Exactly what I've done to lower Clickbank refunds and increase conversions by a mile

[Harry Behrens]

Here's a nice tip for reducing the refund rates in your Clickbank affiliate products... and also even improving conversions by a good bit, I have found... but, my original mission here was "reduce refunds", everything else was a nice surprise.

Anyway, you know how a big thing with Clickbank affiliates is to offer the "special bonus if you buy through my link", right? It's like that, only you take it one step beyond.

First you choose a Clickbank product that is basically a system that someone's going to follow. Something that takes some time to do, like, an SEO system, a dog training technique, the perennial "losing weight" thing... anything that is like a "blueprint" type of thing.

So you buy it and read it, and as you read you divide it up into different phases. Try to imagine you yourself are following the system, and how long each phase takes you to complete. In general you want to be looking for several 2-week phases.

Now, as you imagine this, being an IM'er and having done this type of thing before, you're going to get ideas for ways you could record and track your progress. Or ideas for information that would be darn useful to have during some phase; for example... many diets nowadays have an "intensive" phase where the dieter eats almost no carbs, which then turns into an "intermediate" phase where carbs start to be cycled in.

So you simply get out your office software and make these tools.

These don't have to be masterpieces or anything. It's actually amazing how much value a simple Excel sheet or a table done up in Word with some clipart can have if you just look at it in the context of a tool within a system:

- A daily checklists
- A pre-formatted "journal" page with slots for every relevant piece of information
- A list of commonly needed statistics (keyword list, carb counter, etc)
- An outline and more basic explanation of a certain phase
- A guide to "What if X goes wrong in this phase?" and what to do to fix it
- A guide, "Questions you might have at this point and the answers"
- An Excel sheet to keep track of numbers
- An Excel auto-calculating sheet to make any needed calculations easily
- A step-by-step guide with screenshots of the action in that phase
- A video of you demonstrating how to do the action involved in that phase
- A printable wall-chart where you can track and check-off steps and phases
- A "projected results" comparison chart
- A motivational "Before and After" desktop or printable poster
- Actual software tools that will help
- A personal coaching session by email or Skype
- Audio interview with someone who has been through what you're going through
- A certificate of completion (for the last bonus)

Now in your offer of a free bonus, instead of just offering "a free bonus or two or three", you're going to be offering a schedule of bonuses, with each bonus being given just as it's becoming relevant within the system. Something like:

- At the moment you buy, you get Bonus 1
- Two weeks in, you get Bonus 2
- Four weeks in, you get Bonus 3
- Six weeks in, you get Bonus 4
- Eight weeks in, you get Bonus 5

So, in the end, you've gone beyond just providing a "bonus" to providing a complete support and guidance framework for your buyer. The Clickbank product tells them "what" to do, but you're the one who's making the "how" that much easier.

That helps, and when people feel they are being helped, in my experience, they buy. And they also stick with the program for a lot longer than they would have otherwise, including through those occasional urges to refund.

PS - How do you make sure the buyer gets the right tools at the right time? Autoresponder. Boom - now you're also building a list. Not bad eh

PPS - If you have any more ideas on what could be possible time-relevant bonuses like the ones I listed above, I would really like to hear them, so please do share.

[bieke81]

Harry,

Thank you for this outline. I have a few products I'm selling as an affiliate that fit this type of selling. Guess I need to get creating some bonuses the following days.

Take care,

Leslie

[Don Schenk]

Brilliant.

We can also do this for our own products to produce a bonus!

Thanks for the idea.

:-Don

[Chris Thompson]

Harry this is utterly brilliant. So simple, yet so effective. Thanks for sharing your method.

[Harry Behrens]

Originally Posted by Don Schenk

We can also do this for our own products to produce a bonus!

Indeed - one very brilliant marketer that I have watched does this variation - he gives you a surprise bonus after you buy, that bonus being that after 60 days, you get to choose to get ANY of his other products - for free.

