The risk reversal email: sell the guarantee, not the product

What happens if it's wrong

Think about where somebody actually is by the time they've read the description, checked the reviews and put it in the basket. What's left isn't about quality. It's the private sum about being stuck with it, and about how difficult you'll be if it doesn't work out.

Almost nobody emails to ask. They just don't order. That's why this objection is invisible in your support inbox and obvious in your conversion rate.

Four levels, in ascending order of nerve

Most brands sit on the first row and call it a guarantee. Moving one row down is usually the cheapest conversion improvement you've got, and the campaign announcing it is what makes anybody aware of it in the first place.

No conditions in the same sentence as the promise

A guarantee undermined by its own caveats is worse than no guarantee, because now the reader has a list of ways it might not apply. State the promise in one plain sentence. Then deal with the genuine exceptions underneath, honestly.

• Say what somebody gets back, and how long it takes to arrive
• Say who pays for the return, in the same breath
• Say what they have to do, in the fewest steps you can manage
• Say what isn't covered, plainly, instead of burying it in terms

That reasons to buy panel is risk reversal working inside another campaign, and it's the version most programmes should run permanently once the standalone send has gone out.

A stronger guarantee usually lowers returns

The objection to improving a guarantee is that people will take the mickey. In practice a clearer promise tends to cut returns, because customers who felt confident buying are better matched to the product than customers who hesitated and guessed.

It cuts the arguments too. A generous, plainly stated policy takes the negotiation out of every return conversation, which is time your support team currently spends on cases it always ends up conceding anyway.

A campaign once, then everywhere permanently

Send it as a standalone campaign to subscribers who've never bought, because for them it's genuinely new information. After that it shouldn't need its own send again. It belongs in the places where the doubt actually happens.

The second email of the abandonment sequence is the strongest of those, since the reader has already chosen and is doing the private sum. Putting the guarantee there is one of the reliable improvements to a cart sequence, and it usually beats adding a discount to the same email.

Find your own returns policy the way a customer would

Open your own site on a phone and try to find out what happens if something doesn't fit or doesn't work, without using the search box. Time yourself. In most accounts it takes longer than a customer would ever spend, and the answer reads like a legal document.

Rewrite it as a sentence somebody would say out loud, put that sentence on the product page, in the basket and in the abandonment sequence, then send the campaign. That's a conversion project as much as an email one, and it's usually the cheapest one on the list.