Offering sales and discounts is a great way to bring in extra business and promote loyalty from your customers. But, have you thought about some of the legal issues that might arise if you put on a sale or provide coupons or vouchers to your customers?

What about if you want to send your customers a newsletter in the mail with a coupon that they can cut out, or an email newsletter alerting them to a bargain opportunity?

There are a number of laws around the world that you must always make sure you comply with whenever you are contacting your customers, particularly advertising laws, privacy laws, and anti-spam laws. These topics will be covered in three articles; this article is Part I, which will cover advertising your products. Part II will cover privacy laws, and Part III will cover anti-spam legislation and marketing.

First, let’s look at all types of advertising and sale offers to your customers, and the advertising laws that you need to comply with.

Advertising your products

Some common ways of advertising discounts are:

• Advertising sales in store
• Offering coupons to customers or distributing coupons in your local area
• Emailing and posting newsletters or sales flyers
• Radio and TV advertising
• Internet advertising

I will be focusing on advertising in-store, coupons, newsletters, and sales flyers.

Advertising in store is one of the most common ways of alerting your customers to a sale, by displaying large signs reading something like “20% off all merino tees!” or “Buy one get one free!”

Here’s an example of the types of signs I mean:

Signs in-store alert your customers that a sale is going on.

Offering coupons is also common, and they may be printed on the back of receipts (at your store or at a partner store), sent to customers, or printed and left on tables in public areas near your store. Here’s an image of what receipt coupons typically look like:

Supermarket receipt coupons via Media Life Magazine

Finally, emailing and posting newsletters or sales flyers is becoming an increasingly common advertising method, particularly if you run both an offline and online business.

Emailing and posting will be covered in Part III of this article.

What kind of laws apply here?

No matter which method of advertising you are using, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that you are not misleading any of your customers, or inadvertently using false advertising tactics. An obvious example is that you can’t release a coupon that says “30% off anything in store” that actually only applies to specific items.

A commonly used sales tactic is to mark prices up, and then mark them down again to original price and say that the items are “on sale.” Class action lawsuits are currently pending against Kohl’s and J.C. Penney, accused of deceiving customers by selling products at regular prices but calling it a “sale.”

The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing notes this type of pricing as “deceptive.” The guide states:

“Where the former price is genuine, the bargain being advertised is a true one. If, on the other hand, the former price being advertised is not bona fide but fictitious—for example, where an artificial, inflated price was established for the purpose of enabling the subsequent offer of a large reduction—the ‘bargain’ being advertised is a false one; the purchaser is not receiving the unusual value he expects.”

Comparative advertising

Comparative advertising is a another common way to advertise products, such as “We have the best towels on the market!”

However, despite this practice being widespread, there are some legal pitfalls you need to be careful of, and you need to make sure not to deceive your customers with this type of advertising.

The two main types of comparative advertising that are generally viewed by the law as deceptive are incomplete comparison and inconsistent comparison.

Incomplete comparison is when the advertiser uses the term “better” or “best,” without listing the ways in which their product is being compared with others (such as quality, price, resilience). For example, an advertisement that claims “Our medicine is better at curing colds” could mean “better” than not taking any medicine at all, rather than better than competitors as many consumers may assume.

Inconsistent comparison is where a product is compared with many others, but only compared in the categories where that product wins. For example, “Our Nut Bar X is more convenient than Nut Bar A, cheaper than Nut Bar B, and healthier than Nut Bar C!”

But, what the consumer doesn’t know is that Nut Bar A is the least convenient of all the brands (so of course Nut Bar X is more convenient), or that Nut Bar B is the most expensive (so of course Nut Bar X is cheaper), and Nut Bar C is the least healthy. But overall, the best choice for the consumer may be the more expensive but very healthy and convenient Nut Bar B, while Nut Bar X is just “average” in all qualities. The advertisement makes it seem like Nut Bar X is the best, when it is actually just better than the worst Nut Bar in each category.

