A couple weeks back, I was lurking in a Facebook group when I saw an inflammatory post.
Let me first give you a bit of background.
The Facebook group where this post appeared is for people, like myself, who plopped down $500 at some point to get an online course called the Energy Blueprint.
The Energy Blueprint is offered by a guy called Ari Whitten, and it’s all about scientifically proven ways to increase your energy (if you’re healthy) — or to overcome fatigue (if you’re not).
Now, if you think about it, you’ll soon realize one important thing:
Claiming to have the solution to something as chronic and ill-defined as fatigue will attract at least a few people with a strong victim mentality.
Such as the author of the inflammatory post I mentioned at the start.
The post itself has been taken down, so I can’t quote it verbatim. But it basically said:
“This course hasn’t helped me one bit. I don’t have the money to buy all these supplements or to do all the treatments. I tried getting a refund but I was told it was 4 days out of the 60-day refund period. I just want to warn everybody that Ari Whitten is a scammer who’s taking advantage of people.”
Now, many people in Ari’s group immediately jumped to his defense, saying how much he’s helped them.
A few even cried, “Two months is not long enough to see how well the course works!”
Which might be true. But in that case, why offer a two-month guarantee?
Personally, I think there are two valid approaches to money-back guarantees.
The first tries to draw more people in. In this case, the guarantee should be as long and generous as possible — a year, five years, a lifetime.
The other approach focuses on the quality of your customers.
It’s what people like Ben Settle do, which is basically to say, “Only buy if you’re sure you want this, because there are absolutely no refunds.”
The thing is, both of these approaches can work, and they can work well.
The “generous guarantee” people will tell you that longer guarantees mean higher sales, but they also result in FEWER refunds.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Ben also claims that NOT offering a guarantee actually hasn’t lowered his sales any — and may have even increased them. And of course, his approach eliminates all the headaches that come with refunds and the people who demand them.
In other words, both extremes seem to be good when it comes to guarantees.
What you don’t want to do, at least in my opinion, is offer a wishy-washy 60-day guarantee — which can backfire on you like it did on Ari Whitten.
As for me, I don’t have any kind of guarantees for my copywriting services. Sometimes, I’ve written copy for clients, and it bombed. Other times, I’ve written copy and it was a big success.
I’ve gotten paid in both cases.
And I have learned some lessons from these failures and successes. In case you want to know what those lessons are, you might like the following free, no-risk offer: