Underselling - The Secret Bonus

So you've got a product and you want to sell it to people via the internet. Join the club. Everyone wants to sell stuff via the internet and many do, but how many of the customers are truly happy with their purchases? The internet makes it easy for internet users to communicate with other internet users. It also make it easy for your customers to come back to you regardless of they are in the world. The key to good marketing is customer satisfaction. What happens if you buy a product and you find out that it isn't as good as you thought it would be? You are one unhappy customer, you are hardly likely to tell your friends that it was a good thing to buy, you're unlikely to buy again from that supplier and you may even return the product for a refund. But what happens if the product actually turns out to be better than you thought it would be? You're unlikely to go asking for a refund, you're more likely to buy again from that supplier and you might tell your friends that it was a good purchase. If you market your products via the internet, word-of-mouth recommendations are your 'bridge' to potential customers in the non-internet world. Underselling is a tricky tightrope to walk. Of course you need to tell your prospective customers about the benefits of your product to arouse their interest in the product in the first place. If you're not going to tell prospective customers about certain features of your product you need to decide carefully what those features will be. The mere mention of the extra supercool whatdyacallit might be enough to grab the prospects attention, and yes, you may lose a few potential sales by not mentioning it in the first place, but this is your ace card. Do you really want to throw it in so soon? The unmentioned feature(s) might be subtle like the overall design quality or an extraordinarily good after-sales service, or it might be something that adds a whole new functionality to the product, a kind of secret bonus. This method works best with a 'try before you buy' approach. The customer's discovery of the free bonus means the product will be able to sell itself. It is the element of surprise that does the work. 'Try before you buy' will work with just about any product. It might involve producing a cut-down, free sample of the product or allocating a series of demonstration models for people to 'test-drive' or it might even involve making a provisional sale 'on approval'. Of course, the product should stand-up to everything that has been said about it beforehand but the surprise bonus is the clincher. People rarely buy something for just one reason. The more reasons they have to buy your product, the more likely they are to buy it. At first, in respect of an 'off-the-shelf' sale, this might sound like a contradiction. If giving more reasons to buy is more likely to get a sale, then why keep them secret? The answer is customer satisfaction, free word-of-mouth advertising and repeat sales. Unfortunately, the world is not a perfect place. Everybody has different tastes and dislikes. There is bound to be something about your product that somebody doesn't like, perhaps it's the exact shade of green or the way it goes 'snap' when you press it in a particular way. Here, your secret bonus can come to the rescue, restoring the balance by cancelling out the nasty bit, and drawing your customer to focus on the advantages of your product rather than the disadvantages. So next time you are telling your prospective customers how good your product is, forget to tell them about how it is guaranteed to enhance their love life. Let them find out for themselves. If your product doesn't do this, then perhaps it should!