This is what I mean by comparative advertising:

Image via Verizon

While this advertisement was able to be published in the U.S., it could be considered potentially deceptive under legislation in other countries. This is because it only compares Verizon to AT&T in one category (3G coverage), and does not compare the two providers in all categories, such as price, 3G coverage, available plans, customer service, or ratings. AT&T may be the better option for a consumer when looking at the whole picture, not just coverage.

So what can I do to comply?

These deceptive advertising practices are known as false advertising, and are illegal in most countries. If you don’t check the wording of your advertisements carefully, it may leave you open to fines from regulatory bodies (such as the FTC in the U.S. or the Advertising Standards Authority and the Institute of Sales Promotion in the U.K.) or class actions from consumers.

Make sure that your advertisements always display a fair and accurate price, don’t use deceptive sales tactics, and ensure that you check over the wording of all comparative advertisements carefully. Ensure that someone outside of your marketing team looks at your advertisements (for an independent point of view), or if you are working alone, ask a friend or business partner to cast their eye over things for potentially misleading terms.

With the above tips on advertising, you should be able to ensure that you comply with all laws when you are sharing your deals and products with your customers.

Always make sure that you don’t unintentionally mislead your customers in any way or use deceptive advertising practices, and always have an independent person check over your proposed adverts just in case.

Now that you’re aware of some of the main advertising pitfalls to look out for, the next installments in this series will look at some of the legal issues that arise when you send coupons, advertisements, or sale notifications to customers by mail or email.

Part II of this article will cover privacy issues when you collect customer information. Then, Part III will look at marketing (by email and post) as well as applicable anti-spam legislation.

How do you avoid accidentally misleading customers with your advertising? Do you always make sure you have someone look over your advertisements? 

Now that we’ve looked at advertising in Part 1, it’s time to consider the situations in which you may be directly contacting your customers to advertise or market your products, and collecting their information to do so.

Collecting customer information will be done in different ways online and offline, and has a number of different legal and privacy issues tied up in it that you need to consider. Let’s take a look.

Privacy issues when collecting customer information

Most countries around the world have some kind of privacy legislation in place that governs how you should collect personal information, store it, and protect it. These laws also usually set out what you need to tell your customers when you are collecting their information, such as the fact that you are collecting information, what you are collecting, and what you will do with that information.

Let’s examine a couple of pieces of legislation, from the U.S. and from the U.K.

So, what is the law?

The U.S. doesn’t have an overarching privacy law like many other countries, but they do have specific privacy legislation that applies to areas such as health information privacy (HIPAA) and protecting the private information of children (COPPA).

However, another piece of legislation, the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, requires that your privacy policy on your website must outline:

• The types of data gathered,
• How the data may be shared with other parties,
• The process your customer can follow to review and make changes to the data you have on them, and
• The policy’s effective date and a description of any changes since then.

If you run an online store and are based in the U.S., it is highly likely that you have Californian customers over the internet, so it pays to comply with the Californian state law. If you have international users, you may also need to comply with E.U. and U.K. law, as well as the laws in other countries where you anticipate you may have customers.

The U.K. follows what is called the EU Data Protection Directive 1995, which sets out seven principles of data collection:

• Notice: Users should be given notice when their data is being collected
• Purpose: Data should only be used for what you say you will use it for
• Consent: User data should not be shared without your users’ consent
• Security: Collected data should be kept secure
• Disclosure: Users should be informed about who is collecting their data
• Access: Users should be allowed to access their data and make corrections to any inaccurate data
• Accountability: Users should have a method available to them to hold data collectors accountable for not following the above principles

Now, let’s look at how to comply with these laws in practice, both offline and online.

Offline data collection

In store, one of the main ways in which you might collect data is by asking your customers to sign up for a membership club or loyalty program.

Some of the information you might usually collect through a loyalty program could be customer name, mailing address, email address, cellphone number, or even their date of birth. This is all “personal information” for the purposes of most privacy legislation around the world.

