There seem to be a lot of mixed messages in the marketing community when it comes to branding your company versus generating sales. On one side, you have the folks that insist that branding is critical to instill trust, and that you should not pollute your brand with incessant calls to action. On the other side you have the folks that will tell you that every single message you send out should contain a plain, clear request for the sale.

Traditionally, this ideological hurdle has been overcome by separating out your primarily brand-building messages from your messages intended to direct sales. The current economy has forced a shift toward unification, simply because there is generally less money to work with. The trend has been to increasingly opt for more cost-effective forms of advertising, particularly email marketing, as well as more consolidated marketing efforts.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. I fall square in between these two marketing camps. I think that yes, branding is critical and should not be ruined by constantly asking the client to buy. But, on the other hand, it is also important that your marketing messages contain some call to action. It doesn’t have to be a request for the sale. The important thing is customer engagement. Any small action you can get the potential client to take moves them closer to being a paying customer.

Because people need internal consistency. If they repost a cool video from XYZ company, they’re not merely somebody who likes cool videos–they’re also somebody who likes XYZ company. If someone forwards your email message to a friend, they will have an internal need to justify that action. So, they’ll tend to think more favorably about your company and your product after they forward the email than they did before.

Likewise, if someone purchases your product or service, your branding messages both before and after the sale will help to solidify the feeling that your company is reliable and that the purchase was well-founded. When people buy things, they tend to have one of two reactions: feelings of satisfaction or feelings of remorse.

If you can help your clients experience a feeling of satisfaction following the purchase, they will go on to invent and discover additional reinforcements for this feeling on their own. Otherwise, you will find that they devalue even the positive aspects of your product and publicize the ways that they have been duped by you. This is why a friendly and supportive followup email may be the most important step you can take to safeguard your business. Your contact following the purchase will help start your clients off on that path of security and satisfaction.

All of this adds up to the idea that branding and selling are much more strongly interconnected than marketers have had the luxury of believing during better economic times. Email sales should leverage and enhance your branding, and email marketing that is done primarily for branding should engage your clients in small behavioral commitments that encourage purchases.

There are two basic groups of individuals who you will have contact over the course of your marketing efforts: buyers and non-buyers.

Buyers have already made a decision to purchase, they just may not be sure exactly what they want to buy. They tend to be looking for the vendor that can most fully and readily justify that decision.

Non-buyers are psychologically very different because they have not yet made that decision. So even though they are offering you the opportunity to coax them through the decision-making process, your efforts are much less likely to be rewarded and the tactics required are very different.

The focus of this article is right where the focus of your own marketing efforts should be: on the buyers.

You see, a lot of businesspeople run into problems by failing to distinguish between members of these two very different groups. Whether you’re marketing by email, direct mail, over the web, through television and radio advertisements, or face to face, the surest way to make sales is always to appeal to the buyers. You may be able to convince a non-buyer to make a purchasing decision, but that will tend to be a hard-won sale. A buyer has already made that decision. They basically just need a safe place to deposit their money. Actually, what they need is a sense of security.

Take a moment to remember the last time you had made a decision that you had a need. You went out looking for a solution, and what did you do? If you are anything like me, you started greedily devouring all the information you could find about the possible solutions to your need. You went out and made yourself an expert.

And what did you end up buying? Probably the product you had the most information about. The one that offered to fulfill aspects of your need that you hadn’t even thought about. The authority product.

Many people make the mistake of keeping their email marketing messages, web pages, and other materials nice and brief in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. They justify this to themselves by imagining that a snappy, bullet-list approach will instantly embed itself into the subconscious minds of passers-by, spurring them to suddenly take the dramatic action of biting into whatever hook you’ve tossed out for them.

In reality, this approach does nothing for the people who matter most: the buyers. These folks come to you with money burning holes in their pockets, and all they want is for you to make them an expert on why your product is so wonderful. If you can sufficiently educate them on the benefits of your product and the needs of the market it serves, they will feel grateful to you for accepting their money.

The use of a good email marketing autoresponder system affords you a tremendous opportunity to communicate with your potential clients in a way that virtually guarantees future sales.

The key to making any kind of sale is trust. At the most basic level, a potential customer has to trust that you will give them what you say you will give them. Beyond that, they have to trust that the product or service you provide them will be high quality. They have to be able to believe that you understand their needs, and are offering them a suitable solution.

