Guest Author, Miles Baker

Written by: Miles Baker, ClickScoop

ClickBank has several powerful features that affiliates and vendors can take advantage of in order to increase their profits. Recently, ClickBank has upgraded and added many new features that have a proven capacity to increase your sales. Below you will find 5 of these ClickBank features that are my favorites. Some of these features are new, and some have been around awhile, though all of them have the potential to rock your profits!

Feature #1: TID & VTID Tracking

Who TID & VTID Tracking is for: Affiliates and Vendors

How TID & VTID Tracking Works:

A TID is a ClickBank tracking I.D. It’s a string of letters and/or numbers up to 24 characters in length appended to the end of a ClickBank HopLink. Using a TID allows you to track your hoplinks based on the TID associated with it. There is no limit to the amount of TIDs you can use. ClickBank TID’s are also available for Vendors to use as well, the difference is the variable “VTID” instead of “TID” and that the Vendor TID is appended to the paylink instead of the HopLink.

How TIDs Make You More Money:

Using TID’s provides you with the information you need in order to determine where you should be focusing your efforts.

Tracking your sales with TID’s allows you to pinpoint exactly where sales are coming from. For example, if you want to track links from Twitter you could append the TID of “twitter” to your HopLink. Inside your ClickBank reporting you will see all the statistics associated with that TID for clicks, sales, refunds, etc.

One of my favorite uses is to use TID’s to track what specific pages on a website the sales are coming from. This allows me to focus my efforts on my most profitable pages in order to get higher rankings in the search engines.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-basics/all-about-hoplinks/#TID
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-basics/creating-a-payment-link/

Feature #2: PitchPlus (formerly known as One-Click Upsell)

Who PitchPlus is for: Vendors (but affiliates can benefit too!)

How PitchPlus Works:

PitchPlus allows vendors to add additional products to sell to their customers after the initial purchase.  Once a customer enters their payment information and confirms their purchase they are presented with an upsell page.  With a single click the customer can purchase the additional product without entering their credit card details again.

As a vendor you create the products to sell as your upsells. The PitchPlus Advanced feature offers the ability to present up to three consecutive upsell offers as well as downsells. In a downsell scenario, if a customer decides to decline the upsell offer they could be presented with another product or the same product at a lower price.

How PitchPlus Makes You More Money:

Adding upsells to your products increases your overall earnings per customer for both vendors and affiliates. Since the customer is not required to re-enter their credit card information, the one-click upsell can convert extremely well assuming you have related and appealing offers.

Personally I’ve found PitchPlus to be one of the easiest and most effective ways at increasing income as a vendor.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/one-click-upsell/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/pitchplus/

Feature #3: Joint Venture

Who Joint Venture is for: Vendors & Affiliates

How Joint Venture Works:

ClickBank Joint Venture is a newer and extremely versatile feature.  This allows vendors to split their earnings with partners, promote other vendor products as upsells, and even allow vendors to offer 2^nd tier affiliate commissions.

The Joint Venture feature also works for affiliates.  Affiliates can partner together and split profits from their affiliate sales.

The Joint Venture feature allows you to set up contracts within your ClickBank account.  In the contract you can specify a range of details such as how commissions are divided, start and end dates for the contract, and much more.

How Joint Venture Makes You More Money:

Partnerships are extremely profitable because you leverage one anothers’ strengths. The Joint Venture feature makes collaborating and partnering with people much easier. With the Joint Venture feature the trust factor is increased because one partner is not relying on the other partner to pay them; ClickBank is dividing up and making the payments. Additionally Joint Venture is accurate, easy, and hassle free to split up payments between partners.

There’s really an unlimited variety of ways you could use this feature. Here are just a few short examples to give you some ideas…

• You could have someone write product reviews for your blog and in exchange you could give them a portion of the sales that those reviews generate.
• You could partner with someone to create a new product and split the profits.
• If you’re a vendor you could find another vendor and cross promote one another’s products as one-click upsells.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/account-help/account-tools/joint-venture/

Feature #4: Recurring Billing

Who Recurring Billing is for: Vendors (but affiliates can benefit too!)