To make sure that you comply with the privacy legislation in the U.K., make sure that you have a privacy policy for your business that your customers can access. In the U.S., while there is no privacy legislation that covers this kind of collection, it gives your customers confidence if you have policies in place to protect their personal information.

A privacy policy is a legal statement that explains how customer or user data is collected, used, managed, and disclosed. The privacy policy also explains to the customer how their privacy and personal information will be protected.

Your privacy policy should outline:

• What information you are collecting;
• Why you are collecting it;
• What you will use the information for;
• How you will keep the information secure;
• When you might release the information, and to whom;
• How your customers can amend or correct the information you hold on them; and
• What dispute resolution procedures are in place if there is a disagreement.

Online data collection

One of the most important legal steps you need to take when you set up a branch of your business online is to include a privacy policy on your website.

Your privacy policy on your website, like your offline policy, needs to contain the types of information listed above. As well as that information, some of the unique types of information that you may collect online (that you wouldn’t collect offline) are:

• customer’s internet domain;

• IP address;
• when your website was accessed;
• type of browser and operating system used;
• pages visited; and
• what site the customer came from.

Web forms will also be collecting user data, and if you use something like Google Analytics, even more data will be gathered behind the scenes.

You need to make sure that your privacy policy, whether online or offline, covers every type of information listed above, and is updated whenever anything changes.

Gaining customer agreement to your privacy policy

Both online and offline there are two ways of gaining agreement to your privacy policy: express agreement and implied agreement. Online, these are known as clickwrap (express agreement) and browsewrap (implied agreement).

Implied agreement in a physical store is gained by displaying your policies in prominent places, such as on the counter or on the door of your shop. This is usually sufficient for a legal agreement to be made between you and your customers, as long as you make sure that the policies are displayed in places where they will be brought to your customers’ attention and they will have plenty of opportunities to read them.

Express agreement is a stronger method of agreement, as it would be where your customer has explicitly signed or ticked a box saying “I agree to the privacy policy.” To implement this in practice, ask your customers to fill out a membership or loyalty form when they sign up with your store, rather than just taking their information. On the form you can ask them to tick a box or sign to say that they agree to your privacy policy.

Online, a browsewrap (implied agreement) method is commonly used by most websites. You have probably seen many websites displaying small links at the bottom of their pages to their Terms and their Privacy Policy. Here’s a visual example of what I mean:

You can see in the Art.com footer that Privacy Policy and Terms of Use are in small writing that is very difficult to see.

Unlike the implied agreement in your physical store, browsewrap methods like this are usually not enough online.

For a browsewrap method to be legally binding online, you need to display your policies prominently and frequently, which means that you can’t just put small links down the bottom. For this method to be effective, you could put the link at the top of the page and highlight it in bold, or with red text to draw your customer’s attention to it. It should also be displayed on every page that the customer visits.

For greater legal protection online, make sure that you use a clickwrap method. A clickwrap method is where you use a tick box (at the end of a web form or when the customer makes a user account), or have a statement above any user account Submit button saying “By clicking Submit you agree to our Privacy Policy and store Terms and Conditions.”

Here’s an example from YouTube of what I mean by using a tick box:

Here’s another example where you can see the clickwrap method is being used with a submit button:

Conclusion

In Part 1, we looked at advertising and how to ensure that you don’t inadvertently mislead your customers. Now, we’ve covered how to get their consent for gathering their information, and how to make sure that you comply with privacy laws and get agreement to your privacy policy.

At TermsFeed, we’ve set up free PDF templates that you can use to get started with a privacy policy agreement if you need to.

Next, Part 3 of this article looks at contacting your customers by email or post.

Does your website use the browsewrap or the clickwrap method? 

I’ll never forget my first client, shouting at me in frustration, “C’mon! It shouldn’t be this hard to make a decent advert! Anyone can do it!”

Twenty years down the line and hundreds of marketing promotions later, I’m no longer frustrating people so much because I’ve learned to take apart the meat and bones of promotions to better understand how to produce effective ads and literature.