I have never done this particular way myself, because I sadly don't have that many full-on products of my own (yet), but I can only imagine he gets really good results from it.

[Keith Kogane]

I haven't done it this way - brilliant implementation! What I've done in the past is hook people into a list with free content, then when I make affiliate offers from inside the list, I spin the buyers off into another list and do product orientation and tutorials and stuff periodically off through the refund period. I'd only ever done that for software and IM purchases though.

What I like about your idea is that it really widens the possibility of what niches I can do this with. Thanks!

[Barbara Eyre]

Harry,

Your post produced one of those "d'oh!" lightbulb-over-the-head moments.

Such a simple way to give more to your list, something they can use ... and gives you more credibility because you cared enough to go that extra mile for your visitors/customers.

Two-thumbs-up!

[freakonaleash]

very well put and lots of truth to it.

accompany your customers through the whole process and be a tutor to them in every question they have. this usually creates not only a lower refund(cancellation rate) but it increases your customer loyalty. in economics this should be one of the cornerstones of customer relation management and its painful to see how many companies fail drastically in their attempt to keep the customer

[Harry Behrens]

Originally Posted by Keith Kogane

I'd only ever done that for software and IM purchases though.

Yeah, software and IM is no doubt where something like this REALLY shines, as well as weight loss, but honestly, a lot of things you wouldn't even consider are actually open to it... for example, acne solutions... we as marketers just assume, hey, it's an acne cure, whatever. But for the person WITH acne? It's a long and real process they have to go through, sometimes daunting, even.

You just have to ask what would he/she like to have during that period, and a lot of times, the answer isn't near as hard to produce as you would think. And it's not a question of whether the person buying could or could not produce those things themselves, cause a lot of times it's a question of "it's just nice to know I have it".

Still would like to hear if anybody comes up with any other type of bonuses doesn't matter if they are specific to a certain niche, one can always adapt the ideas!

[toomuchfunbnme]

Your posts always have such great ideas.
I really appreciate everything you share!
Thank You!

[ChrisMarx]

How do you get the customer to opt-in to the list after they become buyers of the affiliate clickbank product?

Because they've left your site, there isn't really an automatic method is there?

(Or if they're already on your list, how to you switch the buyers over to the buyer list without asking them to come back after they purchase and opt-in?)

[Rich Pryor]

Great stuff! And once again, proof that over-delivering quality content will beat the quicksale in the long run, every time.

Buidl a list. Deliver deliver deliver. And they'll be customers for a long, long time.

[jbode]

These are great ideas, it's always good to put content in several formats to increase the effectiveness and satisfaction.

I'd like to add a few more things you can do is offer webinars every few weeks or month.. and also audio recordings and resources such as in IM offer tutorials and a list of resources - I do this so that even beginners can understand my products and have less of an excuse for doing the 'technical stuff' - many people overlook this and the ones that see it have much greater results!

[Keith Kogane]

Originally Posted by ChrisMarx

How do you get the customer to opt-in to the list after they become buyers of the affiliate clickbank product?

Because they've left your site, there isn't really an automatic method is there?

(Or if they're already on your list, how to you switch the buyers over to the buyer list without asking them to come back after they purchase and opt-in?)

I've only ever done this with Clickbank, which gives me the purchaser email addresses, so I just email them directly and say "hey, go opt-in here to start your bonus e-course."

If they don't go sign up, sometimes I'll follow up one more time, but if not, oh well.

It wasn't for this method, but another thing I've done is promote a product with a bonus offer, and I put the bonus offer on a blog page with a password. I make the password be a certain word on page X, line Y of the product.

Of course, this only works if you HAVE the product in question, but it worked pretty good for me. 80% follow up on that one, and I even ended up setting up a "did you buy this from someone else? You can still get my bonus page by opting in here." promo page and then when they confirmed, I just send them the link to the passworded page and instructions.

To promote that one, I went around the web and left comments pointing to my bonus on every blog post review of the product I was able to find.