Broken down like that, it sounds like it should be very simple to win a sale. However, people are not as trusting as they once were. More and more people have had the experience of being ripped off in one way or another. Particularly when you are dealing with clients over the Internet, it can be difficult to win the kind of personal confidence that is needed to secure a sale. Ultimately, the client has to feel secure before they will take a risk on you. And it is your job to help them feel that way.

The surest way to build that kind of confidence is to trade on your reputation. For example, I find it easier to order from Amazon than from XYZ Online Shop because Amazon has more to gain by maintaining its reputation than by ripping me off. This is essentially what we mean when we talk about authority.  You are an authority when your reputation is worth more than the individual product you sell.

One of the surest ways to establish yourself as an authority is to teach people something they didn’t know before. The more you are able to teach someone, the more knowledgable they assume you are.

Now you can simply put up a lot of useful information on your web site, but that has some drawbacks. For starters, it creates a situation where the client has to seek out the information on their own. The feeling this produces is often closer to being self-taught. One of the ways that companies have gotten around this is by starting blogs.

Because a weblog is time-sensitive and tends to be a little more informal than a traditional static web page, it tends to be more successful for building up your authority with your subscribers. It creates the feeling of a relationship in which you are providing excellent information and they are waiting for more. This is effective, but it is also a lot of work!

A blog is a commitment that only retains its effectiveness through long-term updating. That means creating more and more content. You also never get to assume that a particular visitor has been exposed to your previous work, but you’ll lose long-time subscribers if you rehash too much old information. So a lot of bloggers end up somewhere in the gray area, never really establishing as much authority as they may deserve, simply because they lose the ability to guage their audiences.

With email autoresponders, all of these problems are solved. There is no continued commitment to produce content, because every new subscriber will receive the same sequence of messages. All you need to do is keep your information up-to-date through minor editing. You also have much tighter control over the progress of each subscriber, because you get to design the sequence of messages to offer stages of learning. And unlike a static web site, an autoresponder series can give the recipient the feeling that they are being personally tutored. They receive a personalized message from you every so often, that is custom-tailored to their current knowledge level, and that they can respond to for extra help.

If your autoresponder series makes sense and shows your recipients how to gain the maximum benefit out of your product or service, you will not only have established yourself as an authority. You will have also convinced them that your product is truly useful. And what do you do when a truly useful product is supported by a knowledgable authority? You buy it.

This post has to do with a single question: If a client replies to your DONOTREPLY address, do you still make the sale?

E-mail marketing is a powerful way to build and maintain relationships with your clients over the long term. All too often, though, even savvy businesspeople forget that a real relationship goes both ways.

It is true that you can help your clients remain aware of your presence by consistently sending them high-quality information. It is also true that you can increase their feeling of trust toward your business by allowing them glimpses into the real people behind the business.  But if the client doesn’t feel that the channel of communication goes both ways, then you’re missing out on the most powerful part of the relationship.

How can you open up this two-way channel of communication? Would you believe the answer is as simple as using a real working e-mail address in the “from” header for your mailings?

Too many companies are using addresses like “DONOTREPLY@mydomain.com” as their reply-to address in mass mailings. Even worse, some are using mail accounts that look legitimate but either don’t work or aren’t getting checked regularly.

When you do this, one of two things can happen when a recipient of your newsletter wants to contact you: they either notice that they can’t simply respond to e-mail, or they don’t.

If they do notice, then maybe half the time they’ll go to the trouble of pulling up your web page and finding your contact for, or scanning through the message you sent them and copying and pasting the address into a new e-mail. Of course, the other half of the time they won’t, and so you will have missed out on a truly exquisite opportunity–a client-initiated contact. And from someone who already likes you enough to subscribe to your mailing list!

But the real tragedy is in the second situation, when the client doesn’t notice that they can’t reply to your e-mail. If you’re lucky, they’ll notice when their message to you bounces and become annoyed with you for making it tough to write you back. Then we’re back to situation #1, where they have to decide whether it’s worth the hassle to dig around for your contact information.

If they don’t notice that their message to you bounced, then they’ll be expecting a reply from you. A reply which, of course, they are never going to receive. They trusted you enough to subscribe to your mailing list, and they were interested enough to send you an e-mail, but how do you suppose they’ll feel about you after a week with no response? After two weeks? Credibility is difficult to gain and much too easy to lose.