But can anyone do it? I’m not sure I agree with my old client on that one, but there are certainly some message and design commonalities that can be taken apart and looked at in order to build successful marketing collateral.

Whether you’re a rookie designer or a client looking for some sound design and copy advice, this guide can help you understand the anatomy of your promotions and how each one should be built within tried-and-tested parameters.

1. The heart of a promotion: The headline

Giving life to your promotion

Your headline is a critical part of your promotion. It is the heartbeat that gives it life and meaning.

A headline can be as obvious as the word “sale” or simply your product name. It is all about context. Why make it complicated on the cover of a brochure or sell sheet? But then again, why make it super-generic on the headline of a magazine ad that you want to get noticed?

Be effective rather than clever

A headline can be funny, clever, inspirational, seductive, and so on. But what it can’t be is unrelated to your product and business message. There’s an awful habit that many businesses fall into of trying to lever in puns or well-known phrases—a belief born from reading too many tabloid papers.

If you’re able to use clever wordplay to get your point across then that’s great. But trying to “be clever” should never be your motivation for writing a headline.

Don’t use humor for the sake of it (and avoid the dreaded “pun”)

Here is a comparison of actual headlines for similar products with very different treatments:

“Regardless of the right to bear arms, we in no way condone the right to bear feet.”

In my opinion, this headline for Kenneth Cole shoes (above) leaves the viewer wondering: What’s being sold here? What point is being made? How can this information be acted upon?

In view of the fact that this ad was also trying to somewhat make a social statement, it just seems like the wrong place for a “pun” and the whole thing results in a confusing statement with forced humor.

“Metro Shoes back-to-school sale—happy feet make happy people!”

At first glance, this headline (above) could be viewed as fairly unremarkable. However, this headline for Metro Shoes is doing its job because it’s clearly defining a message and a purpose for this piece of promotional literature.

A headline should tell the viewer:

• Who you are
• What you’re selling
• What problem you’re solving

Headline examples

Here are just a few examples of headline strategies that you can adopt for your own business.

• Scare the viewer: “A little mistake that cost the farmer $3,000 a year!”
• Ease the viewer: “Good mornings follow a good Nytol.”
• Impel the viewer: “Nothing hurts more than sitting on a couch.”
• Intrigue the viewer: “How does the man who drives the snowplow drive to the snowplow?”
• Inspire the viewer: “Don’t dream of winning. Train for it.”
• Humor the viewer: “An English ale so authentic it’ll make your teeth crooked.”

2. The brain of a promotion: The copy

Be smart about writing your body copy. Whether you’re writing a paragraph for an ad or an entire brochure, the body copy should reflect your business’s brain and voice. Don’t just cut and paste a copy style; know who you are and who you’re talking to.

If you’re advertising a tech business, you need to sound informed and intelligent; however, if you own an events business, sounding “techy” rather than fun and upbeat is clearly the wrong approach.

Have a plan for your copy

• Think before you write: consider what you have to offer and write down the features—and more importantly, the benefits of your products and services
• Know your audience: be clear about who you’re talking to and adopt the voice of your copy accordingly
•  Use simple words when you can: be natural but intelligent, and avoid marketing lingo
• Never write passively: don’t say “we try to provide the best service” when you can say “we provide the best service”
• Tell a story:
  • Introduce yourself
  • Tell people what you’re offering—not just on the surface, but what you really offer as a result of your product or service
  • Tell people why you’re offering it
• Give people a firm conclusion: offer a takeaway from your story

Take action from the start

Describe the benefits customers get from your business as soon as possible. The benefit is really what customers are after; is it cheaper, is it faster, is it newer, will it make my hair grow back?

Split your copy into subheadings

Don’t write in long paragraphs. Make your paragraphs short and sweet and make sure each paragraph has a subheading to help organize your copy into an easy-to-follow story.

When people read your promotion, the subheadings should give a great summary of what you’re offering without the need to read each paragraph.