How Recurring Billing Works:

ClickBank Recurring Billing gives vendors the ability to sell their product at an initial price, and then setup a rebill price for each subsequent payment for the duration of a rebill product. In addition, this gives vendors the ability to offer a trial period for the product as well.

How Recurring Billing Makes You More Money:

Creating Recurring Billing Products gives vendors a continuous revenue stream over time. With regular payment schedules, such as bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual, vendors can earn more per sale on average than with a standard product.

The recurring billing feature can also be used in combination with PitchPlus Advanced.  This combination can be extremely powerful in generating additional income that is also residual.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-guides/creating-a-recurring-billing-product/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-basics/promoting-recurring-billing-products/
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-guides/recurring-billing-subscription-and-membership-products/

Feature #5: Marketplace Search

Who Marketplace Search is for: Affiliates

How Marketplace Search Works:

The Marketplace search capabilities were recently enhanced and now allow users to search by a variety of product and vendor criteria.  You’ll find Marketplace filters and attributes to search by on the left hand side of the ClickBank Marketplace. Additionally you can use the ‘advanced search’ link next to the search box for additional search features.

How Marketplace Search Makes You More Money:

Finding the right ClickBank products to promote will help you make more sales and increase profits. Using the Marketplace Search you will be able to find which vendors are offering higher payouts, use PitchPlus, offer rebills, offer affiliate tools, and much more. You can even find out which vendors offer $1 trials. Using this information allows you to find and promote the products that are the best match for your marketing efforts as well as find vendors who will make you the most money overall.

Where to get more info:
http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
http://www.clickbank.com/advancedMarketplaceSearch.htm
http://www.clickbank.com/blog/2011/12/08/new-and-improved-marketplace-search-capabilities/

About the Author

Miles Baker has been marketing online since 1997 and has been a ClickBank client for over 12 years. He currently resides in Fort Collins, CO where he runs ClickScoop.com, a community for ClickBank Vendors and Affiliates.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. More Pitches, More Profits – Introducing the New PitchPlus™ Feature!
2. Recurring Billing = Regular Profits
3. ClickBank Introduces Mobile Commerce Features

About the Author

Steven Clayton is the co-founder of Blueprint Information Products, LLC and has been making a living online for the past 8 years.  Check out the “Success Stories” in his forum for an idea of what he’s talking about in this video. Also, Steve’s company is running an awesome contest right now where you can get their premier research tool free AND have a chance at winning a LARGE cash prize. Check that out right here.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Tips to Becoming a Successful Internet Marketer
2. 7 Step Guide to Internet Marketing World Domination in 2012
3. Making the Profitable Move From Affiliate to Vendor: Part 2

In this week’s Tech Tuesday, we’re featuring a new piece of software called Affiliate Rewarder, which lets ClickBank vendors easily run affiliate contests to reward affiliates for promoting their products or launches. If you’ve been watching the Internet marketing space for a while, you know how important affiliate contests have become, especially in competitive niches like Make Money Online and Health and Fitness, among others.

The problem has been that up until now it was a real hassle to manage the contests and keep them updated regularly. Based on the video below, it looks like the team behind Affiliate Rewarder has solved those problems for vendors! Check out the video below to find out more about the Affiliate Rewarder software.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Tech Tuesday: Free Affiliate Tools Page Plugin
2. Tech Tuesday: Advanced Affiliate Management with EasyClickmate
3. Tech Tuesday: How to Create Web Video & Screencasts for Internet Marketing

New Languages

These two new languages, Portuguese and Italian, are the latest additions to a growing number of languages supported by ClickBank including English, German, Spanish and French. At this time, Portuguese and Italian are supported for end customer experience only (i.e., Order Form and Customer Support) and the website and website behind the login are not yet supported for clients in these languages. We do, however, offer full customer and client support in English, German, Spanish and French. These new languages open up opportunities for you to sell your products globally to an international audience!

