The 2-Step Formula for Eliminating Refunds

One of the very first changes I put in place when I took over marketing for Simple Programmer was:

Extend the length of our guarantees.

The idea of going from a 30-day money back guarantee to a full year gave my business partner the heebie-jeebies.

And Email Copywriting Workshop alumnus Devendra is feeling the same way.

He asks:

As of now, I am also giving the 30-day money back guarantee, do you suggest to extend the guaranty for 1 year or should I try for 60 days. The reason I am asking like you said more about the refunds and I believe most of the customers are legitimate but still I have that question in my mind.

Shall I try this one of my Info product to give it a try and test the results?

The rule of thumb here is, the longer your guarantee, the more sales you’ll make.

And you’ll have to try it to find out, but a longer guarantee can even *lower* your refund rate.

In the 13 months that Simple Programmer has offered this extended guarantee, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve had refund requests after the first 3-4 weeks.

Wait, you’re STILL worried about refunds?

Hrm—what, pray tell, are you selling anyway?

Nevermind, don’t want to know.

Here’s how subscriber Ricky of LaunchROI.com reduced his refund rate to a big fat ZERO:

I’ve tried all kind of guarantees:

– 30 days
– 60 days
– 90 days
– 6 months

My experience has been that the longer the guarantee and the better the support, the less refund requests I get.

Those people who try to screw us over usually do it very fast (especially if you allow your content to be downloaded: videos, PDFs, etc), within a week or two from the purchase date.

On the other hand, some people ask for refunds in an honest way for different reasons that I’m sure you know about already.

Not too long ago I did a soft launch of my newest course, The Smart Blog Funnel and surprisingly, I have not gotten any refund requests and I believe the reason for that was my support system (based on the feedback I was getting from customers).

They were saying things like…

“Wow… I have never experienced this kind of personalized support in my life! Love it.”

I actually thought I was going to get a lot of refund requests, because of a technical issue that happened and didn’t allow several customers to access some portions of the course for some weird reason.

So I personally created personalized screencast videos for each customer giving some technical tips to fix the problem, because the issue was on their end and not mine.

They loved the support so much that they couldn’t help but tell me multiple times hehe… it was a great experience for me, because it made me realized that if I show them I truly care, they will love me for it and they won’t even think about asking for a refund.

Long guarantees that put the risk on you = more sales.

Plenty of time to evaluate your product + killer support = more happy customers (who wouldn’t even dream of asking for a refund).

Now that’s a winning formula.

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