4 Credibility Busters – Do any affect your business?

megaphone with letters

I use a PO Box for business mail (do you?) and typically pick it up weekly unless I’m driving by off hours as I often have BudBud with me.

Luckily ours is open 24 hours a day for PO Box access.

Anyhoo, we stopped by over the weekend and was surprised at how much mail there was. There ended up being 14 returned holiday cards. 

All returned for bad addresses. Addresses that had been taken either from their emails (see bottom of this one) or from their website.

These are businesses which have bad contact information either on their website, in their emails or both. Not only in violation of FTC regs, it’s a credibility buster.

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Last week I signed up for an Open Q&A session being offered by a colleague who offers marketing services. This same colleague offered one last summer which I also joined.

Last summer I received an email reminder about the call and a “Have you registered” email within moments of each other. 

As we were colleagues and had “met” in other online zoom sessions, I reached out to let her know that her team didn’t segment the list and so those who had signed up also received invites to register.

She thanked me and said she’d remind the team.

Yesterday I received the exact same two emails as last summer (aside from the Q&A call date/zoom info). I’ve been registered for over a week, gotten several reminder calls and am also receiving “Have you registered” emails.

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A program I pay $97/mo has been doing the exact same thing. I wrote to them asking to please exclude me from the sales emails as I only want to receive the membership-related ones.

Their marketing director’s response? Our software doesn’t allow segmenting. 

Hmm… yes it does, you use AWeber. I can see it from the email. I’ve since canceled the membership. The program value isn’t worth the 4-5x/week sales emails for a program I already belong to. 

A good program has become inbox clutter as I never know what’s program-related and what’s sales for that exact program.

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And one more… I read a book over the holidays that I loved and so signed up for the author’s newsletter list. 

He offered a $499 single payment for lifetime access to his courses valued at $9,000 ending 12/31/22 with a “no exceptions, only time I’m doing it” note. 

I didn’t join. As I’m writing this, I got an email for the same offer expiring tomorrow at midnight. 

My level of trust for this business has nosedived. 

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Reality… We’re all humans, we make mistakes. While not updating a website or email address is likely a simple “overlook” mistake, the others are either credibility or competency issues. Either of which is going to affect whether your prospects want to work with you or not.