The Guarantee

The Guarantee

Fear of getting ripped off is one of the biggest fears on the Internet today. The number of scams that I have personally been subjected to over 4 years of marketing online has been staggering. So it’s no surprise that people are hesitant to make purchases online unless the merchant backs up his product.

That’s where the guarantee comes in.

If you’re going to have any success selling a product online, you MUST stand behind it 100%. This is not even debatable. Those who don’t offer guarantees on their products lose out on a large number of sales. The stats prove this.

The question is what kind of guarantee do you offer?

Well, let’s start off with the simple solution. Many marketers, who don’t want the hassle of having to pay affiliates out of their own pockets and don’t want the headaches associated with running their own affiliate program, usually go with a company like Clickbank to process payments for them and also pay affiliates for them as well. This takes the entire decision making out of the equation. Clickbank mandates a 56 Day or 8 Week Guarantee.

End of story.

You have absolutely no say in this matter. As a matter of fact, if your sales page has any other type of guarantee offered, Clickbank will reject your product and you will not be able to sell it through them.

Now, there is a plus side to this. Many marketers who purchase products online feel very comfortable with Clickbank’s guarantee because they know that it will be honored. So they are less hesitant to make the purchase. So sometimes going with Clickbank can be a plus.

However, if you want to go above and beyond with your guarantee and bring in even more sales, then you need to go with your own Merchant account or with a payment processor that doesn’t mandate guarantee periods. Should you go that route, there are two ways you can attack the guarantee.

The first is time. You can offer a guarantee that is long past the usual amount of time that people offer guarantees for. It’s not uncommon for some companies to offer guarantees for up to 1 year. Imagine the kind of confidence a 1 year guarantee instills in a prospective buyer.

The second way to attack the guarantee is through money. Now, obviously you can’t offer a person less than a full money back guarantee. That’s the minimum. But imagine if you offered a double or even triple your money back guarantee. This can effectively triple your sales.

Of course you can combine the two. Imagine offering a triple your money back guarantee for up to 1 year. Think that’s not going to increase your sales significantly?

The next thing that you need to concentrate on is where to put the guarantee. There are two schools of thought here and either one will work.

As I mentioned in a previous chapter, you can actually put your guarantee right in your opening headline and opening paragraph. Of course you’ll further reinforce this guarantee later on in your sales copy right before the call to action.

Or you can simply put the guarantee at the end of your sales copy just before the call to action. In either case, you MUST remind the person of the guarantee before they are presented with the call to action. This gives them that immediate feeling of assurance that in many cases will push them over the edge just enough to buy.

Aside from the time length and monetary guarantees that you make, you also want to make, what I call, a guarantee of pride. While it may be true that the bottom line is all people really care about, getting their money back and having so much time to do it, it’s nice to read something like this…

“I stand 100% behind my product, so much in fact that if you are not completely satisfied with it, I want you to return it. And with your prompt refund I will also send you a gift to make up for your dissatisfaction.”

Usually, and we’ll cover this in a later chapter, by offering bonuses and allowing the customer to keep them, even if they return the product, this goes a long way.

The point is, when you make your guarantee, you want it to be one that is so compelling and so amazing that the person would have to be crazy not to take you up on your offer.

In the next chapter we’ll cover the bonuses that I had just mentioned.