New Currencies

We are also excited to announce the addition of 18 new acceptable currencies to our previous total of 13 acceptable currencies, creating flexibility for both you and your customers. New currencies include Mexican Peso,
 Brazilian Real, Argentinean Peso, 
Chilean Peso, Colombian Peso,
 Russian Ruble, Korean Won,
 Singapore Dollar,
 Indian Rupee, Thai Bhat, Turkish Lira, Polish Zloty, 
Czech Koruna, 
Indonesian Rupiah, 
Malaysian Ringgit, Chinese Yuan, 
Hungarian Forint and
 Philippines Peso. For a full list of the currencies ClickBank supports, click here. With 31 currencies to choose from, you have more opportunities to sell to new paying customers and more reasons for your products and promotions to convert.

What This Means for Vendors

You can now translate your products, Pitch Pages and Thank You pages to earn more in these markets. Additionally, we now offer Customer Support in Portuguese and Italian to support your sales. If you have a top selling English language product and you’d like to take advantage of these new languages, we can help. To learn about how you can work with a licensee to have your products translated and promoted in these new markets, check out our ClickBank Bestseller Program. For more information on going global with your product, click here.

Additionally, accepting new currencies means that there’s a greater chance that customers who typically pay in these new currencies will purchase your products once you get them to the Order Form.

What This Means for Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate and are familiar with one of our supported languages, you can now promote translated products in these high-opportunity, low-competition markets! To find products in the Marketplace to promote that have been translated into other languages, go to the ClickBank Marketplace, click on Advanced Search, scroll down and select the product language you would like to appear in your search.

Additionally, ALL affiliates can benefit from the addition of the 18 new acceptable currencies. Even if you’re promoting an English language product, you may see higher conversion rates in the local regions of the new currencies.

For more information on languages and currencies, click here. To learn more about the ClickBank Global Bestseller Program, click here.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Affiliate Marketing Today Podcast: International Sales Tools
2. Online Retail Leader ClickBank Releases New How-To Videos in Three European Languages, Improves Access for New Clientele
3. Now is the Time to Translate Your Product

This week on Tech Tuesday we’re happy to bring you a product called easyClickmate, which has been helping ClickBank vendors sell their products more effectively since it was originally created all the way back in 2002 by ClickBank client and Internet marketing veteran Adrian Ling. It was the first script of its kind that enables ClickBank vendors to provide multiple landing pages (for multiple products) to their affiliates.

Since then, it has evolved from a simple text-based script to a complete Affiliate Management Tool that enables ClickBank vendors to easily communicate with their affiliates and provide various marketing tools to them via the web-based affiliate center.

EasyClickmate has many features, but here are 4 main features that we think will benefit ClickBank vendors looking to increase their sales and attract more affiliates:

1. Sell multiple products from different websites with a single ClickBank account

Let’s say you have 2 products that you want to sell through ClickBank: Widget A (Pitch Page at www.widgetA.com) and Widget B (Pitch Page at www.widgetB.com ). The default HopLink Target URL you set in your account limits which product your affiliates can promote.

Your affiliates can only promote the product you have set up in the HopLink Target URL field. In other words, if you set the HopLink Target URL to www.widgetA.com, your affiliates can ONLY send traffic to www.widgetA.com.

However, if you use easyClickmate, your affiliates will be able to promote (i.e., send traffic to) both WidgetA and WidgetB via their custom affiliate links.

Since each ClickBank vendor account allows you to sell up to 500 different products, a single install of easyClickmate will empower your affiliates to promote up to 500 different products (which can reside on the same website or different websites).

