Avoid These Marketing Tactics
26-02-2018
Marketing and sales should be somewhat aggressive in nature, otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to compete with your competitors and stay at the top of your industry. We’re all for aggressive sales and marketing, but it still needs to be done in a tasteful way. When aggressive marketing turns ugly, it completely burns bridges and backfires on your brand.
More likely than not, you’ve been a victim of overly aggressive advertisements before, so you know how annoying it can be. Rather than being persuaded or even obligated to sign up for the service, consumers often feel disturbed and violated by these acts. Needless to say, they will opt out and never come back to use the service again. If you want to avoid such a horrible marketing outcome, stay as far away from these aggressive marketing tactics as possible. They will only you’re your credibility as a business. Your visitors will thank you for steering clear of these strategies!
Scraping
Web scraping, as defined by Wikipedia, is “data scraping used for extracting data from websites.” This can be done with a scraping software or manually. Both are strictly against Google’s rules and regulations for good reason: scraping steals valuable data rather than earning them. In the long run, scraping will not perform as well as earning your customer data through legitimate, relationship-building marketing strategies.
Have you ever received a newsletter email from people you don’t know, whom you’ve never given your information to? Chances are, those individuals scraped your information from a different platform (perhaps LinkedIn or Facebook) and signed you up for their newsletter without your consent. In those common cases, the aggression is minimal, but still extremely invasive. If the consumer has not willingly signed up for your product, avoid scraping their information as if they already did. That’s one way to make sure they will never sign up for your service.
Abusing Email
Email marketing is still going as strong as ever, but it still remains a very sensitive marketing channel. Your subscribers legally have the right to unsubscribe at any given time, so you have to create email campaigns that are as nonintrusive and relevant as possible. People who have signed up for your platform most likely signed up for one thing only. To increase your open rates and click-through rates, only email your subscribers when it is prime time. This could be every Monday on a weekly or biweekly basis. Feel free to conduct A/B testing to see what day works best for your specific audience.
Social Stalking
Similar to web scraping, social stalking is exactly what it sounds like: stalking and attempting to engage with your target audience on social networks without first letting them come to you. Social media marketing, when done correctly, can yield an incredible influx of traffic for your website. When abused by eager marketers and companies, as it often is, it backfires like no other. Our suggestion is for you to engage with your target audience in public spaces, such as on your Facebook page timeline, in community groups, or on your own posts. The line starts to blur when marketers begin to add their target audience as friends or private message them with a pitch. Social media is simply not the right platform for direct pitches, unless it’s consented.
Out-of-Control Pop-ups
We have nothing against pop-ups. In fact, we use them quite often for our own pages. The problem arises when webmasters employ too many pop-ups and don’t optimise them correctly. What we mean by this is to not abuse the pop-up advertisement more than it has already been abused by the market. People are keen to opt out of pop-ups now because of its intrusive nature and lack of inherent value for the customer. To make your pop-ups more useful, tailor it to the page that it’s on. For example, if the visitor is currently browsing your FAQs page, time the pop-up to show itself at the one-minute mark, saying something that contributes to the FAQs itself, such as, “Got any more questions? Speak with us directly today!” That way, your pop-ups will contribute to the readership value rather than take away from it.
In addition to these tips, we have an entire blog dedicated to helping Affiliates grow their platforms organically. If you haven’t signed up as an Affiliate with T Dot UK yet, be sure to do that today! The faster you sign up, the faster you will get to speak with an industry expert who will help you optimise your website and increase your monthly income exponentially. We value our Affiliates, that’s why we’re giving away a free Lead Management System for all who signs up for it! With T Dot UK on your side, you will have all the resources you need to drive more traffic to your website.
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