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Why doing nothing is easier than doing something
Are you throwing money away? I am. For months now, I’ve known that I could get cheaper broadband.
In these trying economic times, every penny counts – and we’re talking about pounds here. I know I could do it, and that I should do it. So why don’t I just go ahead and do it?
Simple. I’ve decided to opt instead for your biggest competitor – and mine.
Buyer inertia.
For given a choice (or two choices, or a bewildering, never-ending, ever-widening array of choices) we often just do the easiest thing.
Which is nothing.
Dollars and sense
A while back, I did some work for a client whose entire business is built around saving companies money by finding them better deals on gas, electricity, phone and other utility costs.
He charges a percentage of their savings. And he’s thriving, with an ever-growing army of staff.
But why, I asked him one day, don’t these companies simply do it themselves? After all, they’re smart, they’re successful and they know they have a choice of suppliers. So why use him?
“Because they’re like you and me,” he said. “They don’t like change, and they don’t like making decisions. So they do nothing – until we make them do something.”
Money for nothing
UK price comparison site moneysupermarket.com recently carried out an experiment to see just how strong the pull of buyer inertia was.
In London and Manchester, they had somebody walk around wearing a sandwich board offering people £5. No strings, no catches. All you had to do was ask.
In total, they encountered 1,800 people. And how many do you think took up the offer?
28.
That’s less than 2%. So a whopping 98% of people passed up the chance for a free fiver. I’m sure I’d have been one of them. Wouldn’t you?
You are now leaving the comfort zone
Buyer inertia will never go away, but we can do something to change the odds in our favour:
- Always have a call to action. It’s obvious, but we so often forget it. Call now. Fill in the form. Don’t delay. Tell people what to do – you’ll be surprised what happens.
- Close the sale: making a sale is not like speed dating. If the person says no, it’s nothing personal. But if you don’t ask, you’ll never know. So ask.
- Say it often enough. As Woody Allen said, 80% of success is just showing up. If you’re not there, you won’t get the business. So show up again and again. And again.
My email has just pinged with another message about a great broadband deal.
Decision time – or maybe not.
I’ll have to think about it.
Whatever happened to WYSIWYP?
 I was on holiday last week. And it’s left a little bit of a bad taste in the mouth.
No, not the croissants, pains au chocolat, brioches and and foie gras. They all went down a treat.
The aftertaste I can feel rising in my gorge is the bitter tang of misleading pricing.
That’s right. I flew Ryanair.
Now they’re not alone in this, but they do seem to have perfected the art of turning WYSIWYP (what you see is what you pay) on its head.
It’s a numbers game
I went to Bergerac, in south-west France. And my flights cost just one penny (= 2 US cents) each way. Sure, you’ve got to add the airport taxes, but that’s all, right?
Wrong.
It’s some time since I last flew Ryanair, so I was surprised to discover that I also had to pay a £4 check-in fee each way (previously free) and £8 per bag each way (previously £7 per booking). So that’s another £24.
All told, it was £44. A bargain. So why did I feel hard done by?
Simple. The price I saw wasn’t the price I paid. If they’d said Bergerac £44, I would have been happy to pay it.
And here’s the thing: they could have said £80 and I’d have shelled out without a second thought.
It’s all about expectation.
A few weeks back I wrote about underselling yourself. You can double your price and most people won’t blink. They’ll just pay. But you must quote with confidence and stick to your figure.
Ryanair is unwittingly alienating customers by adding all the extras to push up the bottom line.
Bass motives
There was some small mercy. Ensconsed comfortably in my aisle seat, I fell into conversation with my neighbour, a well-spoken woman with a cello strapped into the seat next to her.
She was off to a week-long music workshop, she told me. And she was really pleased to have got such a good price on the tickets.
Tickets? For her and…oh yes, of course. The cello. So how much did she pay?
“Well,” she said brightly, “it was only £100.”
I gulped.
“For each of us,” she added, patting her cello case affectionately. “How much did you pay?”
I smiled sweetly, swallowed hard, and did what I had to do to make sure her holiday wasn’t spoiled.
I lied.
Find out more:
- Need a break? I’d recommend Bergerac (but be sure you book early).
Why long sales letters are six feet under
 I’ve found someone who thinks just like I do (believe me, that’s rarer than you’d think).
It’s Canadian copywriter Michel Fortin, whose compelling Death of the Salesletter I’ve been reading over the last couple of days.
For somebody who makes his living from writing sales copy, this is a pretty radical position. But like Seth Godin‘s provocatively titled All Marketers Are Liars, the reality is somewhat at odds with the catchy title.
The sales letter isn’t dead. But the long web sales letter is. You know the one: it picks you up, sweeps you along, endlessly teases (but wait – there’s more!) and eventually lets go when you slap the mat to submit. But wait – there are three bonuses and 10 PS’s.
The giveaway with these sales letters is the scroll bar that’s tiny, hinting at 35 more screens of breathless sales copy to come.
Death of the Salesletter has taken me a couple of days (with breaks) to read for one simple reason – it’s 51 pages long.
Now I know what you’re thinking (I thought it too) but to be fair to Michel, he does say upfront that the idea started as a blog post and grew from there. And he just kept going until he’d got it all down.
In a nutshell, here’s what he says:
- Long scrolling web page sales letters are dead.
- Web 1.0 (the static, simple page version) was one-way: the seller spoke to the buyer.
- Web 2.0 changes all that. It can ‘humanise and magnetise’ a website, build relationships and communicate more effectively. It’s not about technology – it’s about people.
- It’s not the message that’s changing – it’s the delivery.
- Sales letters are changing not because people are changing, but precisely because human behaviour will never change (you’ll have to stop and think about that one, like I did)
- Multimedia (sound, video, picture) creates a ‘multi-sensorial’ experience, which pushes up sales. Not surprisingly, eBay gets most bids for auctions with pictures.
Michel’s got some great recommendations for sales letters that work:
- Turn your sales letter into a non-sales letter – make it look like something else
- Be more newsy
- Give more great content first (then, you can sell)
- Tell more stories
- Use copy to connect with your reader
- Be discreet in your selling effort
- Focus on building credibility
- Turn your sales process into a sales experience
- Use brevity
- Incorporate multimedia
- Offer more proof – audio, videos, demos, samples, reviews
Amen to that.
It’s fascinating read, and I found myself nodding from start to finish like one of those little toy dogs in the back window.
If you’ve got time, check out the report here: Death of the Salesletter.
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