Internet Marketing

How to Lose a Customer for Life

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Years ago I subscribed to a paid newsletter in the IM niche.

To access the newsletter, you had to log into a membership site and download the PDF for that month.

If you forgot to download it each month (which I sometimes did) then there was no way to access the newsletter you paid for because it was gone and the new one was in its place.

What to do?

Email customer service and ask for the darn newsletter that you already paid for.

It was aggravating for me because it took all these extra steps of find the customer service email (hidden) writing the email, watching for the response, being told I’d emailed the wrong person and so forth.

Now imagine how annoying it had to be for the virtual assistant who continuously dealt with these requests.

Then one day after being a paid subscriber for years, I realized that I hadn’t downloaded the newsletter in months, so I sent off my email requesting my missing copies.

No reply.

I sent a second email.

No reply.

Mind you, I was paying for the newsletter monthly. Yes, it was my fault that I hadn’t downloaded each newsletter each month, but so what?

It was a crummy system that made things difficult for paying subscribers and created more work for his assistants.

I never did hear back despite repeated attempts on my part to get those newsletters.

By the way, the newsletters were good and I learned something from just about every issue.

Good quality but a lousy system for downloading issues.

Now here’s my point… this happened many years ago, and yet I still think about it every time I see a new offer from this marketer.

I still like the guy and I still want to buy his stuff but I don’t, because I’ve never gotten over the poor service I received.

Here’s the kicker: I just read an article he authored that stresses how important customer service is and how you need to respond to customers and help them when they have a problem.

If only he followed his own advice.