5 Reasons Why a Guarantee Can Send Your Sales Skyrocketing

by Tammi Metzler

The thought of adding a guarantee to your products and services can be intimidating at best and downright terrifying at worst. After all, won’t you have people asking for refunds by the truckload?

Not so. Consider FedEx’s guarantee: When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be There Overnight. They’ve built their company into a household name based on a guarantee of overnight delivery or it’s free. Yes, they may need to refund a few purchases here and there, but that’s nothing compared to the additional business that comes pouring in from people who are banking on that promise to get their goods to their destination on time.

The reality is that a guarantee can help people feel more comfortable buying from you. In fact, here are five reasons that a guarantee can help you sell mucho products and services:

1)      Ease client uncertainties. More and more often, people are becoming wary of buying products and services online, because they’ve been burned before with a purchase that was, shall we say, disappointing. Perhaps because the service wasn’t delivered during the promised timeframe or because the product didn’t contain the promised goods. With a solid guarantee, you can help to ease some of that uncertainty by letting prospects know that you stand by your product/service.

2)      Take the risk away from clients. Making a purchase from someone that you don’t know and trust can be very risky indeed. You don’t know if that seller will take your money and run or if the product/service will be of the quality you expect. On the other hand, offering an unconditional guarantee can leave you, the biz owner, at risk for unscrupulous customers who don’t think twice about shortchanging you. There are ways to structure your guarantee in such a way that protects you from unethical customers and saves the customer from wasting their hard-earned money (see #5).

3)      Foster long-term client relationships. Most profitable businesses rely on repeat purchases by loyal customers for their ultimate success, and often once a customer experiences your quality and dependability, they’re eager to return for more. Often the first purchase is the hardest to sell to a prospective customer, because they haven’t yet experienced your brilliance. A strong guarantee can help ease clients into that first purchase, so they’ll feel more comfortable buying from you the next time around.

4)      Establish your credibility and expertise. Let’s face it: if you’re not confident about the high quality of your service or product, why should prospective customers feel confident buying from you? Offering a guarantee shows prospects that you stand behind your products, and they will take comfort in your assuredness that you have the solution they need.

5)      Set yourself apart from the competition. If you’re providing a service, offering a guarantee can be a great way to get prospects to say “no” to your competition and “yes” to you. Note, though, that your guarantee doesn’t have to involve results, an aspect over which you have little control (even if you’re a biz coach touting 6-figure results in your clients, it really comes down to whether or not your clients do their part to implement the knowledge and training you provide). Instead, choose something over which you do have control, such as on-time delivery of done-for-you services or the project is f*ree (a scary thought, perhaps, but if you are confident in your ability to get things done on time, it’s just a matter of declaring your confidence to your clients).

As you can see, your guarantee doesn’t have to be intimidating or over-the-top, but it can hold strong weight to your prospects.

Crafting Your Own Compelling Guarantee Statement

A guarantee that ROCKS not only goes hand-in-hand with your unique tagline/Unique Selling Proposition but also serves as the foundation for a marketing message that grabs attention and inspires action. If you act now, you can get immediate access to the formula behind designing your own statements that compel readers to work with you. The “Turn Your Words into Profits” program starts this week, and you can instantly access the first module to begin Breaking Through the Competition with your own compelling tagline/USP and guarantee statements. Just visit www.TurnYourWordsintoProfits.com to get started now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tammi Metzler, founder of The Write Associate, is a Marketing Copy Strategist who helps solo entrepreneurs worldwide get more clients with their online marketing efforts. Her one-on-one copywriting services and marketing training materials have helped clients achieve outstanding results, including as much as a 600% increase in new clients within just a few weeks’ time. To access her steadily-growing library of f.ree & low-cost client-attraction resources, please visit www.writeassociate.com.

Lessons Your Kids Will Learn By Starting a Business

Kids need to be kids and enjoy their time as children. As they get older, however, they also need to learn to make money and function in our society as responsible adults.

Kids will often get a job at a fast-food burger place where they learn how to listen to a boss and how to work with others. But then they may also have to give up some extracurricular activities, study time and time with family. Not terrible things, but enough of a challenge that many families are helping their kids start their own businesses.

Why? Let’s compare the lessons your kid is learning working at a fast food place vs. starting a business:

1. Responsibility
   Fast Food Place: Yes, it teaches responsibility. You need to show up for work and do a good job or your boss and co-workers will get mad at you.
   Entrepreneur: Teaches you responsibility as well. You need to work hard or you won’t get paid.

2. The Value of a Dollar
   Fast Food Place: You learn that time is money.
   Entrepreneur: You learn that creativity, ownership of responsibility and hard work is money.

3. How to Market Yourself
   Fast Food Place: Teaches you how to fill out an application and go on an interview to market yourself. You do this once and then you’re done.
   Entrepreneur: You have to market yourself and your business on an ongoing basis if you want to make any money.

4. Customer Service
   Fast Food Place: Service with a smile or your boss may reprimand you.
   Entrepreneur: Service with a smile or you don’t get repeat business and your income drops.