The good news is that our email marketing software lets you set up your e-mails with any “from” and “reply-to” e-mail address you like, so all you have to do is use one that works. If you’re worried about getting too many replies (a good problem to have!), you can set up a special account just for replies to your newsletters. Just make sure that you are checking the account for new messages frequently–after all, these are double-qualified leads that have chosen to contact you for more information. And provided that you have set up automatic handling of bounced messages, you won’t have to worry about your mailbox getting flooded with bounces or automated replies, either.

The more you open up the lines of communication to you and your business, the more readily you’ll be able to build real and lasting relationships with your market.

You’re much more likely to buy a product or a service that you hear about from a trusted source such as a friend.  Your friend has no reason to lie. When a product or service is offered to a customer it’s only natural for someone to consider the source before taking the plunge. The more positive experiences that a customer hears from their peers the more likely they are going to be swayed toward a similar course of action.  Face it.  There’s no sales pitch that’s so great that it hasn’t been heard before in some form or another.  After all we live in the information age. People are inundated by messages coming from every direction.  Audiences have gotten a lot smarter and a whole lot less trusting of messages that come directly from the marketer. Word of Mouth Marketing is an umbrella term for a number of marketing approaches such as buzz, viral marketing, influencer marketing, blogging, loyalty programs, and leveraging social media.  They all rely on word of mouth to some extent and they take advantage of existing networks to facilitate exponential growth.

Networks begin when people form connections with others.  The strength of a network is based on both the reputation of the members in the network and the sphere of their influence.  For word of mouth marketing to work in an organization’s favor they must earn respect through instituting transparent policies that eschew anything that can be perceived as deceptive or manipulative.  Word of mouth can work both ways.  It can be positive or negative.  Transparency is important because it establishes trust by showing your customers that you have nothing to hide.  If you are perceived as being deceptive or manipulative then you will not be brought into any network with any considerable amount of influence because the mere inclusion of you lessens the value of that network.  Permission based Email Marketing is an ideal way of generating good word of mouth because you begin with a network in the form of a list of opted-in subscribers. The key words here are permission based.  They are already receptive to your message or else they would not have opted in to your list.

Word of mouth marketing in emails often relies on viral components such as forward to a friend links at the end of a message.  While viral marketing may sound scary its actually a good thing.  In marketing its any strategy that encourages people to pass along a marketing message to others in their network.  The term viral is unfortunate because people often associate that word with computer viruses.  Computer viruses are bad.  Viral Marketing is good. A message goes viral when it creates exponential potential for exposure by taking advantage of your subscriber’s existing networks. Like a virus… For a message to go viral however it is not enough to simply add a forward to a friend link to the bottom of the message.  The message must be worthy of being forwarded.   Think about subjects or material to use in your mailings that are likely to get people to want to forward your material to their friends.  Also think about what is likely to get people to talk.  The great thing about forward to a friend is that it is trackable.   You could include a forward to a friend link through your email marketing software and then use A/B split testing to test multiple campaigns to see which one generates more word of mouth.

Keeping risk factors low is essential for positive word of mouth.  This includes offering incentives such as discounts.  For example you could send out a mailing that includes a discount for your subscriber and for the person that they forwarded your mailing to.  Just be sure to cap off any incentives that you offer to prevent a customer service nightmare.  Avoid rewarding people based on how many people your subscriber forwarded your mailing to.  Such practices lend themselves to abusive handling of your mailing.  It also gives your message the unsavory perception of being spam.  You can avoid this by capping off discounts at a fixed rate such as 15% off for all parties involved.  Another incentive is offering something that is free and therefore poses no risk to potential customers.   Free 30 day trials or free versions of software that contain links to your product are both examples of things you can do to generate word of mouth.  As are the policies that you use.  A positive customer service experience is essential for positive word of mouth. A 60 day money back guarantee gives you good word of mouth because it lets people know that you are willing to let them try your product risk free.

What you need to do to generate positive word of mouth extends well beyond email marketing. You should make it easy for your customers to contact you by providing a phone number, address of a physical location, support area, and possibly even live chat.  How easy it is to contact you is something that people will talk about.  You should also offer ways for your customer to leave you feedback in public and private.  People listen to what their peers have to say.  Allowing people to leave comments on blog posts, documentation, and forums can give you a vehicle for generating word of mouth.  Ultimately, however, it comes down to how well you match appearance with reality.  Its one thing to have good policies but its another to follow through on them.  You will ultimately be judged on how responsive you are in handling the good policies that you put in place.

