I feel like almost everyone on my Facebook page is dead weight that I have to drag around (but don’t tell them that). I’m starting to resent the “groupies” that follow me just to increase their own numbers or get free stuff and have no interest in my content. Last month I had a book sale–lowest prices EVER–and didn’t sell a single book to my followers. How depressing. I’m ready to give up some days.
Well, um, as you can probably tell I went through this the hard way. I *totally* understand how you’re feeling, since I felt that way too! The cool thing is that once you start focusing on loving the customers that love you back, you feel SO much better. For me, it’s like this great weight has been lifted since I told my list of freebie seekers goodbye. As my husband will tell you, I’ve been in a much better mood 😉
Susan- I’ve watched this from the sidelines as you’ve struggled with this over the last month, and I want to say that the way you’ve gone about it has been totally classy and I can tell you’ve stayed true to yourself and your business. I think that is really important.
The differentiation between prospect and customer is spot on. Prospects should have different love/attention than your paying, repeat customers (who are like golden nuggets to be cherished). Thank you for such an insightful post!
Gosh Christy, ya make me blush. Thanks 😉
And thanks for reading and commenting too!
Very insightful post Susan. I often tell new peeps starting out to make sure you let people know right up front that this is a business. Often people start by dipping a toe in the water with a blog and build a following and then want to convert them to paying clients. It doesn’t work that way (as you so eloquently explained) and frustration sets in.
I want to point this post to help people understand the difference. You said it so perfectly.
Thanks Phyllis! And yes, if you think this could help people, please point them to the post. It’s not like we haven’t had clients or sold products all this time. But the slap-hand-on-forehead moment was realizing that they weren’t coming from the newsletter. Ouch.
Thanks for such an insightful post, Susan. I’m about to launch into providing services online and reading about the experiences and issues others have faced is really helpful for a newbie. I have also read all the advice stating I should build up email lists etc but it’s good to read someone’s actual experience of it and whether or not that works (I always suspected it didn’t).
Hi Jo…I think it CAN work, but it’s been billed by many as something that *always* works and there’s a big difference. It depends a lot on the market and the type of information you provide. For example, the perceived value of newsletters has dropped dramatically over time and I think that was part of the problem I had. Plus people are constantly complaining about “too much email.” If no one reads your email, having a big list doesn’t do you any good.
Great post, Susan. Thanks for the important reminder, and for allowing us to learn from your mistakes!
I don’t actually view it as a mistake. Publishing newsletters for so long got me into the “writing habit” which led me to publish 10 books and creating a lot of other products. I’m not sure I would have done that without having the deadline the newsletter gave me.
Now that I have years of experience, I write every day, so I’m actually writing more 😉
But I know that when I was getting started, that deadline was a necessary motivator for me!