Design a win-your-money-back offer

1. The bet, and its three forms

A goal is set for the customer and the route to it is spelled out. Reaching it qualifies them to have the money returned as cash or as store credit. The customer's side of it is a wager on themselves.

Form	What the customer bets on	Worked instances
Results	Reaching the number, however they get there	A dollar figure a month; a count of customers; a weight loss of twenty pounds
Actions	Following instructions, whatever the outcome	Attending every session, call and meeting; logging progress; taking pictures; doing assigned homework
Both	Following instructions and reaching the number	The combination, used where the customer often lacks the skill to reach the goal unaided

The reason given for tying the two together is the customer's own skill: a customer often cannot reach the goal by themselves, so the directions are attached to the wager that pays for them.

Which actions to require. Pick the ones that do three jobs, and the third is stated as its own category: actions that get the customer the result, actions that advertise your business, and attendance at the meetings where you will make your next offer.

Three worked criteria sets, to show what the two halves look like filled in:

Business	The window	What the customer must do	What the customer must reach
A rehabilitation facility	28 days	Attend every session, post in the group weekly, journal daily in the app, attend the feedback meeting and the transformation meeting	Pass a test at the end
Pain relief, one to one	28 days	Attend every session, do the at-home stretches, post a picture weekly, attend both meetings	Nothing — the outcome is too subjective to adjudicate, so the actions carry the whole bet
Teaching marketing	Five days	A hundred outbound messages a day, attend the daily training, post once the assigned work is done	Five sales

2. What the offer is really for

It turns onboarding into a paid, choreographed event. Onboarding a customer is a cost, and the whole structure moves that cost onto the revenue side.

The first instance of it was a customer's own proposal: $500 put down against twenty pounds in eight weeks, with the use of the pictures as the other half of the trade. Advertising that one before-and-after produced thirteen more customers.

Two consequences are named. It works on customers who did not come in on any free offer at all — people arriving by referral were put through it as well, on the stated grounds that they got better results, were more invested and enjoyed it more. And it changes what you can charge afterwards, because the back-end price is set with the credit already in view.

Who it works on. New, current and past customers alike — it works for any type of customer, and it suits people who start things and quit them, and services where the customer has a lot of work to do.

Where it does not belong. A business where the work is yours and the customer does nothing — a roof gets repaired whether or not the owner participates — is named as the wrong fit. The fit is a business where results depend on what the customer does: service businesses, and sometimes software, where the customer has to onboard themselves, complete a profile and put their own information in.

Where the money actually comes from. It is not the failures. The stated success rate is 78 percent of people hitting the goal, and the selling does not wait for the end: the next offer is made partway through, to a customer who is on track. The end of the program is not the moment of sale.

Flag: whether the customers who miss the goal add to the money. Here, the money is not in the failures, and 78 percent hit the goal. A second reading says the offer still makes some money because many fail to qualify even when the conditions are realistic, and those who do often stay on as customers; it also puts the larger share of the money with the people who succeed and buy again. This page does not settle which reading is right.

3. Writing the criteria

The criteria make or break it. The characteristics given, in order: easy to track, realistic, drawn from what your best customers already did, advertising the business, and the attendance requirement carried in section 1. Four of the five are below, in that order.

They are easy to track. Train the customer on exactly what to do or they will get it wrong. Bonus points where the tracking already happens without anyone doing anything: phones count steps, word processors count words, cameras date photographs.

They are realistic. The test offered is a feel: if the criteria look too easy, they are probably close to right. Getting them right may take a few attempts, which is said to be true of anything worth doing.

They come out of what your best customers already did. The loop is stated as a loop. Run it, see who gets results, look at what those people did, require it of everybody, then look again at who did best under the new requirement and repeat. What to require is the overlap — the fewest things the whole group did, rather than the full list of what each of them did.

They advertise the business. The worked case: customers training three times a week for six weeks produce eighteen posts each, and a hundred customers produce eighteen hundred posts in one small market, carrying wording you supplied and a link. The end-of-program before-and-after picture is required too, and so is tagging the business, which puts the comments of everyone who responds in front of you.

The reason to be unembarrassed about this is given plainly and is worth keeping in the customer's own words: you are handing the money back, so the offer may carry something for you. The answer to what is in it for you is that you want them to stay and to bring people.

4. The deposit and what it has to buy

The deposit only works if there is something bigger to spend it on. The rule and the arithmetic behind it:

Piece	The rule, as stated here
The deposit	A stated $500, or whatever you decide to charge
The back end	Usually something five times more expensive
What the credit is then worth	A 20 percent discount on that back end
What to do about the back-end price	Raise it by 20 percent, if everyone enters this way
The condition on that	It gets more difficult if some customers do not come in on the offer

Do not hand the credit over as free time. Giving a $600 credit as three free months is named as a thing that was run for a year and did not work. The instruction is to spread it: a year at $200 a month is $2,400, the $600 comes off, $1,800 remains, and the customer pays $150 a month — a saving of $50 a month, which is the $600 spread over twelve months. The cash was collected up front and the customer pays again on top of it.

Flag: the worked credit exceeds the rule that sits above it. The rule asks for a back end five times the deposit so that the credit cannot exceed 20 percent. The worked chain credits $600 against a $2,400 year, which is 25 percent, and $2,400 is four times $600 rather than five. Either the rule holds and the back end in that example is too cheap, or the example holds and the cap is not 20 percent. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Flag: three free months is both refused and offered. It is named as the thing that was tried for a year and did not work, and it is also offered to a customer who says they are certain they will stay. The money is the same $600 either way; only the shape differs. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Spreading it is stated as experience rather than as a rule: it keeps customers engaged and makes more money. The reason given is behavioral and is worth carrying as stated. Customers who took the credit as free time stopped coming, and when the first real bill arrived they left. Customers who kept paying something, even at a discount, kept turning up. The phrase used in the sale for this is skin in the game, and the story behind it was told to the customer as the reason.