I only ever did that with one promotion, because I happened to have a product to upsell that converted really good on my own affiliate promo, so I figured it would work with other folks who bought elsewhere, because it was a closely related product.

Unfortunately, I didn't set up any kind of tracking on that, so I don't know how well it did as far as getting me new subs that weren't already customers via my affiliate link.

But I can't imagine that I did LESS well than I would have otherwise.

[markquinn]

What? You mean we have to WORK to keep growing our profits? ;-)

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.

[rhelaine]

indeed thanks for sharing. another good example of overdelivering.

Do you give yourself a time frame for researching the giveaways or maybe a fixed number of free stuff? or do you give them as much as you can find?

[Joe118]

Awesome idea. Kinda like the limited term membership site idea, where virtually noone quits in the middle because they want to know what's next.

Originally Posted by hmbehrens

Here's a nice tip for reducing the refund rates in your Clickbank affiliate products... and also even improving conversions by a good bit, I have found... but, my original mission here was "reduce refunds", everything else was a nice surprise.

Anyway, you know how a big thing with Clickbank affiliates is to offer the "special bonus if you buy through my link", right? It's like that, only you take it one step beyond.

First you choose a Clickbank product that is basically a system that someone's going to follow. Something that takes some time to do, like, an SEO system, a dog training technique, the perennial "losing weight" thing... anything that is like a "blueprint" type of thing.

So you buy it and read it, and as you read you divide it up into different phases. Try to imagine you yourself are following the system, and how long each phase takes you to complete. In general you want to be looking for several 2-week phases.

Now, as you imagine this, being an IM'er and having done this type of thing before, you're going to get ideas for ways you could record and track your progress. Or ideas for information that would be darn useful to have during some phase; for example... many diets nowadays have an "intensive" phase where the dieter eats almost no carbs, which then turns into an "intermediate" phase where carbs start to be cycled in.

So you simply get out your office software and make these tools.

These don't have to be masterpieces or anything. It's actually amazing how much value a simple Excel sheet or a table done up in Word with some clipart can have if you just look at it in the context of a tool within a system:

- A daily checklists
- A pre-formatted "journal" page with slots for every relevant piece of information
- A list of commonly needed statistics (keyword list, carb counter, etc)
- An outline and more basic explanation of a certain phase
- A guide to "What if X goes wrong in this phase?" and what to do to fix it
- A guide, "Questions you might have at this point and the answers"
- An Excel sheet to keep track of numbers
- An Excel auto-calculating sheet to make any needed calculations easily
- A step-by-step guide with screenshots of the action in that phase
- A video of you demonstrating how to do the action involved in that phase
- A printable wall-chart where you can track and check-off steps and phases
- A "projected results" comparison chart
- A motivational "Before and After" desktop or printable poster
- Actual software tools that will help
- A personal coaching session by email or Skype
- Audio interview with someone who has been through what you're going through
- A certificate of completion (for the last bonus)

Now in your offer of a free bonus, instead of just offering "a free bonus or two or three", you're going to be offering a schedule of bonuses, with each bonus being given just as it's becoming relevant within the system. Something like:

- At the moment you buy, you get Bonus 1
- Two weeks in, you get Bonus 2
- Four weeks in, you get Bonus 3
- Six weeks in, you get Bonus 4
- Eight weeks in, you get Bonus 5

So, in the end, you've gone beyond just providing a "bonus" to providing a complete support and guidance framework for your buyer. The Clickbank product tells them "what" to do, but you're the one who's making the "how" that much easier.

That helps, and when people feel they are being helped, in my experience, they buy. And they also stick with the program for a lot longer than they would have otherwise, including through those occasional urges to refund.

PS - How do you make sure the buyer gets the right tools at the right time? Autoresponder. Boom - now you're also building a list. Not bad eh

PPS - If you have any more ideas on what could be possible time-relevant bonuses like the ones I listed above, I would really like to hear them, so please do share.

