The Real Sinister Side of Forced Continuity

Rant warn­ing: what fol­lows may offend some peo­ple. But I wanted to throw in my three cents on the topic of “forced con­ti­nu­ity,” which seems to be the sub­ject of a lot of debate these days.

Sev­eral well-​​known mar­keters have made offers of late with forced con­ti­nu­ity. What it means is, the intended prod­uct you want to buy can only be pur­chased when you buy another (often, a con­tin­u­ous sub­scrip­tion) billed to your account every month or so until you cancel.

Forced con­ti­nu­ity is noth­ing new. (In direct mar­ket­ing, they call these “Til For­bid” offers.) It’s another type of offer, pure and sim­ple. It’s mar­ket­ing. And there’s noth­ing wrong with that. What’s wrong is not the way the offer is made.

The real prob­lem is its lack of transparency.

But that’s not what I want to rant about today.

What a lot of peo­ple seem to be miss­ing here (and some­thing my bril­liant wife brought to my atten­tion, which makes per­fect sense to me), is that there is a deeper, much darker side to this whole thing.

Some­thing all mar­keters need to be aware of…

First off, I was caught in the mid­dle myself when I hastily pro­moted an offer last week, which I failed to inves­ti­gate and inform my audi­ence about, because I took for granted that the marketer’s offer in ques­tion was clear.

(I’ve been told that it has since been fixed.)

Nev­er­the­less, that was my fault.

Amid the flurry of abu­sive hate email, being called every name “in the book,” and the loss of many sub­scribers on my list (which are to a degree under­stand­able), I apol­o­gized for it.

But my mis­take aside, whether the sales copy is clear or not is not the issue I want to focus on. Being clear is sim­ply good busi­ness prac­tice. It’s also com­mon sense.

Specif­i­cally, there’s a dif­fer­ence between optional, forced, and hid­den con­ti­nu­ity. The first one I agree with. The sec­ond one I don’t mind. But the last one is the one I despise.

It’s also the one that’s illegal.

Some mar­keters fail to prop­erly inform the cus­tomer in their copy, and some­times they skill­fully hide the fine print until the last minute, just enough to be bor­der­line “legal.”

My opin­ion?

You need to be trans­par­ent. You need to be clear in your offer. And you need great copy (yes, great copy­writ­ing can eth­i­cally per­suade peo­ple to accept your con­ti­nu­ity offer, when done right).

Above all, you need to be above board. Why? Because the gold is not in your list, as many mar­keters sug­gest. It’s in your rela­tion­ship with your list. Big difference.

But whether forced con­ti­nu­ity in itself is a good or bad thing, or whether it’s legal or ille­gal, is not the issue I want to focus on, either.

There’s plenty of debate going on right now dis­cussing those issues, on blogs and forums, many of which are beyond the scope of what I want to tell you today.

I’m not a lawyer, and I cer­tainly know that, legal­ity aside, there’s a ques­tion of whether or not it is eth­i­cal in the first place. (I do believe it can be done eth­i­cally and trans­par­ently so that it’s a win-​​win for both sides.)

What really both­ers me is the stigma it creates.

That’s the prob­lem I have with all of this.

Matt Bacak and Joel Comm, two mar­keters who are at the cen­ter of the recent forced con­ti­nu­ity con­tro­versy, are friends of ours. We pro­moted for them in the past, and they in turn pro­moted for us or will be pro­mot­ing for us (such as our new Suc­cess Chef train­ing sys­tem), which we are deeply grate­ful for.

Matt is not only a great friend but also a client of ours. I wrote copy for him in the past. My wife takes care of a lot of his out­sourc­ing work. We spoke at sev­eral of Matt’s sem­i­nars. Here we are hold­ing Matt’s new­born baby a few years ago.

As for Joel Comm, he, too, is a friend. In fact, my wife and I were the first ones to intro­duce Joel Comm to the Inter­net mar­ket­ing sem­i­nar community.

We intro­duced him to the audi­ence while we were on stage at a sem­i­nar two years ago, because we bun­dled his Adsense course with our offer at the time. We even paid Joel out of our own pock­ets for all the copies we sold that day.

As far as their approach is con­cerned, I do appre­ci­ate their attempts to push the enve­lope, which is admirable. It also opens the doors to be cre­ative, pro­vid­ing new ideas for mar­keters to make offers online.

As Paul Han­cox stated in his report, The Secrets of a 10% Con­ver­sion (which I highly rec­om­mend), the most impor­tant part of a saleslet­ter to test is not the head­line but the offer. And forced con­ti­nu­ity is sim­ply a dif­fer­ent type of offer.

Forced con­ti­nu­ity aside, one can learn a lot by watch­ing how these mar­keters mar­ket them­selves. Their use of video is one of them, for example.

But the biggest prob­lem I have with all of this is this…

It may be bor­der­line eth­i­cal, but being “bor­der­line” is just enough to cause a lot of ani­mos­ity and resent­ment. Those feel­ings of ill-​​will and hos­til­ity are going to be a prob­lem these mar­keters will have to deal with, and that’s their challenge.

Believe me, Matt and Joel are far from being the bad guys. As ser­vice providers for close to 20 years, we’ve seen it all. And trust me, we’ve seen a lot worse.