Bullets and other tricks are your friends

Don’t be afraid of bullets or itemized info. Summarized lists of features and highlights are a quick and effective way of drawing attention to major benefits while giving the viewer easily digestible information.

If you can put a complex piece of info in a simple data graph or graphic, then do so. A picture can say more in one second than an entire paragraph or even page of copy.

Include a call-to-action (CTA)

Don’t ever forget what you want people to do with the promotion you’re offering. Getting customers to do what you want is a bit like herding cats!

People have short attention spans and getting them to see your phone number, redeem your coupon, link to your web address, or visit your store is far more important than getting them to read any of your body copy.

Make your call-to-action easily seen and build in motivation as to why the reader should take that action. The following CTAs are just a few examples of commonly used CTA verbiage:

• Call now at
• Join the party at
• Discover the secret at
• See how we did it
• Make a difference at
• Go to our website
• Sign up for free at
• Indulge yourself now at
• Call now to speak to a success expert
• Like free prizes? Like us on Facebook!
• Find your own style at

3. The body of a promotion: The design

The design of your promotion is not only what makes it attractive, it’s also what helps the viewer make sense of the information you’re presenting. It’s the meat of your literature that fills out the bare bones of an idea.

Design harmony

It’s imperative that you understand the relationship between words and images. Before you even start your design, consider the following:

• Never use an image because it looks “nice”—every image you use in an ad, brochure, or other promotion needs to relate to a headline or a piece of information that you’re presenting
• It’s all in the composition—have a visual plan of where your copy will sit and where the related images will best complement these info points
• On brochures and other literature in which there are a lot of copy points, consider adding captions underneath each image
• Use color blocking, different font styles, and other tricks—treat copy as another aspect of your design that needs design attention
• Make every block of text readable—although it depends on the font and the reader, as a rule, each section of body copy should be at least 10 point in font weight with image captions no less that 7 point

Harmonize your promotion to include both images and copy. Think of your images and copy running down the beach, hand-in-hand together! They are supposed to be a team that works in unison.

Breakdown of company promotion that illustrates how each component is presented clearly to the viewer, with each design element working harmoniously.

Rule of threes

If you’ve never heard of this term, the rule of threes is a great composition guide to consider for every page of literature you produce. It’s a great rule to follow that allows you to design in a way that naturally conforms to the way a viewer sees and follows visual information.

By splitting your page into three vertical or horizontal sections, you can create a layout that has natural structure and eye-flow.

Various rule of three layouts that include a completed wireframe with a headline, copy, and images laid out within the three block grid pattern.

Every promotion is different, but whether it’s a brochure, sell sheet, flyer, or advertisement, it needs to have a powerful structure and a strong message to effectively support your business.

Facebook boasts over a billion users that spend an average of 40 minutes a day on the platform. Facebook ads allow you to target all of these users—but they only work if done correctly. Are you spending time and money on Facebook ads and not seeing the results you want? You’re not the only one, and there are some common mistakes you can address that will improve your results.

Targeting

This is typically where most Facebook ads fail. You’re not focusing on the right audience, or you’re being too specific or too broad with your current one. You might even be making these costly errors. For example, are you targeting:

All languages

Is your ad copy in English? If so, you want to make sure you’re filtering for English speakers only, so potential viewers actually understand your ad. Facebook’s default is to target all languages. This can be a major money pit, especially if you’re optimizing for impressions—people seeing your ad won’t necessarily understand it!

Broad keywords

Let’s say you sell expensive goods. Your first instinct might be to hone in on people who are interested in other expensive things like Mercedes, Louis Vuitton or high-rise condos.

Here’s the catch: there are plenty of people who like those things, but they might not necessarily be able to afford them or be able to afford your similar products. Try choosing people who have buying behaviors that would fit your ideal customer, as opposed to interests.

National audiences

While this isn’t necessarily the best approach for every campaign, local targeting is often overlooked. With Facebook ads, the more accurate and specific you can be, the more high quality leads you will get. The potential reach of a national audience is enticing, but the quality of an audience that size is often lacking.

