Your call to action is on fire, and your brand is burning

I’ve had it with marketers — even though I suppose I am one, by process of elimination. But I’m sick of emails with hail-Mary subject lines, yellow AUCTION TODAY signs and websites with all-caps, bold and flashing text saying, essentially, “BID NOW, DAMMIT!”

Maybe that’s your niche. Maybe you you decided that your company’s brand strategy is to compete on price and your slogan is “we sell things at auction at bargain-basement prices!” You’re willing to do anything you can to catch someone’s eye, even if it means using emoji in the subject of your bulk emails.

Maybe you read an article or have first-hand experience that yellow is the best color to catch someone’s eye, so all your flyers and signs are on a yellow background. You don’t care that yellow also means cheap, because your job is to do the best job for the seller you’re working for to the exclusion of all other priorities — including your and your company’s dignity.

This race to the bottom, in the long run, hurts your company’s brand. Worse yet, it hurts our industry. If our customers see that every call to action we use has the volume knob turned to 11, then they’re likely to lump our content into the same bucket as other similarly faux-important, hair-on-fire materials they receive — spam.

My friend Ryan George frequently says, “If everything is bold, nothing is.” He’s usually talking about flyer design, but the saying perfectly summarizes the challenge that we auctioneers face. Each auction deserves our best effort, so why shouldn’t we try to convey to our prospective bidders that it’s the most relevant-to-them event we’ve ever conducted?

Because they’re not stupid. They know that every auction we have can’t be our most important sale. They know that we’re in the business of finding repeat business, and they can see through our smoke and mirrors. They lose respect for a furniture store that has more than one going-out-of-business sale per year, so why do we think we can convince them that every sale we have is the opportunity of a lifetime?

We should know that the harder we try to iterate on the most eye-catching, routine-disturbing subject line or post title, the more our content looks like spam. We should know that success is built on establishing a company brand that’s respected for quality of service, not our willingness to busk or feign phony plumage.

I’m not saying we should sandbag our marketing efforts and underrepresent the items in our auctions. By the same token, I don’t want to work in an industry where everything is superlative. I believe that the best way to retain the customers we want is to treat them — and their attention — with respect.