In Which You Go Broke Trying to Be Right Instead of Smart #facepalm

My Real Facepalm © by joelogon

And by “you”, I of course mean me.

Because I did it again.

I thought it would be really neat to create a certain type of product. And to keep it from instantly being pirated, as my products often are, I decided to erect hoops between purchasing and receving, perfectly reasonable hoops, I thought, that would be barely noticable.

And I had to learn again, the hard way: you will go absolutely broke trying to enforce the “right” way to purchase something on your customers and clients, every time.

Imagine if you went to a gas station, that instead of the way you normally buy your gas, you had to walk across the street, pick up a voucher, walk back to the gas station, show them the voucher, and then go about your regular way of purchasing gas.

Unless we had no other option and were desperately in need of gas, most of us would drive off. But there are gas stations everywhere. Why in the world would a gas station make it harder to buy gas in this day and age?

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. Someone has to really be a die-hard fan of yours to even tell you WHY they wouldn’t buy from you if you make this mistake. Most of the time it means you’ve lost business FOREVER. Is being right really worth that?

If you make it harder for them to buy, they will go somewhere else, no matter how much they love you and think you are the top logical choice.

If you make it hard for them to subscribe, they won’t sign up to your newsletter or membership site.

And if you make them enter their email address (which in their minds you should already have) in order for them to access something they purchased, refunds go up.

This is extraordinarily stressful for me because I have an extremely low refund rate. I always have – even when I had the spike that comes with using Clickbank, the average rate was still 1%.

Thank God I believe in testing everything, or I would have created a huge disaster and a customer service nightmare, since I only have extra customer service staff when we have a sale.

It’s funny because no matter how often I offer this advice to others, at least once a year I forget to apply it to myself. Yes, I’m much better than I was when I refused to acknowledge that this is true at all.

Luckily though, I once had a mentor who would ask me the critical question, when I stubbornly fought to get customers do something my way, the right way, the sane way, instead of the way that most likely resulted in them paying me for my services: Do you want to be successful? Or do you want to be right all the time?

Because eventually, you’ll have to choose.

The way you interact with people over social media can bring you success or waste your time. You can fight to make it into just another marketing exercise, or you can relax and go with the natural flow of connection.

The way you market your site online can increase your bottom line or it can be a bottomless pit of wasted money and time. Are you going to market in a way that’s successful? Or would you prefer to use the traditional ways you learned were correct and lose your shirt?

There’s a value in being right sometimes, sure. It’s often more profitable to screw people over than it is to do the right thing (at least in the short run view of the pre-social media day when someone can instantly broadcast your mis-step to an average circle of around 200 people.)

In cases like those, where morality is at play, hopefully we choose to err on the side of humanity and doing what is ethically correct.

But when it comes to generating revenue, there’s a reason the expression “the customer is always right” has endured for so long: if you try to force your version of what’s right against the grain of what they want, you’ll lose your customers.

So unless your family has some super-power that enables them to eat “rightness” for dinner, let go of the fact that the way you want to do things is technically right, better, smarter, faster, or more efficient if it’s interfering with you making your sale.

Be smart instead.