If it makes sense for you to go after people who live in your area, do it! It might make sense for you to focus your spend on a national audience if you ship your products or if they’re available digitally. Otherwise, local is the way to go. You might see fewer clicks to your site, but sales and qualified leads will increase.

One attribute

Understand your buyer persona. Where are they hanging out online? What products do they buy when they go to the grocery store? Are they married or single? Facebook Audiences provides that information, which allows you to reach potential customers much more accurately.

Try adjusting to include attributes of the whole person, not just one specific hobby or interest. For example, if you have an art gallery and want to reach people who are interested in art, try the targeting whole person of your ideal buyer. Maybe that means targeting males between the ages of 30-50 who make an income of over $100,000, have above average spending habits, and who are into art.

Leave it at that and don’t get any more specific on the interests (i.e. adding the interests of fine art or competitor’s galleries). This will allow Facebook to cleverly target those users who are similar to your ideal buyer—you’re selling yourself short when you just focus on one piece of the person.

A/B testing

Each of your ads is probably geared toward a different potential audience; instead of guessing and relying on your gut to choose wording or images, try testing a few. This is known as A/B testing, you’re comparing ad A to ad B.

The key to useful A/B testing is making each ad exactly the same except for the one piece you want to test, like the background color. If you change several attributes, you won’t be able to tell which one made the difference when you’re ready to design your next round of ads.

I typically play around with A/B testing when it comes down to the copy or description of the ad. Try out asking questions, creating intrigue, or educating viewers with different ad copy. Facebook will take whichever one is performing the best and start displaying it more. You can then go in your Ads Manager and shut off the other ads and let the best one shine!

Using A/B testing takes the guesswork out of your ad creation. You won’t be wasting time and money on ads that aren’t performing as well as they could be with different copy.

Ad optimization

Facebook has built-in ad optimization tools that you can select from when you’re creating a new campaign. These tools correspond with different marketing objectives. Are you trying to drive people to your website to purchase something? Or maybe you’re trying to garner brand awareness? Currently, Facebook boasts 11 different campaign objectives.

You want to make sure you’re choosing the best objective for your marketing goals. This not only will ensure that you’re reaching the right people, but your ad’s success will be measured by objective-specific metrics.

Below are some of the most common objectives:

Traffic

Choose this consideration if you’re looking to grab people from your Facebook ad and send them to your website. You might be looking to get them to sign up for your email list or even make a purchase. You will be able to track the success of your ads by installing your Facebook Pixel.

Brand awareness

You want people to recognize your brand and associate it with your industry. Facebook will focus on showing your ad to people who are more likely to be interested in it—viewers will see your ad up to two times every five days.

They then measure how many people are likely to remember your brand (after two days have passed) because of the ad; this is known as ad recall and is the metric used to measure success in this type of campaign.

Local awareness

Does your business thrive on in-store interactions? Get potential customers off Facebook and into your store with the local awareness objective. These ads showcase a CTA like “call now” or “get directions.” This objective cuts out your website as the middleman and allows viewers to access your information straight from the ad.

Reach

This objective works nicely when you’re trying to reach as many people as possible with your ad. You might choose this if you’re having an event and want a lot of people to be familiar with it and attend. This objective charges per impression—so you will pay for the number of people that see the ad as opposed to the number of viewers that click on it.

Engagement

This consideration is best used for post engagements (post comments, likes, shares, and clicks), page likes, event responses, or offer claims. If you’re looking to do any of those things, this objective will give you optimal results. Note that Facebook will show your ad to people who are most likely to interact with your ad to increase its engagement.

Boosting ads

Facebook offers boosting as an easily accessible option; however, only use this option if you’re looking to get more likes or comments. If you’re looking for any other outcome, do not boost.

Facebook Ads Manager and Audiences has a plethora of data that you can delve into and use to your advantage to target potential customers. Make sure you’re using your time and money wisely by avoiding the common mistakes above.