Net Frontier Marketing

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A lot of people reading this blog are smart affiliate marketers or product owners. Let’s call you future product owners. That’s the biggest service you could do yourself.

When you own a product, you have customers. At least I hope so.

A part of selling this product will undoubtedly be your guarantee. Better make it a good one. Long term, money back, no questions.

No matter how good your product is, there will always be people asking for refunds. It’s part of the game and you deal with it.

What you don’t need to deal with are the awful customers with poisonous attitudes that drain your will to live.

When I get a refund request on one of my products, which happens occasionally, I always process it very quickly and acknowledge to the customer their refund has been processed. I also ask for feedback to see what I can improve in my product or service to make it just that much better.

I’ve had my share of bad apples and recently two examples really illustrated themselves, gathering a strong candidature for the SCHOF (shitty customer hall of fame).

So here’s what this is about. Since I’ve been hitting the Gary Halbert archives pretty hard these days, I found this Halbertism which I’ve always loved.

Today I used it twice adding first: Dear [name],

You have been refunded as you will surely notice shortly.

“I made a mistake when I agreed to accept you as a client. You are way too much of a pain in the ass to be worth ANY amount of money. Don’t bother trying to call, write or e-mail me. I will destroy any messages I get from you without reading it.”

Now I realize that may seem a bit harsh and I’ll probably have to stop doing it as my product portfolio grows and my name spreads in the internet marketing world.

Might as well take advantage of it while I can.

What I intend to stop doing is using a politically incorrect tone like the one above. I have no intention of halting my policy of firing bad customers.

When you just get started in business, you are so happy to have customers, you’re willing to bend over backwards for them, even when they abuse your time and treat you like a vending machine.

Don’t get me wrong, I still bend over backwards for the legit customers and will continue doing so. But the overly demanding self-imbued jerks that think you owe them the world, nevermore.

At first you think you need the money or for some reason or another, it’s not your place to refuse service to a customer. 99.99% of the time, this isn’t true.

Sure a couple of extra bucks is nice but it’s never worth a cancerous personality you are forced to deal with.

I recognize these customers a mile away now. They email you 7 times a day and re-email you the same message 3 times if you don’t answer within the hour. They ask 13 questions per email and then ask the same questions again 4 days later.

When you tell them to slow down, they threaten to refund their purchase, even if you’ve been supporting them for a month.

You can calm them down and encourage them on, you can give them freebies and cajole them. That doesn’t change the fact they have issues.

Most of the time, they will end up draining you dry and abusing you for each last drop you are worth.

My policy, thanks to Mr. Halbert is to not deal with it. Once I can establish the customer is part of this elite group of human cancers, I promptly refund them and tell them to disappear from my cyberworld for all time.

It not only feels great, but saves you time, chargebacks and nervous breakdowns. It also seems to create a kind of energy within you, re-doubling your entrepreneurial spirit from the simple fact you will take B.S. from nobody. Not for the sake of another customer and certainly not for money.

The same holds true for just about any sector of your life. You don’t have to take crap. The sooner you take a stand against it, the sooner your life improves in leaps and bounds.

Updated:  Here’s a post on Woody Maxim’s excellent blog which I just started reading:

Time Vampires