I’m almost 90% sure that you don’t already offer a 100% money back guarantee on your services or product. What this also means is that competitors most likely don’t do this either.

This means you have a huge opportunity to gain incredible advantage over your competition by offering a very compelling guarantee that far outshines anything your competitors may be offering.

The fact is most businesses are terrified of offering any type of guarantee at the risk of losing profits due to a high amount of returns.

I can however guarantee YOU that if you have a good quality product or service, this will not be the case.

If you don’t, well, you should stop trying to market any further and go back to work on developing a better product. No amount of good marketing can make up for a low quality product or service.

I’m sure however that you have a great product, and thus can benefit incredibly from offering a great guarantee. The fact is that the additional sales your will receive will far outweigh any false returns from dishonest individuals taking advantage of your guarantee. This has been tried and tested in almost all types of businesses.

A great guarantee works so well as it addresses all the perceived risks the customer may have with regards to doing business with you, and builds incredible trust in the fact that you are offering a quality product that will live up to your marketing.

You really can’t beat the benefits and increased sales you can get from offering a great guarantee.

Obviously all business are different and you need to take a good look at your business and work out exactly what type of guarantee is viable for you to offer.

This also comes back to one of the most important aspects of marketing and that is to TEST EVERYTHING.

Let’s look a the fitness business for example.

If I ask you why you don’t offer a guarantee, you may explain that in your business it was up to your clients to achieve results. For example, you or your team can’t guarantee your customers put the necessary effort in and follow the recommended diet which will result in their success.

All your competitors probably feel the same. I’m sure none of them offer a guarantee.

Fine, but perhaps you are looking at it the wrong way.

If your clients give you honest and accurate information, follow your advice, and put in enough effort, (and other factors remain the same) can you guarantee they will increase their chances of achieving better results?

The key point here is that you can guarantee your ‘process’ works to help clients achieve results. Of course you can’t guarantee clients will always reach their goals. In your case perhaps, that is up to every client to work on.

Here is an example of wording for a guarantee in this specific case:

“If you follow our guidance, put in the work required, and be honest with us about your commitment, we guarantee you will have better prospects of reaching your goals. We’ll do everything we can to help you realize your potential. If you not completely satisfied that following our process achieved the results promised, you will receive 100% money back”

The guarantee provides specific details on what the client needs to do for the guarantee to be applicable.

The main point of this is that you demonstrate faith in your product or service. As I’ve said before, the objective is to minimize the perceived risk in purchasing from you.

If you have faith in your product or service, you should not have any problem offering a guarantee such as the one above.

A testimonial is incredibly powerful as it provides something called social proof.

Social proof is the ability to show your customers in some way that your product or service has benefited others that have purchased from you, and that your marketing and advertising is not false or misleading in any way.

An example of social proof is the fact that you are far more likely to purchase something recommended to you by a trusted source, perhaps a family member or friend. The idea is that proof of benefits is provided from a non bias source that will result in building credibility for your business.

They come in many formats such as endorsements, written testimonials, photographs of happy customers, case studies etc.

Testimonials are seriously underrated and under used in offline marketing since it’s not always obvious how to go about getting them in front of your customers.

On the internet testimonials are always used by marketers or business that understand good marketing, since it’s very easy to show written testimonials on a website or sales letter.

But how to do this in a brick and mortar business?

I challenge you to begin immediately brainstorming how to get testimonials and other forms of social proof in front of your customers. This will always depend entirely on your business, and how you interact with your customers, and what marketing materials you use.

A good example is the car salesman that fills his sales booth with photographs of happy customers, in many cases, the same customer in many photos show additional vehicle purchases. This shows “proof” that the salesman is selling good deals and is trustworthy, otherwise why did they buy from him multiple times?

For the fitness trainer, displaying before and after photo’s of training customers in your office or training area is incredibly powerful and will result in many more sales due to direct proof of the effectiveness of your service right in front of their eyes.

