A followup to my post about marketing being communication.
You always aim to reach as many people as possible with your marketing efforts, given budget and other constraints.
You are never going to reach everybody. In fact, you are never going to please everybody.
The effort to try and suit everyone can be destructive.
It doesn’t matter how easy you make navigating your site, or how clear you make the checkout process in an online store. SOMEBODY is going to get confused and not be able to figure it out.
If you load up your site too much with instructions, notices, warnings, etc. etc. etc. you just end up annoying the average visitor.
I can’t tell you how many times a client customer service has contacted me because someone had a problem with their site, only to find on investigating that the site was perfectly fine, but someone was so drunk or so illiterate they were unable to find the huge, flashing button that said “click here to check out.”
It’s like the famous story about the person calling tech support because they couldn’t find the “any” key on their keyboard.
Give it up folks. Some people are idiots.