Internet marketing

GDPR = General Data Protection Regulation.

Some people, in their terms and conditions checkboxes, use things like “Do you agree with the GDPR terms?”.

But that’s a rather lazy way of getting out of doing your work.

One should find out the exact criteria GDPR requires for the website and apply them to the website.

You can’t just say, “Do you agree with everything?”.

That’s not how things work.

One should agree to specific terms and conditions, not all.

Also, when not linking to GDPR itself, you expect people to know GDPR by heart. That’s pretty much absurd.

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I like one-page websites quite a bit.

A single, long page, where you add all the basic information (who you are, the services/products you offer, contact details), all in one place.

You could add things like Terms and Conditions, a Privacy Policy, and perhaps a blog, but, all-in-all, you could do a lot of things by having just a single page.

Find such examples here: One Page WordPress Themes from ThemeForest.

Sometimes, you can’t do a one-page website; you might need something more complex.

But if the project scope allows for it, I suggest you go for it – create a one-page website.

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Let’s say you offer three services: 150, 100, and 50 USD for each.

A client comes and asks for a discount.

You could consider offering prices like these: 100, 67, 33 USD. (total discount: 100 USD)

But a better solution would be to give the first service bought no discount, the second one 33 USD and the third one 67 USD. (total discount: 100 USD)

This way, if the project stops abruptly, you do get paid almost fully.

In the first version suggested above, if you stop the project at any given time, you have given a discount without the project being completed.

In the second version, you only give a good discount if/when the project ends.

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Adding temporary offers in a newsletter is not, to me, ideal. As a reader, I tend to read newsletters once every few days.

Opening a newsletter and noticing an expiring offer – that doesn’t sound so good.

Also, if you tell me, “Write to me, this is a personal message,” I do write back, and then you don’t reply – that’s not very nice.

As far as I can tell, newsletters are more difficult to read than a blog/news site via RSS.

Some people add this text: “Subscribe to my newsletter to download X.” There are two major drawbacks to this:

1. You decrease the trust others have in your brand, as you do a rather shady thing as a general principle; you ask for people’s mail without them being sure they’ll be treated nicely;
2. Your audience will mostly consist of people who are too lazy to unsubscribe. I wouldn’t want an audience formed mostly of these people.

Why end your newsletter with a quote? If you have a lot of links in your newsletter, some people might open them all in tabs (perhaps using an extension like Snap links for Firefox / Chrome). While they wait for the tabs to load, they could read your quote and reflect on it.

It matters a lot to have a good subject line. People focus a lot on crafting a good newsletter, but the subject line matters a lot.

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You open a chat with a website, and you see that “the operator is typing”. But sometimes you talk to a bot (computer Artificial Intelligence), and to mimic human behavior, they are also typing.

Sometimes, websites introduce waiting times and screen loaders just to increase the time a user has to wait to get to the page and make the page more desirable.

Some TV Shows in Romania are shown online one week prior to TV, just for you to buy online access.

Some social media websites don’t show you options to navigate in a video, you are forced to watch start to end.

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At one of the Romanian banks, when reaching the T&C area, one can read:

You have reached the Terms and Conditions. :)

Ai ajuns la Termeni și Condiții. :)

• Starts with a personal success (“Oh my God! You reached that area!”). It feels like we’re with the winning team.
• The emoji is a bit manipulative, making it sound like “Here’s the contract, now smile!”, but I think it’s fine, nevertheless.
• Even if it’s a bank we’re talking about, I find the message friendly and open. On the other hand, going overboard with being friendly can lead to trouble with some users. I read about an online user who was very surprised to see an official bank using cherries, as a joke, in an official currency exchange page on a bank website. Friendly? Yes. Funny? Yes. A bit too much for a bank’s communication? Again, yes. Coming back to the original text, I find the emoji friendly & not too much aggressive.
• The use of the emoji reminds of the MailChimp final confirmation message when sending a newsletter: an animation with a finger close to hitting the big red button. It’s an emotional charge.
• The key takeaway – if you can spot important emotional aspects within the funnel, consider trying to answer them in the way. The bank, in case, does this nicely.
• (PS: As a personal note, I don’t think that mentioning “in my opinion” / “personal note” is wrong in any way)

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