Gotta have a Guarantee

Alright, so before we took a short break last week for the holiday weekend we left off with a discussion on guarantees. We talked about the 3 mail different types of guarantees you can use, satisfaction, results, and perception as well as using multiple guarantees to boost your response. To review click over to my blog here.

There are two more big ideas I have to share before we move away from guarantees. First is the length in time of the guarantee. In almost all instances the longer the guarantee, the less refunds you’ll have. I know that may go against conventional thinking, that the more time they have with a product/service the more likely they will realize they don’t like it or don’t need it.

It’s actually just the opposite. The more time they have to use your product or service, the less likely they are to ask for a refund. Here’s why. When you only give someone 14 days to use it, at day 12 if they haven’t used it, or are not seeing results, they’ll ask for a refund.

If you give the same product 90 days, the chances that they actually will remember and use the guarantee goes way down. Now, you need to be honest and have integrity with this. If they ask for a refund on your guarantee within the time allowed, your darn well better honor it.

Finally, we’re left with unconditional vs. conditional guarantees. Last week I left you with our Triple Your Money Back Guarantee that reads:

Triple Your Money Back Guarantee - If you use both of your 30 minute One-On-One Coaching sessions, and your 2 Critique Certificates within the first 3 months, and you can show that you actually used our advice

It’s obvious now that this is a conditional guarantee as well. These can be used to bolster your “regular” guarantee, and really give you an added punch that can spark additional sales.

Here are a few examples of great guarantees I’ve seen and some I’ve written for myself and clients.

This is an unconditional guarantee used by Victoria Principal selling facial cream. It’s a whole lot better than just saying, “money back guaranteed”:

“If your friends don’t accuse you of having a facelift return the empty jar and we’ll give you all your money back.”

Here’s another I wrote for a client, a perception and unconditional guarantee in one, I call it the “You’ll be a Star” guarantee:

“If you don’t think my show wasn’t the most amazing you’ve ever seen, and people are not coming up to you after the show patting you on the back for having such a great event, then you don’t pay a dime.”

I can hear a lot of you out there saying you can’t guarantee your products or services. If you’re a doctor, you can’t guarantee patient health, if you’re in weight loss, you can’t guarantee that they’ll lose weight, if you’re a financial advisor you can’t guarantee monetary success.

But there are a ton of things you can guarantee. The doctor can guarantee that he’ll see you within 5 minutes of your scheduled appointment time. If you sell weight loss, you can guarantee that their coach will call them back within 45 minutes of receiving a call, a financial advisor can guarantee something similar to the doctor, or guarantee returned phone calls (wish my advisor did that!), or any number of things not directly related to the product or service, but to the quality of service they’ll receive.