5. Banking Skills
   Fast Food Place: You learn how to collect a paycheck and how to deposit it into the bank.
   Entrepreneur: You learn how to budget for advertising costs, taxes, and expenses and weigh them against your profits. You learn to deposit your income into the bank and write checks to cover expenses. You learn how business works.

As you can see, both options have benefits. As for which option you’ll choose – that’s up to you and your child.

Can I Unclutter My Life In A Week?

I just purchased the book Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Doland.  So I decided to test it out and report my progress on this blog.  Perhaps this will help make me accountable as I have bought countless organizing books which really do nothing but collect dust on my shelves in an unorganized mess.  I think a week is really pushing it, but I’m going to give it my best shot!

Here’s my schedule for next week based on this book:

Monday

Morning – My Wardrobe
Afternoon – My Office
Evening – My Home Entrance

Tuesday

Morning – My Bathroom
Afternoon – My Files
Evening – My Chores

Wednesday

Morning – My Bedroom
Afternoon – My Work Communications
Evening – My Kitchen & Dining Room

Thursday

Morning – My Living Spaces
Afternoon – My Work Productivity
Evening – My Home Office

Friday

Morning – My Scheduling Strategies
Afternoon – My Routine
Evening – My Life With A Clutterer

Saturday

Morning – My Personal Care
Afternoon – My Emergency Plans
Evening – My Hobbies & Personal Time

Sunday

Morning – My Vacations & Time Off
Afternoon – My Social Life
Evening – My Celebration!

Publicity Specialist Niche

My friends Cindy Greenway and Tina Forsyth are offering the first ever Publicity Specialist training program via HotSkillsVATraining.com.  Lead by publicity expert Diana Ennen, this 3 week program has been designed to provide Virtual Assistants with the skills, understanding and strategies needed to execute effective publicity campaigns.

Submitting articles and press releases here and there isn’t enough and contacting the media, when you really don’t know what to say or how to present yourself can be intimidating.  However, master these skills and develop a plan, and you (and your clients) will be sure to be rewarded with great results.

To date there are very few Virtual Assistants who specialize in the area of publicity, yet business owners everywhere are desperately searching for support in this area.  A Virtual Assistant that can provide this support is sure to have clients knocking at her door who are willing to pay a generous rate.

In addition, a Virtual Assistant who can provide this service to other business owners, can certainly build on her own publicity!  All strategies can be applied to a VA business as well!

This program starts Monday, January 25th — learn more at http://xrl.in/4ae5.

A Chip Off The Old Writer’s Block

As I am sure is true of most people, I write best when I am inspired and not when forced to do so.  Adding a deadline only makes it worse.  Obviously, stress is not conducive to getting the creative juices flowing. So suffering from a serious case of self-inflicted writer’s block, I decided to take my English teacher’s advice and write about having nothing to write about.

Whenever my fellow classmates would complain about the inability to think of something to enter in their journals, she would dryly remark “then write about that”. I recall having numerous pages with “I have nothing to write about” scrawled repeatedly across the page.  Before I resort to anything quite that drastic and monotonous, I have decided to share some suggestions I found on how to cure writer’s block.

Write about something personal – Hmm, I could talk about the mysterious new growth on my foot.  Maybe not… so on to the next tip.

Relax, take a bubble bath or go for a walk – Sounds like good advice.  However, right now I am in the midst of another typical summer thunderstorm.  Otherwise, this could be an excellent way to get rejuvenated and ready to put ink to paper.  (It was summer when I originally wrote this post.)

Practice EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) – EFT is really popular these days and has been known to help in such circumstances.  EFT is an emotional version of acupuncture which uses fingertips (not needles) to stimulate certain points on the body. However, my children’s snickers and bursts of laughter were too distracting for me to continue my first attempt at EFT.  If you’re interested, click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHCjxdKbHvM to watch the YouTube video of a writer who demonstrates this technique.

Pretend it’s Wordless Wednesday and post only a photo – Maybe I could start something new and call it Thoughtless Thursday.  Until then, I need to keep researching ways to bring forth a writing Muse.  FYI – Under the premise that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, participants post a photo at http://www.wordlesswednesday.com without any additional comments.  Amazingly, no one on the Internet has stepped up to take credit for this popular site.

Ask others for help and inspiration – Okay, so I put out a desperate tweet for blog suggestions in the hopes that some famous novelist might take pity on me and come to my rescue.  Sadly, I did not receive a single response.  Perhaps I need more followers who are also copywriters. As you probably already know, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform and right now the need to come up with only 140 characters sounds very appealing to me!

Look at photos for ideas – Now that seemed like a very good idea so I visited some of my favorite stock photo sites. One such site that I like in particular is http://www.sxc.hu. The problem was I kept finding all these wonderful looking pictures of food and decided it was time for dinner.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t write when I’m hungry.

Reuse and repurpose other content – Many bloggers will use articles they’ve previously written as blog posts and vice-versa.  This is an excellent suggestion and one entrepreneur I know is a master at doing so (as well as coming up with fresh new content on the spot).  Erin Blaskie has managed to write an ebook in one hour and has also captured it on video.  Watch Erin’s video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nv_FcEvgJI

Now that’s inspirational!  If Erin can write an ebook in an hour, I should at least be able to come up with a blog post.  And I did – my English teacher would be proud.

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