2. Communicate with your affiliates via automated autoresponder integration

One of the biggest advantages of ClickBank over other digital publishing platforms is its huge network of affiliates (over 100,000 and growing). As a vendor, your success is assured if you can tap into this vast network of affiliates and get them to promote your products. Therefore, the ability to track and communicate with the affiliates that promote your product(s) is crucial.

EasyClickmate provides a framework that enables you to do this easily by integrating the Affiliate-Center with the 4 major autoresponders (Aweber, Getresponse, MailChimp & AutoresponsePlus).

When affiliates sign up with you to promote your products, you can automatically subscribe them to your autoresponders without any extra work/coding. Then you can communicate with them and provide them with marketing pieces, latest news, promotional tips, new product launch announcements, etc.

Imagine having a (modest) list of 100 or so affiliates that you can contact for your next product launch – that will definitely help you get started with a bang!

3. Auto-subscribe your customers via automated autoresponder integration

In the same way, you can easily build your customer list when someone purchases your product. You can assign an autoresponder list to each of your products, and easyClickmate will automatically subscribe your customers to those lists after they have completed the purchase.

This is a powerful feature because it allows you to stay in touch with your customers; for example, providing product updates, upgrades, news, upsells, cross-sells, etc.

4. Advanced affiliate links

This is perhaps the most powerful feature in easyClickmate to date.

If you decide to enable this feature, your affiliates will be able to send traffic to any page you define – even if that page is on a 3rd party site. For example, if your product is featured in CNN or one of the top authority sites, your affiliates can link to that article and still get credit for the sale if the visitor ends up buying your product after reading the article.

How cool is that? Instead of sending traffic to a ‘hypey’ sales letter, your affiliates can send traffic to case studies, neutral reviews, Facebook, etc, and still get credit for the sale!

You could also create a free report or an ebook and have your affiliates send traffic to this page instead of the main sales page, or you could create unique personalized landing pages for specific (super) affiliates.

FAQs

Q: Does easyClickmate work with 3rd party scripts such as Amember, WishList, DLG, DAP, ECG?
A: Yes

Q: What are the server requirements?
A: php4 or php5, mysql and unix/linux host

Q: Will it work on a Mac?
A: EasyClickmate is a server-side script, so it is installed on your webhost, not on your PC or Mac. This means you can run it no matter what kind of computer you prefer.

Q: Is the script outdated since it was created in 2002?
A: Definitely not. EasyClickmate is updated regularly, usually 3-4 times a year. Current version is 11.7, version 12 (2012 edition) is in the works.

Q: I’m a complete “script newbie” – is this script difficult to install on my webhost?
A: Adrian and team provide detailed step-by-step PDF guides with plenty of screenshots. However, there are a few that find installation a challenge. For those that find it a challenge, Adrian’s team is more than happy to help with the installation, setup or any other issues you may run into.

ClickBank Tech Tuesday Special!

Adrian was generous to include a special deal for readers of ClickBank’s Tech Tuesday feature. You can use the promo code CBTECHTUES to save $30 off retail pricing and get free installation and setup service! This promo code is only valid for a few weeks.

If you’re a vendor looking to improve your ability to support your affiliates and grow your sales, you can check out easyClickmate here.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Tech Tuesday: Free Affiliate Tools Page Plugin
2. Tech Tuesday: Affiliate Rewarder for Affiliate Contests
3. Tech Tuesday: CBpress Customizable Marketplace Plugin

This week, we’re excited to use Tech Tuesday to announce a new feature that is now available to all ClickBank vendors- Custom Order Form! Until now, this feature has been in closed beta testing with a few select vendors so we could measure its effectiveness in improving conversion rates for vendors. We’re happy to report that based on our testing, most vendors saw a marked improvement after implementing Custom Order Form in their accounts. Now all ClickBank vendors, even people just starting out, can take advantage of this conversion boost.

What is Custom Order Form?

The idea behind Custom Order Form is that by providing a more seamless shopping and buying experience for your customers, they’ll be more likely to complete their purchase when presented with a version of the ClickBank Order Form that looks more like your Pitch Page or website.