It’s not reasonable to expect that you will profit off of all or even most of your subscribers.   What you can expect is that a few of your subscribers will pick up for the majority of your list members.  We call them your best customers and you must value them as a precious commodity if you expect to make a living or turn a profit out of your line of work.  When you begin to lose any of your best customers you will know it because it will impact your bottom line.  The majority of your customers are good customers and this is equally true of your subscriber list.  However, you’re never going to be profitable relying on good customers alone.  You can expect to be marginally profitable off of good customers at best.  A hard truth you will have to live with in whatever you do is you will have bad customers no matter how right you run things.  If you have spent any considerable amount of time doing customer service the notion of a bad customer does not sit right.  But there have been times where you approach a situation using logic and reason.  You provide answers or explanations that are helpful or point in the right direction.  You spend considerable time and energy focusing your attention on a person and their concerns.  You give everything you have and no matter what you do you know it won’t matter.  That’s what’s meant by bad customer.

If you are running things the right way this number should only come down to a handful.   Still it only takes a few bad customer to demoralize your employees with excessive complaints or demands. If they are not dealt with properly they can hurt your business with negative word of mouth.  Also, they can be a drain on your resources and not allow you to focus on your best customers who you depend on to remain profitable. As someone looking to protect your bottom line,  especially in tough economic times,  you must always be on the look out for ways of turning good customers into best customers. At the same time you need to be cognizant of handling bad customers and looking for ways to turn these customers into good customers.

The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule is often referred to as the Pareto principle after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.   He described the unequal distribution of wealth in his country as coming down to 20% of the people owning 80% of the wealth. Since then the 80/20 rule has been used as an organizing principle for understanding everything from time management, to running a business, engaging content in emails,  SEO, and of course managing your subscriber list.  This number is not set in stone but it can be used as a guiding principle for segmenting your list.

The exact breakdown of your numbers is going to be specific to your list and business.  What you are going to want to do is to find out which portion of your list accounts for most of your profits.  This is usually anywhere from 10% to 20%.  Find out which part of your list is marginally profitable or breaks even.  Should be between 60% or even as high as 70%.  Next identify which portion of your list you lose profits from.  This is the bottom end of your list which can be anywhere from 10% to 20%.   Now you’re going to want to find ways of moving some of those marginally profitable subscribers up your list so that they are more profitable and therefore best customers.  That way even if you lose a best customer your bottom line is not effected.  You are also going to need to decide what to do with the 10% or 20% that you’re losing profits from.  You’re going to want to find out if there is anything you can do to at least break even with them.

There are advocates for firing a bad customer and sending them off to a competitor.   How you deal with these customers depends on your business.   However, information spreads quicker than ever before.   How you conduct your business in circumstances that are difficult is noticed.  If you take the high road even in a circumstance where you know you are going to lose no matter what you may be surprised to find out you can gain the respect of even a bad customer.  Tell them you are sorry that things did not work out and that you wish them the best in their future endeavors.  Think of it as a breakup in any relationship.  Do not give them any reason to say anything bad about you.  Never burn any bridges.  Just like in relationship you never know but this person can come back in your life in a positive way.  Word of mouth spreads quickly. If nothing else the bad customer might be impressed with the way you conducted yourself and give you good word of mouth by telling people about that.

RFM Analysis

Although we never formally referred to it as RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) we discussed this when we talked about targeting your best customers.   Doing a RFM Analysis is a great way to find out where your subscribers fall in line with the 80/20 principle.   It will also allow you to create a marketing strategy that is based on what kind of customers your subscribers are.   You can increase profitability by treating subscribers that make infrequent big item purchases differently from subscribers that make frequent small item purchases. Recency refers to how recently a customer made a purchase from you.   Frequency is how often they made purchases from you.  Monetary Value is how much a customer spends.  RFM Analysis gives you a way of quantifying your best customers based on their past purchasing behavior.

Lets show you how RFM Analysis works by opening up our own online music store.  We’ll assume that you worked out a licensing agreement with all the major record labels and each song costs only 99 cents and albums cost $9.99.  Because buying an individual song is only 99 cents we’ll count it as nothing until you get to 10 songs which is near the equivalent of an album.  We’ll use a 3 point system for the sake of simplicity.   3 points for customers that make the most recent purchase, 2 points for those that fall in the middle, 1 for those that have not made a recent purchase, etc.

Recency Score

1. Purchased at least 10 songs or an entire album more than a year ago.
2. Have not purchased within the quarter (3 months) but have within the last year.
3. Purchased within the quarter.

