Do you offer a “30-day money-back” or “100% satisfaction” guarantee?
As great as those sound, they’re just not as effective as they used to be.
People don’t notice standard guarantees anymore. They’ve got guarantee blindness.
One of the most important things a good copywriter does is make your prospects believe—beyond a doubt—that they’re going to get incredible results.
But whether you hire a copywriter or you write your own sales pages, you should understand how guarantee blindness affects your sales; otherwise, you can only hope the copywriter knows how to form a great guarantee.
Strong guarantees are almost sure to create more sales than refunds, so offering them makes sense (as long as your product is as good as it’s supposed to be).
But to get really great results, you need to make the guarantee shine so brightly that even the blind will see it.
So, What Still Works? Here are a couple of guarantees I’ve used in my clients’ sales pages:
10 times your investment back within 6 months 365-day “You’ll Be Thrilled” guarantee Add $1,000 to your monthly income within 6 months Start earning at least $3-6K/month within 12 months or your money back + $1,000 extra Those are pretty darn strong guarantees. They’re so strong, in fact, that they slide right past guarantee blindness, and people actually notice them.
But even a strong guarantee is worthless if it doesn’t grab your readers’ attention.
Where Should You Mention The Guarantee?
The standard is to mention it at the end of the sales page. If you get 10% of readers to read that far, the guarantee can affect 10% of readers.
If it’s mentioned in the page’s headline, it can affect 100% of readers.
But if you offer a standard guarantee, the first headline isn’t the right place for it.
You shouldn’t mention the guarantee in the headline unless it focuses on the most important value you’re offering.
If the best part about your product is that the buyers get their money back if they don’t like it, you should come up with a new product. So, unless the guarantee is directly tied to the core promise, for example, “Lose 10 pounds in 10 days or its free,” it shouldn’t get a prime spot on the sales page.
That leads to the question: how do you come up with the right guarantee?
How to Make Even The Blind See
You can expect the readers to forget the guarantee almost immediately after reading about it.
It’s not that they couldn’t understand it, it’s that they’re blind to the actual promise—they’re guarantee blind.
Still, there’s a huge potential benefit to offering the right guarantee.
First, everything you say is easier to believe after you’ve guaranteed readers will get exactly what you promise.
Instead of scrutinizing your every claim, they have the idea in the back of their minds that it’s all “guaranteed to be true.”
Second, when you offer an unusually strong guarantee before the reader even considers what you’re selling, you’ve minimized the perceived risk of the purchase.
Handling objections such as “What if the product isn’t as good as it’s supposed to be?” before the reader thinks about them is easier than addressing them after the reader has thought of them.
To get those benefits, you need to weave the idea of the guarantee tightly into the copy:
It needs to surface several times throughout the copy (if the page is long) It needs to be a selling point just like the main benefits of the product It needs to be so clear that the reader doesn’t have to stop to think about it It needs to directly demonstrate the value of the product and the benefits the reader can get If you don’t keep the guarantee front and center, it won’t make a big difference to your sales.
Guarantee What The Readers Want You to Guarantee
What would your customers want you to guarantee?
Do they want just the usual money-back guarantee? Do they want you to guarantee a specific end result or timespan?
Find a way to make your guarantee-blind readers notice you’re guaranteeing exactly what they’re hoping for.
The right guarantee can create a huge increase to your sales, so make sure you test it to get it right.
Neil
P.S Our outsourced marketing department comes with a unique 90 day “we make you money or it’s free” Guarantee. Check it out here
Comments
2 responses to “This Persuasion Strategy Doesn’t Work Anymore (and what to do about it)”
Yes, you do need to go “under the radar” with this one these days. They can have a powerful effect when incorporated into some other part of your website copy.
I’m trying to think of he one a friend of mine came up with this morning – it was along the lines of “well, of course if half way through our phone consultation, you’re not happy in any way, I’ll give you your money back”. Naturally it needs padding out, but you gets the idea!
Of course, there are some aspects you need to know about ED risks. Again, it’s important that you know about generic drugs before start.
I get the idea and yeah that’s on the right path 🙂