Custom Order Form gives vendors the ability to customize the ClickBank Order Form to match their site, by adding matching header graphics, color schemes, and more. It also gives vendors the ability to pass this customization to the ClickBank Success Page where customers access their purchase, increasing their level of trust and confidence in their purchase.

How to Get Started

To create your own Custom Order Form now, we recommend checking out our Custom Order Form Help Center article. It has all the instructions you need to start taking advantage of the increase in conversions today!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Coming Soon: Changes to ClickBank Order Form
2. Tech Tuesday: Advanced Affiliate Management with EasyClickmate
3. Tech Tuesday: CBpress Customizable Marketplace Plugin

Protecting ClickBank client sales is a top priority, and cracking down on consumers who may abuse the ClickBank refund policy represents a significant portion of our recent efforts to reduce refunds and chargebacks. We have and will continue to actively monitor and block consumer purchases that abuse our ClickBank Return and Cancellation Policy. On a daily basis, we review consumer behavior for refund and chargeback history, block purchases from consumers who have a record of frequent refunds or chargebacks and blacklist consumers who we’ve identified as policy abusers. We do this to ensure that the refund and chargeback rates for ClickBank clients’ products accurately reflect the product and promotions, and are not the result of problem consumers. On the whole, “serial refunders” make up a small percentage of all refunds.

ClickBank clients who act as consumers by purchasing products from other ClickBank clients are also subject to this policy, in addition to the Client Contract. ClickBank clients who abuse the refund policy may be subject to corrective action in accordance with the Client Contract.

As part of our efforts to help clients lower refund and chargeback rates, and in addition to best practices outlined in our updated promotional guidelines (e.g., no blind offers) and other tips available on our blog, we have been trialing additional features through our beta program including:

• Exclusive Affiliate Whitelists — Vendors can utilize exclusive whitelists to select which affiliates are permitted to drive traffic to their site to eliminate problem affiliates.
• Affiliate Blacklisting – Vendors can request that specific abusive affiliate accounts be added to a blacklist, prohibiting the abusive account from driving traffic to their site.
• Partial Refunds – This will allow a vendor to determine the percentage of a refund to grant to a consumer, based on their business rules.
• Digital Rights Management for eBooks – New technology that will allow a vendor to revoke access to their digital product if the consumer requests a refund.

We anticipate these new features will help vendors to manage refund rates as well as improving the consumer experience. We will continue to communicate the availability of these features as they are released from beta.

We’re committed to supporting both our clients and consumers, and ensuring refunds and chargebacks are kept at reasonable low rates is the responsibility of clients, consumers and ClickBank. We are committed to working together to make sure this industry remains profitable and viable for a long time to come.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Update to ClickBank Refund Policy and Vendor Fees
2. How to Lower Your Refunds
3. Strategy for Success: Create a Privacy Policy

Starting October 17, 2011, vendor accounts with a refund rate over 15% and/or chargeback rate over 1% over the past 60 days may be subject to additional fees or penalties. Refunds and chargebacks negatively affect everyone, including customers, affiliates, vendors and ClickBank, so it is important that we all work together to keep refunds as low as possible.

For vendors over the 15% refund rate threshold, ClickBank may opt to retain our transaction processing fee on any subsequent refunds, rather than returning the processing fee to the vendor as we do now. Vendors with refund rates significantly higher than the 15% threshold may also be subject to additional processing fees on refunds and additional penalties including removal from the Marketplace or account termination. Vendors with chargeback rates over 1% may be subject to additional fees on subsequent chargebacks.

As stated earlier, this change will impact a very small number of ClickBank vendors, and will not affect affiliates.

To support vendors in lowering their refund rates, we are adding a clear indicator of the vendor’s current 60-day refund rate to the Account Home page so vendors can easily track their refund rate and take action if necessary.

As we begin to implement this new policy in the coming weeks, ClickBank will contact affected vendors individually before any additional fees are applied to their accounts, and will attempt to work with these vendors to lower their refund rates whenever possible.

