Sneaky Way To Get JV Partners…Or Customers
When I checked my email this morning I found one of those ‘Payment Received’ emails from PayPal, with no product name. So I opened it up to see what the person had bought, and found that it was a payment for just 10 cents.
For a moment I thought somebody had hacked into my sales system and changed the pricing on one of my products to get it cheap…grrr..but that wasn’t it.
No, there was a note in the PayPal comment box promoting a product launch. I think they were trying to get JV partners.
Now, what you’re meant to think here is that these people are just paying you 10 cents to get your attention. But in fact, there is something a little more manipulative going on.
Gifts like this – in fact, any promotional gifts – exploit the psychological expectation of reciprocity that almost all human beings have.
What does that mean in simple language? It means that if somebody gives you something, you have a deep – almost instinctive – feeling that you should give them something back. And if you don’t reciprocate because you don’t have anything to give them, you feel that YOU OWE THEM.
Like any kind of debt, this is an uncomfortable feeling. In most cases, you will try to get rid of it by repaying them in some way, either with a gift or by doing something that you think they will like.
This is why we feel so bad when somebody unexpectedly gives us a gift at Christmas and we don’t have anything for them.
Marketers play on this to get us to buy stuff. You receive a gift (whether it’s a free pen in the mail from Cancer Research or a free ebook you download from somebody’s site) – you feel you owe them – so you are more likely to buy whatever they are selling.
And this applies whether or not you liked or wanted the gift. You might even HATE the gift. It doesn’t matter. Most people will still feel bad if they cannot give something back.
I’m saying ‘you’ for the recipient here, but of course YOU are the marketer as well. You are probably already benefiting from this human response by giving something away for free on many of your sites. But with the free download, we are just offering a gift that people can take if they want. We are not giving them something whether they want it or not, like my 10 cent emailer did.
Have you ever thought about doing something like that? You could. You only have to click on marketers’ Buy Now buttons to see their PayPal emails, then send money. These guys either did it with Mass Pay or as a gift in PayPal, because I wasn’t charged a fee.
Would you think it’s worth trying for some product launches? Of course, you would need to check PayPal’s terms. But if they are OK with it, would you do it? Or is it too sneaky…or too risky financially?
Vote now (you can pick up to three options):
P.S. You may be wondering if I clicked on the link in that email and joined their launch. The answer is no, but I did have that nasty indebted feeling…
…so I refunded the payment, and sent them a link to MY site in the comment box
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