For exam­ple, there are some mar­keters out there who not only make their con­ti­nu­ity offers hid­den, but also make it tremen­dously dif­fi­cult for cus­tomers to can­cel their sub­scrip­tions and obtain refunds.

On pur­pose.

Those are the worst, if you ask me.

(Mak­ing your cus­tomers jump through hoops to can­cel their orders, not hon­or­ing your guar­an­tees, or refus­ing to refund them, is just bad busi­ness all around, whether you used forced con­ti­nu­ity or not.)

But what some mar­keters — the ones who use ques­tion­able and poten­tially harm­ful tac­tics — may not be cog­nizant about is how these feel­ings will affect oth­ers and our indus­try as a whole.

In other words, it gives Inter­net mar­keters a bad rep­u­ta­tion. It gives all of us a bad name. It cre­ates ani­mos­ity and mis­trust toward all mar­keters, good or bad. And now, legit­i­mate mar­keters have to strug­gle twice as hard to sell and make an hon­est liv­ing in this business.

I know this from per­sonal experience.

I fought hard to pro­tect the integrity of good direct response copy­writ­ers out there. The direct mar­ket­ing indus­try is not made up of just a bunch of scammy, carnival-​​barking, long-​​copy, hype-​​mongering fraud­sters, as some purport.

Believe me, when I first opened my copy­writ­ers forum, there were some amaz­ing, crazy, and some­times pretty heated debates going on!

But some bad apples can indeed rot the bas­ket. And they have. Why do you think the used-​​car busi­ness has such a bad rep­u­ta­tion, for instance?

If you were to go into the used car busi­ness your­self, and you’re a legit­i­mate busi­ness owner with the intent to con­duct your busi­ness in an hon­est, pro­fes­sional, and trans­par­ent man­ner, you have your work cut out for you.

You see, we’re fac­ing the same problem.

Mar­keters push the enve­lope. They think out­side the box to come up with new and cre­ative ways to sell. This is good. In prin­ci­ple. But the prob­lem is, some of them just don’t care. They will push the enve­lope too far.

Some even jus­tify the back­lash as pub­lic­ity. “Bad pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity,” they say. Neg­a­tive pub­lic­ity is good when it is ill-​​founded or based on opin­ion alone (because you can eas­ily fight those, espe­cially if you’re a good copywriter).

And con­tro­versy does sell.

But it’s not good when it is true and well-​​founded — that is, when it is based on bad busi­ness, such as some­thing ille­gal or unethical.

Sure, con­tro­versy cre­ates curios­ity (and sales do result). I’m a big fan of con­tro­versy. But con­tro­versy alone, or con­tro­versy cre­ated by bad or ques­tion­able busi­ness prac­tices, is like a drug.

It’s short-​​lived. It requires con­stant injec­tions — injec­tions of new mar­kets, new prod­ucts, or new offers — to stay “high” (high sales vol­ume, that is). It forces mar­keters to keep fight­ing fires rather than grow­ing their busi­nesses. And it cre­ates ill will, which affects future sales and…

… Kills it for the rest of us.

Here’s an analogy.

A snake oil sales­man comes to town. He sells his magic elixir that promises results after a period of time. After he sells his entire lot, in the dead of night he packs up and skips town before peo­ple real­ize he just scammed them.

Now, obvi­ously, he can’t go back to the same town to sell other stuff. He is forced to move to the next town to keep earn­ing money.

Here’s where it gets mucky.

The next time another sales­man comes to town, per­haps a legit­i­mate one sell­ing a legit­i­mate prod­uct, their sales will fal­ter as a result of that town’s pre­vi­ous bad expe­ri­ence. Peo­ple will instantly dis­trust them. They will refuse to buy if not chase them right out of town.

In those days, word got around by horse­back. So the snakeoil sales­man had no trou­ble going from town to town scam­ming others.

Today, with the help of the Inter­net how­ever, you don’t need to be a vic­tim like those towns­folk to be wary and skep­ti­cal of new sales­peo­ple. You just need an Inter­net connection.

Again, Joel and Matt are good guys. They put out great prod­ucts, and I like what they’re try­ing to do in terms of pro­mo­tion and marketing.

It’s cre­ative. Done right, it can be both legal and eth­i­cal. And tremen­dously prof­itable, too.

But done wrong or done poorly, next time another mar­keter makes a sim­i­lar offer peo­ple are going to think twice about mak­ing a pur­chas­ing decision.

Now, remem­ber that the caveat emp­tor applies (let the buyer beware). I’m just as guilty of this. I should have con­ducted my own due dili­gence, just as much as we all should.

How­ever, if you’re a mar­keter think­ing of offer­ing forced con­ti­nu­ity, think twice before you do. Remem­ber the dif­fer­ence between “forced con­ti­nu­ity” and “hid­den con­ti­nu­ity.” Be clear. Be trans­par­ent. And serve your cus­tomers well.

Oth­er­wise, when it’s not done prop­erly, forced con­ti­nu­ity can cause a lot more dam­age in its wake. Why? Not because it is bad in itself, or the fact that it leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths.

But because, bot­tom line, it affects us all as marketers.

(And remem­ber, some of us mar­keters are your joint-​​venture part­ners. Some of us are your affil­i­ates. And yes, some of us are your clients, too.)

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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