It’s time for a rant …
You may have noticed it is becoming more and more common in IM launches for the sales page and launch emails to use blatant lies and broken promises to imply scarcity.
For example, a UK marketer launched a new product last week. He advertised that ‘only 349 copies will be sold’. 71 had already gone in early bird sales to a small list, so there were 278 available at the moment of launch.
The next day it was ‘only 47 copies left’.
Now, given the number of people who were promoting this, I think it’s very unlikely that he only sold 231 copies in the first 24 hours. But there’s no countdown on the sales page, so without seeing his Clickbank account we cannot know for sure.
However, the day after that, no way can he claim there are any copies left. The last 47 must definitely be sold by now. The product is coming off the market … right?
Wrong. Instead, he sends an email saying that because this product has been selling so well, ‘the gurus’ have been begging him to keep it on the market so that they can make more money by promoting it. And of course he has to do whatever ‘the gurus’ ask …or that’s the excuse. So he’s going to keep selling it, but in 24 hours he will increase the price.
He even names these ‘gurus’. I happened to know one of them, so I asked him if it was true that he had asked for this product to stay on the market.
No, it was not.
And now 4 days later the product is still available, still at the launch price and – unbelievably – the sales page still claims that only 349 copies will be sold.
So he didn’t limit copies to 349, he didn’t raise the price and he lied that this was because named gurus had asked him to go back on his sales page promises.
That’s 3 blatant lies in 1 product launch.
And this is not an isolated case. This is typical of big product launches these days.
Does it matter? Well yes, I think it does.
First it means that the number of people using the technique described in this product is not going to be restricted after all. I don’t know if that will affect the effectiveness of the technique. Quite likely it won’t. But why disappoint buyers by leading them to believe they were getting something exclusive in the first place?
The result is that anybody who bought the product feels scammed and loses faith in it … so they will be much less successful with it than they might have been. (That’s why I’m not naming the product: I’m told it’s a good product and I don’t want to stop you using it if you own it.)
And everybody who received those launch emails, whether they bought the product or not, loses faith in internet marketers.
I advertise limited numbers of copies of many of my article packs and I really do limit them. The software that I use counts them down, and when they are all sold it displays a ‘Sorry, sold out’ page until I get around to taking them off the website.
So when other marketers make false promises to their customers about how many copies of something they will sell, it means that visitors to my website are less likely to see the value of my products. They won’t believe what they read.
Plus it can damage the reputations of the honest marketers who promoted that product to their subscribers in good faith, especially those marketers who were named and blamed for his decision to keep on selling.
(So take care if you are promoting ANY newly launching product to your list of valued subscribers, even if you have seen a review copy and know that the product is good. The product owner might just turn around and bite you in the a*** .)
I think it’s very sad that this kind of deception is becoming so common.
Sure, there’s a Clickbank guarantee on the product, so anybody who feels scammed can get a refund. But does that make it OK?
Posted on July 19th, 2010 by Rosie
Filed under: Internet Marketing Scam | 21 Comments »
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