Most of us have experienced buyer’s remorse at some point in our lives. Whether it was that sweater you bought on impulse or an expensive restaurant meal that didn’t quite live up to the hype, it can leave a bitter aftertaste when you’re left questioning, “Was this really worth the investment?” or “Could I have got this for a better price elsewhere?”
While our own experiences with buyer’s remorse can certainly help inform how you deal with your clients and customers, today we’re digging into how to prevent our own customers from having buyer’s remorse.
From a moral standpoint, of course we want people to be happy with their purchase. But when our clients or customers have buyer’s remorse, it can also become a BIG customer service issue—especially as the people who are not convinced their purchase was the right move tend to be more willing to talk about it than those who are happy with it!
We certainly don’t want people to get to the point where they are so unhappy they resort to emailing customer service for a refund or—even worse—taking to social media to rant about their experience. Our businesses are so reputational and if someone is looking to invest in your program, there’s a very good chance that they’re going to Google the name of your program and read the reviews.
To help ensure no one ends up tarnishing your business’s reputation and causing lasting damage, we’re diving into the reasons why buyer’s remorse happens and the actionable steps you can take to prevent it in the first place.
Why does Buyer’s Remorse Happen?
- Pricing
One of the biggest reasons people experience buyer’s remorse is because they feel they could have gotten a better deal. Did I pay too much? Could I have gotten the same thing with someone else at a better price? Even after people have purchased, they’re still comparing what they have purchased with other options out there–that process doesn’t necessarily completely end just because they went ahead with their purchase.
We are absolutely NOT saying that you should look at your competitor’s price and decrease your price based on your competitors (the price comparison is a very, very dangerous place to go down). But when you can offset the price conversation with a value conversation, that can certainly help to avoid buyer’s remorse happening when it’s based on price.
Pricing can be a very quick and easy way to make people unhappy. We’ve all been there where you finally make the decision to buy something and then shortly after, you see it discounted. That can really put a bad taste in someone’s mouth and even if you think you have removed purchasers from your sales email list, remember that there’s no guarantee that they’re not on there.
2. It isn’t what you thought it was going to be
Think about heading to a fancy restaurant for dinner—you have a certain expectation for the level of service and quality of food. But if you turn up to find the service is rushed, the staff are unfriendly, and the food tastes average, it’s going to leave a bad taste in your mouth (literally as well as figuratively)!
But expectation management is huge for any type of purchase, not just fancy dinners. When you make the decision to invest in something and discover that it’s not what you were expecting it to be, it can only lead to one thing: buyer’s remorse.
3. Not getting the results you expected
Another reason people experience buyer’s remorse is because they don’t get the outcome they anticipated. People want to feel good about their decision in the sense that they want to feel like they’re a smart individual, they made the right decision, and they did a bunch of research that helped them make a sensible purchase.
To admit that a purchase was wrong feels really bad for us. Our brains do not like that. We want to feel we did everything that we could to set ourselves up for success and when we don’t do that, it just causes anxiety and frustration.
How to Prevent Buyer’s Remorse
It can be easy to forget that every purchase is inherently risky—even picking up avocados from the grocery store (no one wants to open an avocado and see brown mush, right?). As the seller of our offer, we know our program is amazing and that people love it. But people who are not yet in your program don’t yet know for sure that it is fantastic and so it can take a lot for someone to actually reach the decision to make a purchase.
It is a very negative emotional experience to get into something that you took the risk on, only to find that you did not get what you expected, whether it was price, value, or the outcome. But the good news is, there *are* things that you can do in advance of people purchasing (as well as post-purchase) that will help to prevent buyer’s remorse from happening.
#1: Be Clear on What You’re Selling
It is paramount to be clear about what you’re selling right from the beginning and that you’re selling something that you can absolutely deliver on. Sometimes messaging can slip into being salesy and try to promise way too much in order to get people to take the action that we want them to take. But then if it doesn’t deliver on that, it’s the worst possible experience for a consumer.
You need to be excessively clear about everything that’s in the program and everything that they are going to experience as a result. And you also need to make it clear if you can’t actually promise those results. For example, on all of our programs we will say, “This is our goal for you, we can give you all the steps, but it’s on YOU to take the actions.”
Don’t forget that key pieces of information like this need to be repeated in multiple places. As business owners, we are looking at all of our sales materials again and again, but our potential customers may only open one or two of our emails. Don’t be afraid that you’re going to say it too many times because people are not memorizing what’s in your program.
We have FAQs in our sales emails, on our sales page, in our videos and we *still* get people saying, “Well, I would’ve purchased it, but I didn’t have the answer to this question…” Despite having it in five different places, people still somehow miss it.
It can also be really helpful to include who your program is and isn’t for in your sales materials. You want to be very transparent about who you can and can’t help.
When people purchase an online program, it doesn’t feel tangible because it’s not a physical product. To help buyers have a clearer visual of what to expect, you could do a quick course preview video to show people the dashboard, what the courses are and how they’re laid out, and where the videos are. This gives people a better sense of what we’re selling them and makes it more of a real thing in their minds versus diving blindly into a course without really knowing what they’re going to get back.
#2: Show Buyers You Still Care After Their Purchase
Everything post-purchase is an opportunity to remind buyers of the value of their purchase. It is a chance to reiterate the steps that they need to take to get the results that they want, (and that there *are* steps they need to take), that you’re there for them, they’re supported, and they’re not just being left to figure it all out alone.
Making people feel that they still have that tethering connection to you and that you’re not just severing that connection once they’ve purchased is crucial.