Frequency Score

1. Purchased 10 songs at 99 cents or an entire album with the last year.
2. Purchased at least 100 songes or 10 albums within the last year.
3. Purchased more than 10 albums within the last year.

Monetary Value

1. Average purchase amount is at least 10 songs an album at $9.90-$9.99
2. Average purchase amount is between 20 songs or a couple of albums at $19.80 – $19.98
3. Average purchase amount is greater than $19.80-$19.98.

Anyone scoring a 3 falls within the top 20% in regard to Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value.  Those that score of 2 are within the middle 60% while anyone scoring a 1 falls at the bottom 20%.  Anyone that scored a 3 on all categories is a best customer.  Those scoring a combination of numbers either fall in the middle 60% or the bottom 20%.  Pay attention to those scoring any variation of 3s and 2s as they are your low hanging fruit.  You should implement a marketing strategy that offers these customers an incentive for moving up to best customer.  RFM analysis is useful for identifying who your best customers are and for giving you an idea of what you need to do to turn good customers into best customers and bad customers into good customers.

In order to control the future you must control the past.  While you cannot rewrite the past in order to take over the future you can use it to predict it.  The past allows you to learn more about your subscribers so that you can then target your email marketing approach toward them.  When it comes to understanding your customers there is no better predictor of future behavior than the past.   Purchasing behavior is a response to an object of interest.  If behavior is recent then its more likely to happen again.  Perhaps that object of interest is a song you recently heard when you were around an acquaintance.  You really like the song when it’s played but you do not know who its from.  You spend the entire next day trying to remember who the song was from.  You would purchase if you only knew.  You completely forget about the experience the next day.   As an object loses its recency interest fades over time.

However,  if a positive impression is initially formed it can lead to purchasing behavior later.   This is why its important to work on forming good impressions with everyone you meet.  You had a positive impression of your acquaintance because they had something to offer you in the form of good music.  This did not translate in a purchasing decision the first time around but let’s see what happens when you run into the same acquaintance again.  By the time you run into them you are no longer interested in finding out who played the song you liked.  You do however trust their opinion so you can say they have established credibility.  When you are around them this time you hear a different song that you are impressed with.   This time you get your acquaintance’s number in case you forget the name of the song when you go out to purchase it tomorrow.   You become friends with your acquaintance and the more time you spend with them the more likely you are to go out and purchase music.  Interest peaks when exposure is recent.  Your subscribers are more likely to purchase from you in the period immediately following a mailing.   The longer they do not respond to a mailing the less likely they are going to.  You have a window of interest but after that they will forget about you completely.  One way of measuring purchasing behavior is by measuring when the purchase was made.  Before you met this person you were not exposed to music so recency was low.   Now that you are friends recency has increased.

The frequency with which an action occurs in the past can be used to measure interest.  You are now purchasing more and more music with greater frequency as a result of your friend.  The frequency of your product purchases is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend with your friend.  One other way of thinking about frequency is how it relates to exposure.  Have you ever played a song that you really liked over and over again until you got sick of it?  If you’re frequently exposed to a song then it sticks in your head and this is a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you think of the song.   The fact that you’re voluntarily playing the song over and over again means you are interested in it.

Notice what is happening here.  When your friend was merely an acquaintance they did not force their music taste on you.  They gave you a good experience by exposing you to what they considered good music.  They established trust with you.  When you later ran into them they were able to repeat the positive experience.  Credibility began forming and this led to a purchase decision. As your relationship progressed your acquaintance became a friend.  You begin basing your purchasing decisions on their judgment.   You do this because they demonstrated reliability.  Which led to an increase in frequency of purchases.

A good newsletter does the same thing.   It exposes subscribers to something that’s worth having.  The newsletters you send should be of interest to your subscribers.   If you are able to demonstrate how your newsletter is of interest you will establish trust.  From there you establish credibility by repeating the positive experience without being too aggressive.   Your subscriber is an acquaintance that is just getting to know you.  When you are able to demonstrate reliability to your subscriber they will begin relying on your judgment when forming the basis of their decisions.

Now an emerging need for treating different customers differently is apparent.  You’re not treating some customers better than others.  You are treating them like people and using their past behavior to govern your future behavior toward them.  Which of your customers recently purchased from you?   How many times did they do it.  How much did they spend on individual purchases?   You are asking yourself questions in order to learn which of your subscribers are your best customers so that you can target your marketing approach to them.   In the process you are attempting to turn acquaintances into friends by showing respect for the relationship.  A healthy relationship grows because it is mutually beneficial to both parties.