We are committed to supporting our clients and end customers, and these changes are part of our commitment to keeping affiliate marketing profitable and sustainable for years to come.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. ClickBank Refund Policy and Consumer Refunds
2. Updated Vendor Promotional Messaging Guidelines
3. Use Physical Products to Increase Profits & Reduce Refund Rates

We’re excited to announce a new series here on the ClickBank Blog: Tech Tuesday. These posts will feature the best in tools and technology designed to help ClickBank clients and Internet marketers build their businesses and make more money. Some of those tools will be free and others will be paid, but we’ve got a great new free tool to kick things off!

WordPress is one of the most popular web publishing platforms out there, and is used by many Internet marketers because it’s so simple, powerful, and best of all free. We’ve recommended in the past that ClickBank vendors use it to host their Pitch Page and Thank You page, but Internet marketing and programming genius Jack Born has created a free plugin for WordPress that does something else really cool: it creates dynamic, powerful Affiliate Tools pages that vendors can use to provide valuable resources to their affiliates.

Jack and I recorded the following video to show off the plugin and talk about how you can get the most out of it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To download Jack’s amazing (and free) plugin, visit http://affiliatesaleschannel.com/freeplugin

BONUS: Jack has created a second video where he goes into more detail about all of the available features and uses for the plugin. Be sure to check out this companion video too!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks for joining us for our inaugural Tech Tuesday- we’ll be back with more great technology and tools for you very soon!

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Tech Tuesday: CBpress Customizable Marketplace Plugin
2. Tech Tuesday: Affiliate Rewarder for Affiliate Contests
3. Tech Tuesday: Advanced Affiliate Management with EasyClickmate

I’ve been selling on ClickBank for approximately 5 years, across a myriad of niches.

These are the best ways I’ve learned that vendors can lower refunds on ClickBank.

Work through this checklist and you are sure to slash the number of refunds and chargebacks you run into, hopefully with minimal effort.

Ask yourself, “How easy is it for my customer to get their order?”

Sounds simple but by far the most common reason I’ve come across for a customer refunding is that they cannot get access to their order. This is either because they never received an email containing their login info (either it went into the spam filter or perhaps your download delivery system failed), their browser crashed mid-order, or they did manage to access the download page but some technical issue stopped them from actually accessing the product. If you look at your refund reasons then you will very probably see that the vast majority of frustrated customers are frustrated not because they got the product and didn’t like it, but that they didn’t get the product, period. In a world of instant gratification you may find that not everyone takes action when they’ve digested your content – but the vast majority will at least try to download it. And if they can’t, they will refund. Sounds simple but this is definitely the first thing to look at. A customer who doesn’t get access to a product will almost always refund.

Approach your customers as if they are complete newbies

If you’re selling your own ebook on CB, then chances are you have a high degree of specialized knowledge about your field. In other words, you’re an expert. And when you’re an expert its tempting to think that the value you deliver is by giving people information which is advanced, brand new etc – information they can never find anywhere else. Indeed, your sales copy is probably positioned in line with this kind of thing.

But when it comes to the product side of things, being overly technical can do you more bad than good. I’ve found in almost every niche I’ve sold in that most customers (and often most of the best ones) are complete beginners – not intermediate or advanced users. So you’ll do better to teach them from the bottom up. I’ve found that refund reasons of “this is too complicated for me” outweigh refunds because “this isn’t advanced enough for me” by ratio of ten to one.

The conclusion? Treat your customer like they have absolutely no experience in the area. Start from the basics and explain everything in depth. Use simple images, diagrams and as many videos as you can. Write and talk like you would to a complete novice. Make everything idiot-proof as possible. By all means mix some more advanced stuff in there too (later on and ring-fenced from the beginner-focused stuff ideally). But if you approach your customers as if they are complete newbies you will actually lower refunds. And the more visual (video and step-by-step diagrams) you can explain everything, the better. Oh and one final point – if your product requires any technical plugins (Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime etc, give them very prominent and clear links to download whatever they need).