[Harry Behrens]

Originally Posted by ChrisMarx

How do you get the customer to opt-in to the list after they become buyers of the affiliate clickbank product?

Because they've left your site, there isn't really an automatic method is there?

(Or if they're already on your list, how to you switch the buyers over to the buyer list without asking them to come back after they purchase and opt-in?)

I just tell them. I tell them that when they've bought the product to come back, put in their name and email and I'll check that after checking that they bought through my link (I actually don't check though), they'll get everything. Like Keith says, if they come back great if not oh well.. the list-building is really more of a "frosting" thing, a nice unexpected extra that I realized while doing this whole thing... but I'm sure someone with good ideas can turn it into a much bigger thing somehow.

Originally Posted by jbode

I'd like to add a few more things you can do is offer webinars every few weeks or month.. and also audio recordings and resources such as in IM offer tutorials and a list of resources - I do this so that even beginners can understand my products and have less of an excuse for doing the 'technical stuff' - many people overlook this and the ones that see it have much greater results!

Awesooommee! Webinars, tutorials, list of resources.

I'd never think of webinars because I've never done one myself. It actually kinda scares me a bit (can't say why though, because back when I was on the MLM circuit I did lots of public speaking and found it to be really fun... but a webinar... seems more "serious business" to me, somehow).

Originally Posted by Keith Kogane

It wasn't for this method, but another thing I've done is promote a product with a bonus offer, and I put the bonus offer on a blog page with a password. I make the password be a certain word on page X, line Y of the product.

Ooohh... I like... ideas now brewing, thanks

[Harvey.Segal]

My colleague Adrian Ling has a product which lets ClickBank affiliates
deliver add-on bonuses automatically.
CBListAutomator: Automated List Builder and Bonus Delivery System
(not an affiliate link)


Harvey


.

[Swastik]

Excellent post.

Now, my mind is bubbling with ideas how this could be implemented with other products that are not on Clickbank.

Thanks for sharing this with us!

[red172]

Ive thought about doing something like that but I was put off after I read that it's against Clickbank's TOS.
Im pretty sure I read something on their website saying that they dont allow affiliates to offer bonuses in order to make sales. Or have they scrapped that new rule now?

[Harvey.Segal]

Originally Posted by red172

Ive thought about doing something like that but I was put off after I read that it's against Clickbank's TOS.

No it's not.

Here is what ClickBank have said


Affiliates may offer bonuses that are not cash or cash equivalents if they
adhere to the following:

1) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that the bonus offer is not
the responsibility of ClickBank or of the seller of the primary product.

2) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that ClickBank will not
honor any refund requests that are based on non-delivery, quality, or
functionality of the bonus materials.

3) Affiliate must provide their own direct contact information (email
address, etc.) and state clearly that any issues regarding bonus delivery,
bonus functionality, or bonus quality must be addressed with the affiliate,
not with ClickBank or the seller.


Harvey


.

[brucerby]

Harry that is one of the best tips on WF in quite awhile.

It just makes perfect sense. Stretching out appropriate and genuinely useful bonuses to minimize refunds and get thru the refund period is so smart.
_____
Bruce

[searchnology]

Originally Posted by ChrisMarx

How do you get the customer to opt-in to the list after they become buyers of the affiliate clickbank product?

Because they've left your site, there isn't really an automatic method is there?

(Or if they're already on your list, how to you switch the buyers over to the buyer list without asking them to come back after they purchase and opt-in?)

Just put the opt-in for the bonus(s) on the ClickBank sales confirmation page. Have the opt-in sent to a a dedicated autoresponder that will send them the bonus after X days.

[RedMatrix]

Excellent post, Harry! 5 stars.

[Harvey.Segal]

Originally Posted by searchnology

Just put the opt-in for the bonus(s) on the ClickBank sales confirmation page.

An affiliate can't do this.

Harvey

.

[mywebwork]

Awesome tip Harry, thanks so much for sharing it.


