Bad Marketing is Like Daylight Saving Time

If you're like me, your morning started an hour too soon today. Actually, I got a double whammy: spring break ended for the kids and daylight saving time started. Ugh.

If I were living the internet lifestyle :-), I would have stayed in bed. But breakfast had to be eaten and lunches had to be made so that my two eldest could get to school an hour earlier.

I feel like posting a rant against daylight saving time. And maybe I will on one of my other blogs. Maybe I'll email all my state and federal representatives a link to the Time Magazine article about how "the number of serious heart attacks jumps 6% to 10% on the first three workdays after DST begins."

But this is a marketing blog. Let's talk about how marketing missteps may be affecting your customers just like daylight saving time is affecting you this morning.

"It's Too Early!"

If you're telling prospects to buy before they're ready, there's no government mandated time change to force them to do it your way, and they're going to roll over and go back to sleep.

You may need to add more information or persuasion to your sales letter. You may need to use an autoresponder sequence to warm people up to your product. They'll buy when they're ready -- not when you get tired of waiting.

"What's In It For Me?"

You've heard the saying about how your customers' favorite radio station is WII FM -- "what's in it for me?"

Apparently there are businesses that make more money because of daylight saving time. With it staying lighter in the evening, people stay out later and spend more money.

Yippee for them. What's in it for me? If I ever discovered that a business had lobbied to force me to wake up an hour earlier this morning, I'd boycott them and encourage others to do so too. Take that, you government power abusing profiteer!

If you're thinking more about what's in it for you than what's in it for your customers (eg. promoting a bad product and hoping somebody'll be too lazy to ask for a refund), you're asking for the same kind of backlash.

"The Sale's Over? I Thought it Hadn't Started Yet!"

When you have time sensitive sales online, you have to remember that not everybody lives in your timezone. And not everybody knows how to convert from your timezone to theirs. And not everybody who knows how will calculate it right every time.

Just like the person who gets to work on hour late the day after daylight saving time starts, a lot of people are going to arrive at your sale at the wrong time if you don't make it easy for them to figure out. Feel free to use my automatic timezone converting links to deal with that problem.

"Where's the Cashier?"

In the fall, we'll get an extra hour of sleep one night. It's still a pain to change all our clocks, but at least there's something in it for the rest of us.

But there'll still be people who forget to make the change and arrive at work an hour early, wondering where everybody else is.

Have you ever gone to a webpage, planning to buy a product, and been unable to figure out how to order? You're like the customer who's at the checkout counter, but the cashier hasn't come in yet. "What's going on here?"

If all you've got is a little "buy now" link hidden in the middle of a paragraph somewhere on your sales page, you're going to have a lot of customers standing at the checkout counter (ie. scrolling to the bottom of the page and looking for the order form) wondering why nobody's there.

Whatever it is you want the customer to do -- buy, sign up, click a link, etc. -- make your call to action so big, bold and obvious that not even somebody who forgot to change their clock could miss it.

And please, write your congressman and ask them to support any initiative that would abolish daylight saving time.