I was working with a new direct mail copywriting client recently when she proudly told me that she had just processed her first refund of the year the day before--- on December 8th. I told her that was great, but that was much too low based on the number of orders she had received over the past year, and that the number of refunds she had should probably go up. Let me explain---

I told her that one of the critical and often overlooked elements of a direct marketing letter or email campaign are the guarantees or reassurances that the prospect will not lose out if what you promise is not delivered. They want to know that if something goes wrong that you will fix it and that it will not cost them money.

What this means that the same energy that you put into your headline, opening, body and close needs to go into that reassurance. Experiment with different versions to help increase sales beyond what they would be without them. If your guarantee is for 30 days, try strengthening it to 60, 90 or even 365 days or more. Strengthen the language, slanting it in favor of the reader. Assure them it will be easy to make a return if necessary. If you want to get even more outrageous, you can do what some marketers have done--- offer a refund in excess of the purchase price if the purchaser is unhappy and returns the product. (Of course you’ll have to consider your target market before get that aggressive--- my client sells to CPAs and Accountants--- an honest bunch of characters.)

The point is that if your assurances are weak, your sales will not be a high as they could potentially be--- or you are not charging as much as you could be. This is because the other key factor that often drives the number of returns from a direct marketing campaign is the price of the offering. Generally, in my experience, the higher the price, the greater the number of returns will be.

What about the cost of those returns you ask? Here is an example from a project I worked on a couple of years back. We were selling educational video tapes via direct mail to a highly focused target market. When the price of the package was $79, we had about 1.5% returns per year. Per thousand, that translates to 15 tapes or $1185 in refunds. When we increased the price to $99 and made the return policy more liberal (to a full year from 30 days to help compensate for the higher price), returns rose to 2.5% or $2475. But gross sales after returns rose by a whopping $18,710! We used a more liberal return policy to support a higher price and increase profits.