I woke up this morning to an email (striving to be viral, which it stated too…hmmm!) with a great offer.
I really wanted to read more about the offer and the email seemed to be progressing well. Ticking a lot of boxes that Seth Godin mentioned in his what makes an idea viral post. It was indeed easy to swallow and tempting.
The offer was a good one, I could get a magazine subscription for 62% less than the cover price (I do think they should have mentioned the actual discount amount though, Paul talked about this on his don’t make me think post). A further incentive was thrown in, 40% (again why not say $7) was going to back to a great cause. I was engaged, reading, interested, and this is even though it was a female magazine subscription, i thought my girlfriend might like it. Then they went and ruined it all.
With just one simple word they totally lost me…and I stopped reading…here it is (I’ve added the red so you know the word):
………………WHY???
Do you know what the worst part about it is…..There was no CATCH. The catch they were talking about was the offer ends in a few weeks! This is a call to action, ACT NOW, because this offer isn’t around for ever. A catch is that I maybe have to commit now to buying the magazine at full price next year, or even that I have to go and collect the magazine from my local shop every month. The fact that the offer is ending isn’t a catch, its an incentive to not wait until tomorrow to sign up, and to tell all your friends about this great offer.
This was clearly a well thought out campaign, they are trying to get 10,000 people to sign up, the email was a nice looking mail, the offer was really valuable to me (or people I care about who would be interested in this type of magazine) and as an added bonus even with the subscription I was paying a large portion of it was going to help children. I was just so disappointed to see that such a basic error was made so early in the mail (it was in the second paragraph).
One badly word, used at the wrong time, in the wrong place can ruin your campaigns chances of success.
