Three Ways You’re Terminally Annoying Your Customers

It really doesn’t matter how fantastic your products or services are. In fact, nor does it matter if you’re offering them for a lower price than your rivals. If you make the mistake of annoying the living daylights out of your potential customers, you can forget about succeeding.

You shouldn’t need to be told that customers in general absolutely hate irritating online marketing tactics. The reason being that you probably hate them just as much yourself. How many times in the average day or week you find yourself cursing the lazy, disruptive and time-wasting marketing messages companies all over the place throw at you? If the answer is a lot, you’re officially part of the vast majority.

All of which means you need to ensure you aren’t making the same mistakes yourself. And as far as recent research goes, the following four examples are the worst offenders by far when it comes to a terminally irritating your customers:

1. Anything that disrupts the user experience

First and foremost, pop-ups, slide-out offers and the like almost always result in profanity-laden outbursts. Despite the fact that the vast majority of companies continue to use them, they are the number one pet-peeve for millions of web users all over the world. Quite simply, anything that disrupts the user experience instantly and massively increases the likelihood that the individual in question will disappear. Not to mention, never come back. One of the only examples of pop-ups that aren’t quite as harmful are those that use exit-intent technology.  The reason being that as the individual in question has already made the decision to leave your website, there’s no harm in presenting them with an attractive special offer, or perhaps the option to join your mailing list. 

2. Non-user-specific emails 

The vegan that receives regular special offers from a steakhouse, the atheist bombarded with religious messages – the anyoneannoyed on a daily basis by anythingcompletely of no relevance to them whatsoever. These days, email spam is every bit as rife as it has ever been. Which is interesting, given the fact that there are no longer any residual doubts whatsoever as to the harm spam email marketing can do to your reputation as a business. Not only does it bring little to no value your way, it wastes your time and harms your image. It could even land you in trouble, given the way in which the official stance on spam marketing is becoming less tolerant all the time.

3. Gating content

Last but not least, the number of online businesses and websites in general still making this mistake is both extraordinary and tragic. Even some of the biggest names in the business included, from online news resources to recipes to blogs and even the catalogues of various online stores, you’re comprehensively barred entry until you sign up. If there’s one way of ensuring people completely ignore anything you have to say, this is it. Gating content for the most part has absolutely no value whatsoever – given that your target audience can and will quite easily find what they need elsewhere. So unless you’ve already made it as a successful luxury retailer, for example, you need to kick this annoying habit immediately and permanently.