With regards to advertising, you could display a written testimonial underneath or in between your advertising message, whether it be print advertising, brochures or storefront displays.

This is extremely powerful yet many physical businesses never make use of the testimonial.

So lets quickly summarize why testimonials are so effective:

• Testimonials build trust. They tell prospects that other customers had a positive experience with your product or service.
• Testimonials aren’t “salesy” or part of your sales message. They are written by someone else in another “voice” and can lend great credibility to any existing sales message.
• Testimonials overcome skepticism and can convince even your most hard sell customers who may never had made a purchase from you otherwise.

Let’s now discuss how to go about getting testimonials:

Firstly, simply start asking for testimonials. I’m sure you must know who your happy customers are, and what success they have had with using your product or service.

Simply call them up and ask for a verbal (you can record this with your phone) or a written testimonial and ask them if they would allow you to use their testimonials in your marketing. Most happy customers won’t have a problem with this at all.

Start taking photo’s of happy customers with your products. Not possible in every business type, but see if this can work for you.

In a service business, develop case studies describing how you managed to solve the customer’s problem. Make sure to use customer quotes in the case study and obtain their signature if possible.

Get a website (check here how to do this easily and cheaply) and add your testimonials there. Almost everybody has a website these days and customers or prospects find it easy to visit a website to investigate a potential business they want to purchase from.

In the health business it’s always very effective to run competitions to see who will get the most results from your product or service, or who makes use of it the most etc. Obviously the terms of the competition is making use of perhaps the top 5 winner’s results in your marketing.

Make sure you get and use the right kind of testimonials:

Here’s an example of a glowing, but ultimately ineffective testimonial:

“I love this product! I can’t get enough! I’m so glad I bought your stuff and I’ll definitely be back to get more!”

What could be wrong with that? It sounds like you have a happy customer on your hands!

But what does this testimonial really tell your visitors? Does it prove the product works, or explain exactly how your customer benefited from using it? While the feedback is definitely positive, the testimonial doesn’t provide enough detail to have any real impact on your prospects.

Here’s an example of the kind of effective, benefits-driven testimonial that’ll turn a prospect into a customer:

“I used the methods you told me to use, and in 3 weeks I’ve lost over 5lbs! The methods are easy to use and don’t even take up much time at all!”

This testimonial shows benefits from the product and speaks to the kind of results the prospect may want to see for them. I testimonial must always include as many benefits as possible.

Make sure the testimonial backs up the claims made in your marketing, as closely as possible. Inconsistencies will raise warning flags.

Next, make sure the testimonial comes from somebody or some business they can relate to. If your selling products for aging, try to include the age of the person who provides the testimonial or the type of industry you are targeting in your marketing (if the testimonial is from another business).

Make sure the testimonials are credible and that you include as much personal details as you can (with permission of course), names, location, age contact details, whatever else is appropriate.

So, why not get started right away and gather as many testimonials as you can. It’s usually 100% free and will have incredible impact on your business!

If you already have an existing business that generates sales, chances are you are leaving a lot of money on the table by not attempting to optimize generating additional sales from existing customers.

It’s a fact that it is very much easier to sell something to somebody who has already made a recent purchase with you.

Psychologically, once a customer makes a purchase from you, they have give you their approval and trust, and will be far more likely to make another purchase from you, since they have already gone through the mental process of deciding if they should buy from you or not.

Once the first purchase was made, and the product offered value to them, you now have their trust.

Therefore with good marketing and follow up communications it’s very easy to get at least 30-40% of first time customers to purchase something additional from you again.

You will now want to set up an automated process (if possible) where you send additional communications to these existing customers with the purpose of generating additional sales. This is called making sales on the back end or back end sales.

The front end is the product you try to sell to a new prospect, which will then put them in the back end sales funnel (which can be completely automated) where you will market additional services or products to them.

In the following articles we will go over the different methods and strategies for making additional sales on the back end.