Subscriber DN, whom we heard from last week, asked yet another
\ninteresting question:<\/p>\n
“Bob, I’ve purchased information products from you, and found
\nyour information to be sound, but nowhere near as good as your
\nsales letter makes it out to be.”<\/p>\n
Talk about a back-handed compliment….<\/p>\n
She continues: “I am sure your refund rates would reduce if you
\navoid the hype, clever copy, and amplification in your sales
\nletters … but so would your sales. You can’t have it both ways.
\nSo what say you?”<\/p>\n
DN raises an extremely important point that I have struggled
\nwith daily in my 34 years as a professional copywriter —
\nnamely, balancing the promise of benefits in the sales copy with
\nthe delivery of those benefits by the product.<\/p>\n
A common piece of advice to marketers is to under-promise and
\nover-deliver.<\/p>\n
The idea is that customers are happy when they get what they
\npaid for … but are ecstatically happy when they get MORE than
\nthey thought they had any right to expect for their money.<\/p>\n
My friend, ace Internet marketer Fred Gleeck, has a rule of
\nthumb: the product should be so good that if the customer had
\npaid 10X the price, he would still be happy and not ask for a
\nrefund.<\/p>\n
That ratio is sensible in theory, but difficult to achieve in
\npractice.<\/p>\n
For instance, one of my copywriting heroes, GB, sold a $5,000
\ncopywriting boot camp to his list – an amazing feat in today’s
\ntroubled economic times.<\/p>\n
As good as it no doubt was, I am not sure the attendees would
\nhave felt they got their money’s worth if they had paid $50,000
\neach. Or that he would have gotten any registrations at that
\nprice.<\/p>\n
So here are the rules I follow as a copywriter and an
\ninformation marketer when writing my sales letters and creating
\nmy products:<\/p>\n
1-Write the strongest sales copy possible within the limitations
\nof being ethical and truthful.<\/p>\n
Remember, you must convince the reader that your product can
\nsolve their problem … and do so more ably than competing
\nproducts.<\/p>\n
Your competitors are pulling out all the stops in their copy. So
\nyours can’t be meek and mild.<\/p>\n
2-When in doubt, it is in fact better to under-promise and
\nover-deliver. The customer should feel that she has gotten more
\nthan her money’s worth.<\/p>\n
However….<\/p>\n
3-Do not deliberately set the bar so low in your copy that you
\nwrite bland, ultra-safe promotions. When you do so, you won’t
\nmake sales.<\/p>\n
4-If you feel compelled to write low-key copy as an apology for
\na mediocre product, you should instead write the strongest copy
\nyou can – and then improve your product so it will delight
\nanyone who buys in response to that copy.<\/p>\n
My copywriting teacher at NYU, the late Milt Pierce, told us
\nthat he was hired to write a direct mail package to sell a book
\nwritten by a famous interior decorator.<\/p>\n
When the marketing director got Milt’s draft, she gasped: “This
\nis great copy – but this isn’t what’s in the book,” she
\nobjected.<\/p>\n
“It should be,” Milt countered. He says the publisher made the
\nauthor rewrite the book to deliver on all the promises made in
\nthe copy.<\/p>\n
5-There is a rule of thumb that refund rates on info products
\nshould be less than 10% and ideally 5% or less. Our refund rate
\na few years ago was around 2%.<\/p>\n
Now, selling those same products, the refund rate is 5.2% for
\nthe year to date. The most common reason for the refund request
\nby far: “This product has a copyright date of 2010 or earlier
\nand therefore I think it is out of date.” They are wrong, of
\ncourse, but you can’t fight city hall, which is why we are in a
\nmassive program of updating our core info products.<\/p>\n
Some argue that a zero refund rate is bad, because it means your
\ncopy was so mild, it did not make enough strong promises. I
\nunderstand the logic of this theory, though I would not object
\nto a zero refund rate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Subscriber DN, whom we heard from last week, asked yet another interesting question: “Bob, I’ve purchased information products from you, and found your information to be sound, but nowhere near as good as your sales letter makes it out to be.” Talk about a back-handed compliment…. She continues: “I am sure your refund rates would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}