Passive-Aggressive Pop-Ups And Other Acts Of Marketing Self-Sabotage
This story originally ran under the same title on MarketingProfs’ blog in June 2020. Read that version here.
Marketers often think their writing is inviting. But to readers, it can feel like falling into a hidden temple where the walls spew poison darts.
We’re talking about GDPR banners. Pop-ups that show before the content. Misleading headlines. Email capture. Gates. Nonsequiturs. Needless philosophizing. Language so maddeningly imprecise it says everything and nothing at once. It’s a struggle out there for the reader who was promised an answer and found the blog post booby-trapped.
Visit a website.
— Dennis Shiao ✍️ (@dshiao) November 7, 2019
❌ Close the live chat
❌ Accept GDPR cookies
❌ Disallow tracking of location
❌ Close offer to sign up for emails
I tell you, it's exhausting 😰
There are many reasons the experience ends up like this. Partly, it’s too much distance between marketers and their audiences (58 percent don’t talk to customers even when conducting customer marketing). Teams forget that readers are people too, and so they crank up the “monetization” dial beyond what’s bearable. And for the biggest and most egregious error, look no further than the sort of recipes you find when searching Google.
You know what I don’t want when searching for something as specific as a blood orange salmon recipe? A long, self-indulgent rant that insists I “need more color in my life.” The offending article, like nearly every recipe I find on Google, begins with a page-long story about something I did not want and buries what I did come for (the list of ingredients) at the end. For those juggling their phone while cooking, which is probably all readers, it’s doubly hard. Every time you set the phone down, the page and its army of pop-up video ads reload.
The contract between writers and readers is this: When I click, I expect to be told what I was promised I would be told. I will trust you if you do that. But to bait-and-switch is to cause me to remember the domain and avoid it.
To fix: Write introductions that relate to the title. When done, ask, does this make things easier on the reader? Or is it simply the first thing I came up with? Edit. Edit a lot. As William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, wrote, “Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting.”
The first time a restaurant owner tells you they have the best food, it’s charming. But if they insist again, unprompted, it becomes alarming. You wonder, what must they know? You glance at other patrons. You poke the food. You make eyes at your date that say “I’ll run interference if you grab the check.” This is the situation marketers put readers into when they pack their writing with hyperbole like, “so simple anyone with a pulse can figure it out,” and exaggerated claims like, “we’re the only way to grow your business.”
At a certain point (and not very far in), big and obviously unsupportable claims have the opposite effect. They telegraph that you’re a bit of a cheat. And if you’ll lie in small ways, what else? To say you have no competitors is to look foolish when you do. To promise a cure-all is to encourage readers to look for third-party reviews. Tiny mistrusts snowball into skepticism.
To fix: For each point you make, ask, is this strictly true? If an ungenerous competitor walked my reader through the article, would they find fault? If you can’t support a claim, soften it.
Most business writing is full of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. These are qualifiers like “best,” “seamlessly,” and “insanely,” meant to dress up the writing. But it’s baleful garnish and readers will wonder what it conceals. If a major goal of writing is to speed readers along to their end, adjectives are speed bumps.
“Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty,” wrote William Zinsser, “and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons.” Overly-written writing is cliché and forgettable.
Not only that, but readers don’t interpret complex grammatical constructions as a mark of intelligence. Just the opposite. They think the writer is too dense to explain it simply. It upsets them, and they move on to the next Google result.
To fix: Simplify your sentences as much as possible without losing the essentials. In the words of Strunk and White, “Omit needless words.” If you can delete a word and it reads the same, leave it out.
Perhaps the most terrible trend of all is passive-aggressive UX writing. I see it in pop-ups, where my options are either to surrender my email or admit that “I’m a mealy-brained moron and want to pass up this deal because I don’t know what’s good for me,” or something like that.
Nope, not ever. You have absolutely no clue what your reader or visitor is going through. The author comes across as spiteful and in fact, the trouble is their own inability to create something worth signing up for. (Though I see how that’s frustrating.)
Not everyone signs up, and not all sign-ups are good. Not everyone’s a fit. I question the value of a subscriber who was coerced to join out of a desire not to be called names. Far better to let the bad-fit visitors decline with dignity lest the good-fit ones, also feeling insulted, leave too.
Many marketers think their writing is inviting. But when the introduction veers off-topic and descends into hyperbole, adverbs, and passive-aggressive opt-outs, it makes readers feel like they’re being chased away by a big skull-crushing rock. And when the back button is only a click away, you’d better bet they’re running to it.