Now let’s consider monetary value and what it means to be a best customer.  Some of my favorite albums of all time have been concept albums such as Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, Radiohead’s OK Computer, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.  The beauty of a concept album is that you are not listening to it just for one song.  You have to purchase the entire album to appreciate the concept!  Every song is made fuller and richer by the songs that surround them.  They also have a powerful emotional component. Perhaps you’ve heard a song that you really like that led you to purchase an entire album.  Once you purchased the album that led you to purchase other albums from the band until you owned their entire music catalog. You then tried to turn your friends into fans of the music so that you wouldn’t have to enjoy it alone.  If you have then you would be that band’s best customer.  You would be one of the true fans that the band relies on to make a living.  Once you have a best customer you can market to them differently because they have demonstrated through their purchasing behavior that the relationship demands it.

You would market to a best customer for a band such as Pink Floyd differently than you would for a weaker customer.  A best customer may be interested in owning all of their albums in CD quality,  having all the original vinyl copies as well as digitally remastered CDs, box sets, concert recordings, T-shirts and posters, DVD footage of live concerts as well as documentaries, Nick Mason’s Personal History of Pink Floyd, and solo albums from the band members. Marketing all of these products would be of great interest to a devoted fan of Pink Floyd but would be of lesser interest to a fan who simply wants to have MP3 albums of their most seminal work.  Here you could use a newsletter to turn a casual fan into a best customer by giving them insider information on the band in order to strengthen the relationship that fan feels toward the band.  Meanwhile,  you could keep the devoted happy by offering them exclusive opportunities for material that would only be of interest to the band’s most ardent supporters.  One purpose for the newsletter would be to track live performances from surviving band members.   A best customer would not let money be an obstacle for going to see a live performances from David Gilmour or Roger Waters.  You could offer these subscribers the first chance to purchase the best seats available.  At the same time you could keep all your subscribers happy by offering all of them an opportunity to win free tickets.  The best part of having a best customer is the word of mouth advertising they provide.  A Floyd head will try to turn their friends into fans as well.   Perhaps some of these friends may later turn into best customers.

The marketing approach of your newsletter should address the needs of all your subscribers separately.   You are going to earn most of your revenue from your best customers.  So your challenge is to turn good customers into best customers and weak customers into good customers.

It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days like we do with our own web software, just to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.

Since we started giving away fully-functional, free versions of our most popular software products with no strings attached, we’ve been fielding some phone calls from disgruntled users of other people’s services.

You see, if you download and install a free copy of our Help Desk Software, for example, the bottom of each page of your support center will have a tasteful “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” message with a link back to our site. To be honest, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how few disreputable vendors have ended up using our free software. For the most part our clients tend to be extremely upstanding members of the web community. But there are a few companies using free versions of our products who have failed to meet their clients’ expectations and have been generally unreachable.

So these hapless clients follow our “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” link in hopes of finding anyone who might be affiliated with the company that is ruining their day. By the time they do that, they tend to be pretty upset, and so it can be difficult to help them understand that we really don’t have any affiliation with sites that use free versions of our products. After all, we only use full versions.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. If you follow this simple principle, you can reasonably expect that 99% of the people you speak with will love you by the end--especially the ones who start out by feeling and acting upset.

The secret is that people are not barbarians; people genuinely want to be reasonable. The only time that people behave unreasonably is in the face of a situation that they experience as unreasonable. So, let them know that their experience and their reaction both basically make sense. Empathize. Tell them you know how they feel. Say, “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

That’s it! That’s all you have to do, and everyone you talk to will feel comforted and taken care of, and they may even keep you in mind for when they need some web software of their own!

It always puzzles me when I find myself in a license situation that simply does not make any sense. Recently I was given two options with a fairly large software company:

• Upgrade my current license (it will cost over $2,000 and includes 12 mths support)
• Purchase a new license (it will cost just under $1,000 and includes 12 mths support)

Perhaps I fell into a crack in their licensing scheme, however it truly makes one wonder. Who actually purchases the upgrade??? I don’t believe there should be a situation where an upgrade is more than a new purchase (when both accomplish the exact same thing)

I have always been an advocate of how our licensing works. It is both simple and effective. Upgrades are time-based and do not have to be renewed if you do not wish to. Our clients would never be charged more for an upgrade compared to a new license price.