Ari Whitten

The case against 60-day money-back guarantees

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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:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Selling “male enhancement” with one easy, simple trick

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A few years back, I paid $500 for an online course called The Energy Blueprint.

This is offered by a guy called Ari Whitten, and it deals with increasing your energy levels and reducing fatigue.

The reason I actually plopped down the $500 was instructive. You see, out of the flood of marketing that Ari was putting out to promote his course, only one tiny bit caught my attention.

In one of his lead magnets, Ari gave a practical tip for increasing your energy. Says Ari,

“Drink a glass of water the first thing when you get up.”

“That’s it? How lame,” you might think.

I certainly did. After all, I do a ton of reading about health, and “drink water” is neither new nor exciting advice. And yet, Ari managed to sell it in such a way that this one small, not very impressive tip got me to buy a $500 course.

So what’s going on?

I thought about this in a lot of detail today.

That’s because I’ve been talking to a potential client.

He sells information in the “male enhancement” space and he wanted my thoughts on the lead magnet to use for a new product launch. (By the way, a lead magnet is the video or PDF that you give away to get potential leads onto your email list.)

So I thought about Ari Whitten’s easy, simple water trick, and how it worked on me. I broke it down into 3 crucial parts, all of which operated in tandem to convince me to actually buy his course.

Anyways, I shared the structure of Ari’s “water lead magnet” with this potential client.

And I’ll also be sharing it in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space.  In fact, I think this kind of lead magnet works best for health offers — “male enhancement” included.

I’m planning on selling this book when it’s out. But if you sign up for it now, you can secure yourself a free copy. To do so, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

The good, the bad, and the ugly of product names

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What’s in a name?

Quite a bit, my young Shakespeare.

I should know, having been blessed with an almost unpronounceable, unreadable name for all but a small part of this planet’s population (“John” is just my “professional” name).

As for people, so for products: names matter.

Yes, sometimes a great product can sell even in spite of an awful name (hello Psycho-Cybernetics).

But why not give yourself the best advantage by having both a good product and a good name?

Let’s look at some products I’ve bought in the last year to see what makes a good name:

“Quit in 6”

Buck Flogging’s course on making it with your own business. Buck says a good name will say what a product is, while a great name will say what a product will do for you. I guess he took his own advice.

“Email Client Machine”

Ben Settle’s product explaining how to get booked with clients using his email tactics. A good name in my opinion: it also says what it will do for you, and the word “machine” draws attention because it’s unusual in this context.

“Energy Blueprint”

Ari Whitten’s course on increasing your (physical) energy. There was a spate of these “blueprint” courses over the past decade. Today I think “blueprint” products have become cliche, putting this name into the good-but-not-great category.

“Dartboard Pricing”

Sean D’Souza’s product on how to set and raise your prices. It’s named after the methodology — how to set your prices — rather than the outcome. However, it definitely gets bonus points for the unusual, attention-grabbing term “dartboard.”

“Email Players”

This is Ben Settle’s monthly newsletter on email marketing. I think the “Players” bit is a reference to Gary Halbert and the way he used that word. If that’s true, then I don’t think this name is really about what the product will do for you… rather, it’s about the identity of the kind of people that Ben wants to assemble as his customers. Knowing Ben’s emphasis on building relationships, this would make sense.

So what makes a good name? I’d say you have two options:

Appeal to self-interest.

Or appeal to identity.

The decision will depend on what kind of clients you want to get, but that’s a topic for another day.

Either way, you get bonus points if you can make the name fresh (of course, without making it confusing).

Here’s why I bring all this up.

I’ve been playing around with the name of my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space (the ugly “Health Email Splash” has gone out the window).

Whatever the final name will be, the offer remains the same. If you sign up now, you can get a copy for free when it comes out. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails

The parable of the marketing apprentice

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Do you know the parable of the sorceror’s apprentice?

The sorcerer leaves the tower for a bit, and his apprentice uses what magic he’s learned to get the broom to come alive and start fetching pails of water. Except the stupid broom, once it has gotten the command, won’t stop. The apprentice hasn’t learned this magic incantation yet.

So more and more water keeps being sloshed into the tower. The apprentice starts to panic and decides to chop the broom in half. Not smart. His problems are now doubled — two brooms are bringing twice the water.

This is akin to what happens when people start learning about marketing and copywriting. For example, the very first bit of marketing advice you’ll hear is to focus on how your offer benefits the prospect.

“Don’t make it about you, make it about them!”

It’s a solid piece of advice. And it should be used, when and where it’s needed. But is it the only incantation a marketer needs to know?

I thought of this a few months back when I got a promotional email from a health coach named Ari Whitten. Ari runs a very popular online course called the Energy Blueprint, and he was sending an email to his list to promote his new book. The subject line? “My New Book is HERE!”

Who cares, right? Where’s the benefit? What’s in it for me, Ari?

Well, apparently, much of Ari’s list cares. Through motivating his own loyal followers — and probably with a lot of affiliate help — Ari’s book shot up to the #2 spot in the health category on Amazon, and within the top 40 of all books on Amazon.

In a way, this is reminiscent of what Gene Schwartz calls the “most aware” state of customer awareness. From Gene’s Breakthrough Advertising:

The customer knows of your product — knows what it does — knows he wants it. At this point, he just hasn’t gotten around to buying it yet. Your headline — in fact, your entire ad — need state little more except the name of your product and a bargain price.

At the same time, this isn’t really about awareness of the product. Instead, the awareness is about Ari himself. People know him and want what he has to offer, without taking too much care of what his offer actually is.

But let’s tie this back to the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Wouldn’t Ari have been more successful if he had pitched the benefits of his new book right in the subject line? Maybe, at least for selling this one book. That’s like telling your broom to go fetch the water.

However, for the long term, always shouting benefits might not be the best strategy. If you keep writing to the same people, and all you do is talk benefits, without doing other things to build a bond with your readers (like entertaining them, teasing them with curiosity, or relating to them on a personal level), then you eventually lose their attention and you make your job harder — or impossible — for the long term.

That’s when you try chopping the axe in two. In the marketing world, that usually means making more and more extreme promises and claims. When that doesn’t seem to work, you chop again and again, making still more extreme claims.

That is, until the sorcerer comes back from his afternoon walk. He surveys the mess, throws the sleeves of his robe back, and  finally casts the magic spell (called “relationship”) to drive all these marketing problems away.

“My new book is HERE!”