There are lots of ways you can improve a landing page to get better sales results, and wise marketers do lots of testing to find out what pages work best.

But have you wondered … If you manipulate someone into buying a subscription have you done yourself a favor?

There are all sorts of ways to help the sales process. Expert copywriter Bob Bly recommends things like testimonials, credibility enhancers (e.g., “this is a secure site”), guarantees and the like. Those all reflect something tangible about the offer.

Then there are other ways to increase sales, like using a pretty woman’s face, or using the right color button. Those things do increase sales, but they have nothing to do with the offer.

When you’re selling a subscription service, you are often willing to lose money on the first year, hoping to make it up on renewals. If you use parlor tricks to manipulate someone into buying, is that helping your bottom line? If the pretty woman’s face causes a 10% lift in sales, will those sales renew at the same rate as the people who bought without the pretty face?

If your renewal rate dips one year, you’ll look back and wonder what might have caused it. Was your content less compelling? Did you use lower quality lists? Did you change your offer?

In an environment where marketers are constantly testing and refining landing pages, you may be bringing in orders from people who didn’t really want your product. You just tricked them.

I’m not sure what to do about it. It would be cumbersome to track every little change to a landing page — by assigning a different code to the order, perhaps — and then following it through the renewal process. But it’s an issue I think about from time to time.