Is your sales letter too “blind”?

One instant way to lower refunds is by making it much clearer to the customer what they will get and how it will be delivered. If you keep it “blind” and don’t tell them what the product is about, then you will very likely generate more sales, but you’ll “catch a lot of people in the net” who really shouldn’t be buying your product. Of course this is a trade-off between generating sales and minimizing refunds, but if you find your refund creeping up, try and make your sales letter more specific.

One way to still get the sale but not suffer the refund is by talking about the experience the customer will have once they’ve ordered your product. For example…
“Once you order, you’ll be instantly be redirected to our download page. Just enter your name and email, then you’ll be presented with our full and complete e-course. Since our method is firmly based around getting free SEO traffic, we’ll present you with a series of beginner’s videos to explain the basics. If you already know the ropes, you can skip past these and head straight to the core method itself – which is presented in a series of videos and to-the-point PDF ebooks.”

A simple paragraph like this will prepare the customer for what happens after their order – and will make it all less “blind” and lower refunds.

If all else fails, go physical

One very underused trick is to create a physical version of your product. If it’s software, put it on a CD or DVD. If its an ebook, make it printed. Offering your product in physical form can lower refunds by up to 30% – and that’s even if customers don’t need to return it to get a refund.

The reason is simple. When a customer buys a physical product, it instantly has more perceived value than one that’s purely digital. Customers love physically holding something in their hand, and they are more likely to consume your product if its physical as opposed to just sitting somewhere on their desktop. Remember also that when a customer fires up their computer, they have a million and one distractions. But if you get a physical product in their hands, you have their undivided attention. One additional bonus of this is that it means you have their physical address, allowing you to send newsletters or even presents (such as cookies) – with their permission of course. This builds your relationship with the customer, separates you from others in your niche (who are surely not doing this) and will definitely lower refunds.

Respond to customers instantly (even if it’s automated)

This is another simple trick I’ve picked up along the way. Very often, customers go into panic mode if they can’t get their download, or need to solve a fundamental problem right away. A typical scenario goes like this: they buy an ebook, and can’t get instant access as promised. They email support and hear nothing back. They panic and either refund or chargeback. A simple solution is to setup a detailed autoresponder that explains exactly how your support ticket works – with open times, and expected response times (aim for under 24 hours). So any customer email to support will get an automated, instant autoresponder email back.

This kind of thing will stop customers going into a panic and cut a few percentage points of your current refund levels. Likewise, try to give a prominent link to a customer FAQ with your top 10 most common support questions (and answers). This will give many customers an answer without them having to wait to hear from you, which in turn will lower your support volume and lower refunds.

Review your customer support tickets at least once per month

This is really the one thing that you should be doing more than anything else – you need to be “in the trenches” with your customers. Its tempting to outsource your customer support, and I’m not going to argue the pluses and minuses to this approach. But if you do decide to do this, you need to keep a very close eye on what your support team are up to. At the very least, try to read through as many tickets as you can and compile a list of the most common complaints and refund reasons. Some will be long-term changes that take time to implement, but many will be tiny little changes you can make almost instantly. It definitely pays to stay in touch with your customer – if you want to lower your refunds, they’re the first person to ask.

So there you have it – my top tips for lowering refunds. Many of these are common sense but ask yourself “are you doing them?” If not, then start right away. Not feeling motivated enough? Well, ask yourself how much extra money you would make with 10%, 20% or even 50% fewer refunds. Hopefully thinking of this number will get you to take action and make it happen.

About the Author

Chris McNeeney is an affiliate and vendor. He has several websites, but right now he’s working on Affiliate X.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. ClickBank Refund Policy and Consumer Refunds
2. Update to ClickBank Refund Policy and Vendor Fees
3. Give the People What They Want