Bill

[Harry Behrens]

Originally Posted by Harvey.Segal

My colleague Adrian Ling has a product which lets ClickBank affiliates
deliver add-on bonuses automatically.
CBListAutomator: Automated List Builder and Bonus Delivery System

Hey!! I hadn't heard of that one. Thanks. I'll be checking that out, sounds made to order.

Originally Posted by Harvey.Segal

1) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that the bonus offer is not
the responsibility of ClickBank or of the seller of the primary product.

2) Affiliate must state clearly and prominently that ClickBank will not
honor any refund requests that are based on non-delivery, quality, or
functionality of the bonus materials.

3) Affiliate must provide their own direct contact information (email
address, etc.) and state clearly that any issues regarding bonus delivery,
bonus functionality, or bonus quality must be addressed with the affiliate,
not with ClickBank or the seller.

Hmm, I was actually not aware of this either (man I *really* need to start reading those TOS's more in detail...) but I think it's a fair list of requirements that shouldn't cause trouble for anyone. Thanks for that too Harvey you are most definitely the CB authority as always

[Harvey.Segal]

Originally Posted by hmbehrens

Hmm, I was actually not aware of this either (man I *really* need to start reading those TOS's more in detail...)

It's not in the TOS.

It's a statement from ClickBank back in November 2006 saying
"It is not posted on the website yet, but our security team will be using
this policy from here on out unless we experience any additional problems
from affiliate bonuses."

Originally Posted by hmbehrens

Thanks for that too Harvey you are most definitely the CB authority as always

Thank you

Harvey


.

[garyk1968]

How do you automate taking them off your autoresponder if they have obtained a refund from CB, is it possible?

The only reason I ask is that I have products which I haev gottten refunds for but still continue to receive information from the vendor. Now that may be just a sales tactic but not having sold on CB I would have thought they just email you to say xyz has a requested a refund. So you need to take them off the autoresponder which delivers the bonus material, which of course could be done.

Gary

[markquinn]

You know. I was thinking about this and realized that I think Marlon Sanders did something like this years ago with a bonus to one of his courses.

Does anyone else recall that?

[TheNightOwl]

Great tips, Harry (and others!)

As I read the post, I also thought of CBListAutomator. Great piece of software and exactly what is missing from this technique.

Another idea was posted in the following thread a while back, too:

One way to make a killing running a clickbank review site

That might complement things on the front end a bit. And you could talk up the bonuses and give a brief walk-through/overview.

Anyway, great post! Cheers.

TheNightOwl

[Mac2x]

Thanks for sharing your great ideas
i well appreciate for share your post

Thank you!

[Devon Brown]

What a fantastic idea! I had incorporated something like that but inside my Clickbank product. I never thought about having it as a bonus!

[Harry Behrens]

Originally Posted by garyk1968

How do you automate taking them off your autoresponder if they have obtained a refund from CB, is it possible?

The only reason I ask is that I have products which I have gottten refunds for but still continue to receive information from the vendor. Now that may be just a sales tactic but not having sold on CB I would have thought they just email you to say xyz has a requested a refund. So you need to take them off the autoresponder which delivers the bonus material, which of course could be done.

I don't, personally... every email that the responder sends out has an unsubscribe link where the reader can stop receiving anything if they want... plus, you know it's really in your interest to keep them on the list even if they refund... I would actually take that as a compliment to your bonuses

Originally Posted by TheNightOwl

Great tips, Harry (and others!)
One way to make a killing running a clickbank review site

That might complement things on the front end a bit. And you could talk up the bonuses and give a brief walk-through/overview.
TheNightOwl

Yep that's the post that I was referring to above talking about video and the purchase... awesome idea.. I'm trying it out right now and expect some nice results, but you never know until you actually see the bottom line..

[Asher]

Hi Harry,

Great tips! It's threads like this that make the Warrior Forum so much
more valuable. You're giving great information here - thanks!

Asher