Across all our brands, we have a whole welcome sequence after people have purchased so at no point should anybody be wondering, “okay, what happens now?” This helps to get buyers comfortable with opening our emails first of all, but also helps them understand how to make the best use of the program.
In addition to the emails, there’s also a welcome page when they first purchase to congratulate them and outline what they can expect and what the next steps are. We have a video of our team welcoming them to the community and showing how excited we are to have them there. This whole process makes people feel connected to real humans and as though they haven’t just thrown money into the wind and been left to their own devices. People appreciate that handholding to guide them through your program.
After they’ve purchased, there may be some FAQs that you answered in the selling process that you also need to remind them of after they purchase. For all of our programs, people want to know in advance, “How long is it going to take me to go through the program?” Although it’s a tricky question to answer as everyone works at a different pace, we answer it before they purchase and we also put it in the welcome sequence and on the course dashboard once they’re in.
If you’re hearing the same questions from your students once they purchase, you may need to ask yourself, “Would it be helpful for people to know this information before they purchase as well?”
#3: Share Testimonials
Immediately after people purchase, there’s a tendency for excitement to wane because now there’s work to do. So how do you get them motivated to start taking action and keep taking action week after week and month after month?
We often associate sharing testimonials just with people who have not yet purchased because we think they’re the only ones who need to see the wins. But that’s not necessarily true—even people who have purchased still need to see other people’s wins to help inspire them, keep taking action, believing in themselves, and believing in the process.
This is one of the reasons why we share our testimonials in our Facebook groups (or, even better, when the students share their own wins!) and on our podcast for all the brands we have. If people have not yet purchased from us, they hear the student success stories and think, “Okay, this is legitimate. This program works.” But it also can be very good for students who are in the midst of building out their Circuit because—spoiler alert—it’s not necessarily fast to build a multi-seven-figure-per-year business.
Depending on what you’re selling, it might be a longer time before they can see the payoff from your program. It might not be something that they can consume in a week and already see results from. So it can buoy people’s spirits to hear a student success story and keep them making progress.
#4: Give people the chance to get on a (non-salesy) call
You could consider giving people the option to book a call with you or a member of your team. This isn’t necessarily a sales call (although it can be if you want it to be!) but an info call, where people have the opportunity to speak with a real person and ask any questions they might have.
In some programs, potential buyers can get on a call with one of the current students, which is something that may be worth experimenting with. And when you start to hear the same questions, you will know to put it into your sales materials.
Offering these calls can better inform your sales process so that people don’t get to the point where they have to book a call with you to get that question answered (and if you’re getting overwhelmed with calls, it’s probably a sign that there *is* something missing in your sales material).
#5: Dial in Your Customer Service
How quickly you’re responding to people can really make or break whether someone wants to move forward with you or not. If people aren’t getting a response back within 24 hours, they might start to feel like this business doesn’t care about me. Do they even have a system for this? Are they so disorganized that they can’t respond to me? If they’re not getting that support before they purchase, they certainly aren’t going to expect any level of support after they purchase.
If you have someone else who manages customer service, it’s also important to go in there and do some spot audits every once in a while to make sure that questions are being answered in the way that you want them answered.
Along with that, if you are running ads and have someone responding to comments, remember that other people are seeing your response, not just the original person that commented. When it’s a public facing ad, other people are going to see that thread and judge your brand based on how well you responded to that interaction. And even the comments that challenge us are great opportunities to reply with something that other people will see and learn something from.
#6: Listen to Customer Feedback
Yes, sometimes people do get irrationally upset but there’s almost almost always some nugget of information that we can use to improve our business. Even if people are upset, do your best to take a step back and ask yourself, “Is there anything I can learn from this?”
Everybody who sells a program will at some point hear from someone saying, “How dare you charge X for this!” so set comments like that aside. But customer feedback can be a prime opportunity to improve elements of your business.
#7: Delight and Surprise in the Post-Purchase Period
One of the last things that we’d recommend trying in the post-purchase period is having moments of surprise and delight for your customers. After they’ve purchased, buyers are not expecting anything else per se at this point (aside from the ongoing support and whatever else you’ve promised and through the purchase process).
Something we have done for our copywriting brand is a book giveaway. If we come across a book that’s particularly inspiring and helpful and we feel like our audience would really benefit from it, we do a quick giveaway and people are just surprised and delighted that we would do something like that.
We also do free events for students and giveaways of other kinds because these moments of bringing something unexpected into their life shows them that we still care and we’re still showing up for them.
You don’t even necessarily have to give something away—you could do a special surprise book club or a meet and greet with members of your program. It becomes a fun, additional community building activity but most importantly it’s something that they were not expecting and shows that you care about them.
Ultimately, you want people to say, “oh my gosh, I love being a part of this program or this community.” We want people to purchase from us, to be excited about their results, but also to be thrilled with the way that they’ve been treated and the support they’ve had. That’s what we want people to feel instead of someone thinking, “this isn’t what I want” and then emailing your customer service, snowballing it into a terrible experience.
But it won’t happen unless you make it a priority. So take note of the steps that we’ve shared today and turn it into a checklist that you can schedule out and embed in your processes. Although you might be thinking “well, it’s not really sales”, the long term impact on your sales will be positive as you prevent losing sales, and people become much more likely to refer you and post glowing reviews.
Read More
In this blog post, you’ll learn more about why you need to convince customers of your offer’s value.
Watch More
In this Energize Your Online Business podcast episode, Nicki and Kate dig into the reasons why buyer’s remorse happens, as well as the actionable steps that will prevent it in the first place.
Your Turn!
What steps are you taking to prevent buyer’s remorse in your business? Let us know in the comments below!