How I’ve Used The Pratfall Effect

When I was working on a Pet Food brand in 2020, I came across a great little defensive design (also named The Pratfall Effect) technique in email marketing.

Using The Pratfall Effect you can make yourself come off more likeable when you make a mistake.

So when I made an email welcome sequence, I realised an interesting win when I actually made a mistake in one of the emails.

This mistake made a customer frustratingly mad, so I decided to keep the mistake, but once we told him we’d fix that, we knew he would never go through that process ever again, but he felt like he got a win by fixing a small business error.

If you do this, you have the opportunity to make better, long-term customers, but simply don’t use this on everyone because it comes off as untrustworthy. So in one email most would skim over, this rare issue gave us an incremental nudge to revenue.