Imagine this: you’re perusing a healthy lifestyle website for diet-friendly recipes when the inevitable pop-up appears requesting you sign up for email updates.
A colorful CTA advertising a weekly newsletter of exercise tutorials encourages you to “Sign up and get the latest workouts sent to your inbox!”
There are two options listed: “Yes, sign me up!” and “No thanks, I’m okay with having a winter body year-round.” Did that opt-out text change your mind about subscribing? Chances are it didn’t make a difference, and probably made you a little mad, too.
Bullying is a Bad Look
Negative marketing tactics such as the above example are becoming more and more popular. The idea behind these strategies is that if you make a visitor feel bad about themselves, they’ll want to take action to change something.
It makes sense, considering the approach advertising has taken in our consumerist society, preying on people’s insecurities to sell products. While it may sound like a good idea to convince website visitors to take action by appealing to their sense of self-esteem, the end result doesn’t look great. Emotional manipulation makes your company appear desperate, and in some cases, even cruel.
The Right Way to Convince
Insulting someone isn’t exactly a smart tactic for making friends, so why would you use it on your consumers? Instead, provide quality content that shows value, and you’ll wind up with leads that actually want to hear from you. Think of what knowledge your target audience would benefit from and tailor your strategy from there.
Prove your company’s value sharing tips and informative posts that help solve your prospect’s problems. Once you become a visitor’s go-to source for all their pain points, they’ll be eager to share their information in exchange for updates that give them what they’re looking for.
Bottom Line
You shouldn’t have to trick users into interacting with your company. Not only does this diminish your authority, but it won’t generate quality leads. Collecting information via guilt-tripping will result in an email list full of people who aren’t truly interested in your services, wasting your sales team’s time.
If you already have someone on your site, don’t guilt-trip them into interacting with you further. Focus on creating the best content you can instead of duping people into taking desired actions, and your leads will flourish naturally, rather than by force.