Message drift doesn't announce itself.
It just quietly makes everything a little harder.
But if you know what to look for, it leaves a very clear trail.
Here's what it looks like on the inside ...
Your support inbox starts filling up with basic questions. "What does this actually do?" "How is this different from X?" "Is this right for me?" Those aren't curiosity questions. They're recognition questions. The message didn't answer them, so the customer is asking a human.
Your best creative works for a while, then dies. And the next winner looks completely unrelated to the last one. So you keep chasing new hooks, new angles, new formats. But nothing sticks. That's not a creative problem. That's a truth problem.
Customers click but don't convert. The interest is there. The intent isn't. Because the message attracted curiosity instead of fit.
Refunds and cancellations come from people who expected something different. Not because the product failed. Because the message set the wrong expectation.
And here's the one that stings the most ...
You start discounting to close sales that should have closed on their own.
That's the message asking for help it shouldn't need.
If two or three of those sound familiar, your message is probably softer than it needs to be. Not because you did something wrong. But because drift is normal. It happens to almost every brand that grows.
The good news is the fix doesn't require blowing anything up.
It usually just requires subtraction. Removing the soft words. Getting back to the thing that was true before everyone got careful.
Tomorrow I'll walk you through a simple audit you can do in about 20 minutes that will show you exactly where your message went soft and what to do about it.
See you tomorrow,
Jeremiah
P.S. Read your top five customer-facing lines today. Just read them. Notice how many of them use the word "help" or "support." That number will tell you a lot.
100% Typo Guarantee … This message was hand-crafted by a human being … me.
There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-facto revisions. I just wrote it and sent it … so I can pretty much guarantee some typo or grammatical error that would make all my past English teachers cringe.
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