How To Increase Your Profit Through The “Backdoor”
February 25th, 2010
How To Increase Your Profit Through The “Backdoor”
By Jimmy D. Brown
You make a $97.00 sale and you say an emphatic “Yes!” as a smile breaks out on your face. This selling online thing is cool and it feels good to be getting sales.
Then, a few days later you get a refund request. The $97.00 is gone. And so is your smile.
Or, worse still, a month and a half later (after you’ve spent the $97.00) a chargeback hits you. Not only is the $97.00 gone, but you’ve also been zapped $20.00 in service fees.
Instead of making money, you’re losing money.
Now, to be sure, that doesn’t happen on EVERY single sale. If it did, we’d all be out of business. But, it does happen frequently, from 2-10% of the time depending upon your offer.
Regardless of how often it occurs, when it does, it takes money out of your pocket.
So much emphasis is placed on ways to “make money” that many people forget to focus on how to KEEP the money that you make.
In today’s article (with part 2 coming later) we’re going to talk about increasing your profit through the “backdoor” by identifying 10 ways to reduce refunds and chargebacks so you can make the most money possible from your internet business.
The best part is this: most of them take just a few minutes to implement and most of them don’t cost a penny.
1. Be Accurate In Describing Your Product.
Probably the most common “legitimate” reason for a refund is when the product or service doesn’t deliver what was described during the sales process. When you create advertisements and salesletters, it’s important that you be accurate in describing your product.
This involves both…
* “Avoiding hype” which creates unrealistic expectations that ultimately lead to disappointment with the order. Your advertising sets the tone for what “results” the customer feels they can accomplish. If your claims are found to be unreasonable (or downright false) then refunds will often follow.
* “Correctly Define” the components of your product including its type (I.E. digital goods vs physical goods), its size (I.E. 20 pages vs 200 pages) its delivery (I.E. Immediately after order vs within 7 days) its required skills or knowledge (I.E. For beginners vs experienced) its exclusivity (I.E. Common knowledge vs your unique offering) its compabibility (I.E. PC only vs Mac users welcome) and its freshness (I.E. Updated for 2006 vs last year’s news) to name a few.
Perhaps the easiest way to turn back refund requests is to be clear in what your product or service offers without raising false expectations.
2. Offer Several Unadvertised Bonuses.
After the sale has been completed, let the customer know that you’ll be sending them 4 or 5 “unadvertised” bonuses over the next several weeks via email. You can even list what those bonuses are and their delivery schedule.
Example: In exactly 7 days you’ll receive unadvertised bonus one, an 18-page report entitled “27 Ways to Attract Butterflies Year Round”.
These unadvertised bonuses can be extra reports, articles, audio/video, interviews, tools, etc. The important thing to remember is that they should be related to the original purchase (I.E. an extension of the base product or service being offered) and should be desirable enough to add real value to the order.
I recommend that at least one of your bonuses be a “list” report with more than 20 entries (I.E. “27 Ways to Attract Butterflies Year Round”, “Top 20 Shortcuts For Starting A Christian Bookstore” or “The 21 Best Homeschooling Time Savers”). When it’s over twenty entries, it has a tremendous perceived value.
And that’s the point here: add more value to the existing purchase. The more bang your customers get for their buck, the more likely they’ll be satisfied and NOT request a refund.
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