There’s a well-known Internet marketer who recently ran a webinar on an intriguing topic.
Normally I don’t sign up for webinars. Who’s got time or patience to be teased and massaged into a sale for two and a half hours? But the topic of this webinar sucked me in.
I signed up. Of course, I still didn’t attend. And then, I got an email from this marketer.
Subject line: “a REPLAY??”
Preview text: “ok ok… I’ll cave this time. Replay is up for 48 hours.”
The body of the email talked all about how this marketer doesn’t normally do replays for webinars because people never watch them, and because attendance is higher if you don’t offer them.
And yet this time, the email said, he’s making an exception. Why? No one knows. The email didn’t say anything about that.
I recently ran a presentation I called Manna for Marketers, in which I covered how I consciously apply the commandments in my 10 Commandments of Con Men etc. book in everyday tasks like these emails and the offers that I make.
The example I gave for how I used Commandment II, about overcoming objections that my readers are likely to have, was all of 6 words, buried inside of a daily email.
I admitted inside that Manna for Marketers training that 6 words in the middle of an email might seem like a trivially small use of a persuasion idea.
But trust takes a long time to build up.
It can vanish quickly with one big blunder, or a little less quickly, with a few off-smells that signal that something isn’t right here.
Those off-smells can be implicit, like glossing over an objection or question your reader is likely to have…
… or they can be explicit, like what that well-known Internet marketer did in his emails.
“I never do this! But I’ll cave this time! Just this once! Trust me!”
The sad thing is, it’s so easy to avoid this.
Of course, the strategic way is simply to stick to your principles.
“I don’t offer webinar replays because I believe they are worthless. And so I won’t offer one for this webinar either.”
But if you really must go against principle, there’s a tactic for how to do it in a way that doesn’t tank your trust with your audience.
That’s something I cover in Commandment V of my 10 commandments book. If you still haven’t read that: