So you’d think a free offer would like to a free offer, right? No it doesn’t. And then business scratch their heads, and wonder why things don’t work.

What I’m saying is this: Attraction can work prettttttty well. And then you play goof-ball with conversion. And completely avoid the customer from consuming your offering.

Why is it that things go so wrong? Why would a simple task lead in almost zero-conversion?

Let’s take this example from Shutterfly.com.

When you get a free offer, what is the first and last thing on your brain? Why the word: FREE. You can’t think of anything else. You want to see FREE and nothing but FREE. And when you go to the page below, you see nothing that says FREE.

Here’s what I got in my email. It says FREE. It has a deadline. It gets my attention.

The disconnect when you click to the link. Where did FREE go? Where did the deadline go?

You dither. Is it really free? What’s that $9.99 doing on the page? What was the offer all about? Where did FREE go? What happened to the deadline of March 28?

You see the disconnect and the resulting confusion?
I haven’t been to Shutterfly.com for a while. So they they are, prodding me to get my act together by making a simple, effective offer. And in the process, they’re increasing my consumption.

But consumption works both ways…
If they get me to use their service more often, I’ll use their service more often. If they confuse me more often, I’ll expect their service to be confusing–and may not go back.

Paypal ran into this consumption issue many years ago…
Paypal got a reputation in the market. Not so much from the the grapevine, but more so from the users–namely people who bought products or services using Paypal. Paypal would want to link to these customers’ bank accounts, and make all sorts of crazy, irritating-enough demands.

The consumption-slide sets in
Instead of more buyers buying through Paypal, more buyers started opting in for non-Paypal buttons to click on. Now of course, Paypal has cleaned up their act, but the perception remains.

Shutterfly scored high on attraction…
And then totally blew their chances on conversion. As for consumption, let’s not go there, shall we? What could have been a clean path from attraction –right away to consumption, ended abruptly at confusion.

And yeah, I still don’t know if that offer’s free.

Is it just me, or are you confused too?