Marketing Failures – “Online Specials”

Here’s a Marketing Failure you can certainly avoid making.  In the interest of helping you avoid making marketing mistakes and wasting or losing money, we’ll periodically feature examples of marketing failures.  Mistakes should be something to learn from, whether they are your own mistakes or someone else’s failure.  We all make them – the smarter among us learn from them and especially learn from others.

So here goes, for the marketing failure of the day:

If you have to make a phone call, it’s not an online special.

Believe it or not, this is a screen shot from an actual web page.  I’ve masked out the company name and the phone numbers in an effort to avoid further embarrassment to the “guilty party,” but have otherwise not altered the image at all.   I came across this site while doing competitive intelligence for a car dealership client, and the company in question sells millions of dollars a year – so you’d think they’d have someone savvy doing their marketing and making sure they make the best impression possible.  Instead, they came up with this little gem of a marketing mistake:

When in doubt, use a little common sense.

I wonder how many sales they lost from this?