There’s been a bit of controversy lately about the marketing tactic of “forced continuity”. It’s flared up again with a recent promotion by Mike Filsaime of “Butterfly Marketing” fame.
Mike is launching a new magazine focused on internet marketing and to get people to try out a subscription he’s giving away a ton of free material as well as one month of the magazine free.
Now, a bit of a “flame war” seems to have erupted with a number of people suggesting Mike has been underhand or unethical with what he’s doing. In response to this, top copywriter Ray Edwards (who did some of the work for Mike) has posted a video going through exactly what the promotion involves so people can see for themselves.
You can view the video at this link…
Couple of things about the video. If you watch it, you’ll see that Mike Filsaime did 2 things in particular…
1. Throughout he went to great pains to make it very clear what was involved.
2. He also made it extremely easy to cancel the trial subscription. In fact, if you wanted to, you could just get all the freebies and cancel straight away without even getting the trial issue of the magazine.
Lesson for marketers and copywriters? Consider this “best practice” if you’re going to use this “forced continuity” tactic.
However, Mike went on to do something else that might very well annoy a lot a people. he made multiple (and I mean multiple) “One Time Offers”. Again, he did this in a way that would be viewed as “best practice” but it still comes across as incredibly annoying, at least to me.
However, as Ray points out, if you don’t want the offer, it’s a simple matter to say “No Thanks”.
Worth having a look at the video to see what these tactics involve. Despite the controversy, there’s ample evidence that they produce results in terms of sales. Plus, of course, these type of tactics have been used successfully in traditional offline Direct Response Marketing for many years (book and music clubs being examples).