Whose choice it is. The customer may apply the credit however they like. That is stated as the compliant position, not as a preference.

5. The guarantee that makes the word free work

Two guarantees run at once and they are different things.

Guarantee	What triggers it	What it is for
Performance	Doing the things, or hitting the goal	The bet itself
Service, unconditional	The customer not believing the service was worth what they paid	Advertising the offer as free, and staying out of trouble

The unconditional one is named as the more important of the two for advertising purposes, on stated legal advice, at least within one country's law. The window ran to the last hour of the six weeks — a customer at day forty-one and twenty-three hours still qualified. The rule that came with it is a rule of conduct: hand the money back when it is asked for, because the risk and the nuisance are not worth it. The instruction that follows it is to go and win another customer.

The counted experience: across more than 4,000 sales over five years, two service refunds were given, and both are put down to sales that should not have been made. A second account adds that putting the unconditional guarantee on the offer never materially changed how many people asked for their money back.

6. The selling sequence

Open by asking whether the customer's goal is short-term or long-term, and sell the offer as the start of the long one. The mechanism offered to the customer is external motivation used to build internal motivation, taught through a household analogy about a child told to brush their teeth until the habit runs itself. The six-week length is justified against a 21-day figure for forming a habit, doubled deliberately.

Every meeting is an offer. Make the required meetings part of the criteria wherever you can. The three that were used:

Meeting	What is collected	What is offered
Nutrition orientation	Before pictures	Supplements
Progress check-in	Progress	The membership, for the coming year
Transformation feedback	After pictures	The membership again to anyone who has not bought; prepayment to anyone who has

Credit everyone forward partway through, and do not announce it at the start. About halfway through, make the next offer as though the customer has already won: credit the program forward toward the long-term goal whether or not the short-term goal is hit. What that does is remove the customer's fear of losing the money they agreed to risk, which — positioned properly — turns the second sale into a reduction of risk rather than an addition of it.

At the end, credit forward the customers who missed. A customer who refused the upsell and then missed the goal is told they met the goal that mattered — finishing what they started — and the deposit is credited forward anyway. The stated point is not to engineer failure. It is to get people to finish, build momentum, and credit that into something longer.

7. Before you run it at all

• Refund rate under 5 percent. Above that, fix the product first, because the structure risks producing too many refunds.
• Something to spend the credit on. Without a back-end offer the deposit has nowhere to go.
• A business where the customer's own actions decide the result.
• Being at ease with handing money back. In one large set of data, about 10 percent of all customers asked for their money back; if you cannot live with that, do not run it. That share is a different measure from the refund rate above and from the two service refunds in section 5.
• Store credit or cash. In testing, advertising store credit drew the same number of customers as advertising cash back, so store credit might as well be the default.

8. What this page does not decide for you

• The size of the deposit. $500 is worked; the instruction is to charge what you decide.
• The length of the program. Eight weeks, six weeks, twenty-eight days and a challenge of five days are all worked; no rule picks one.
• The share of criteria that should be actions rather than results. Both, and each alone, are offered without a proportion.
• What counts as a small enough market for the posting arithmetic to matter. This page gives no figure for market size.
• What to do with a customer who hits the goal and wants cash rather than credit. Both forms are named. Store credit is offered as the alternative for anyone who does not like giving cash back (see section 7 for what testing showed about how many customers each draws), and stated as a judgment, not a finding, crediting forward produces a longer-term customer. What to do when the customer asks for cash anyway is not established on this page.

9. The checklist

Question	The answer
What the customer puts down	Money, against a goal
What earns it back	Results, actions, or both
Which form suits a subjective outcome	Actions, because the result cannot be adjudicated
Stated success rate	78 percent hit the goal
When the next offer is made	Partway through, not at the end
The criteria characteristics	Easy to track; realistic; drawn from best customers; advertise the business; the attendance requirement
The third action category	Attendance at the meetings where you sell
Back-end price rule	Usually five times the deposit
What the credit is then worth	20 percent off
How to apply the credit	Spread across the term, not given as free time
Worked spread	$600 across a $2,400 year leaves $150 a month
The two guarantees	Performance, and unconditional service
Counted refunds	Two, across more than 4,000 sales in five years
Precondition	Refund rate under 5 percent
Share asking for their money back	About 10 percent of all customers, in one set of data
Store credit or cash	Store credit: it drew as many customers as cash in testing
Habit figure behind the six weeks	21 days, doubled
What the deposit is worth against a back end four times its size	25 percent, as in the worked spread; see the flag in section 4

10. What this page does not cover

Putting this offer into a deliberate order with everything that follows it belongs to SOP 59 — Assemble a money model from four prongs. Four more offers do the same job at the front of that order, which the page does not rank: SOP 61 — Run a giveaway as an acquisition offer; SOP 63 — Design a buy-X-get-Y-free offer; SOP 62 — Design a decoy offer; SOP 64 — Design a pay-less-now-or-pay-more-later offer; and, named as sitting outside the original set, SOP 65 — Convert a free consumption asset. Crediting a previous purchase forward into the next one, which is the mechanism this page hands off to, is SOP 69 — Run the rollover upsell, and the membership sold at the check-in meeting is SOP 74 — Price continuity against upfront cash. Choosing and conditioning a guarantee is SOP 7 — Choose and condition a guarantee, and pricing one is SOP 8 — Stack, name and price a guarantee. The cost this offer is meant to recover is SOP 56, and what a customer returns across a lifetime is SOP 55.

Legal drafting and tax treatment are not covered on this page.