Firing Your Internet Marketing Customers?

One trend that I'm hearing more and more about, is that of marketers who are "firing" their Internet Marketing customers.

By firing, I mean that these marketers are using whatever methods are necessary to prevent those customers from buying from them again. Most marketing product sales systems have some type of Blacklist option, for instance, both WSO Pro and JV Zoo offer this, for WSO sellers, and that adds those customers to a list of people who cannot buy and receive future products.

 

Is This A Good Idea?

For many marketers, yes it is.

A customer who requires a disproportionate amount of support is going to be unprofitable for your business. Now, I need to draw a line here between totally acceptable support issues, such as lost download links, which everyone will have, and people who are really looking for a complete set of paid coaching for the price of a WSO product. The latter is totally unreasonable.

You need to get a good set of customers who know, like and trust you, and who you can help along their own Internet Marketing journey. If people don't understand what you're offering, or don't see the value of the information that you're providing, they probably aren't for you.

 

Do I Ever Fire My Customers?

The answer is yes, but sparingly.

I can think of three main reasons.

The first is customers who are rude. I can appreciate that not every customer will like every product. My product advertising is to the point and honest, but I appreciate that not everyone understands exactly what they're getting. But, I can't deal with people who are rude. I'm never rude to people and there's no need to be. A polite refund request will get dealt with swiftly every time.

Next, I do have a problem with serial refunders. People who just buy every product and then batch up a set of refund requests just as the guarantee period expires. I'll always let occasional refunds go through, but when this happens with every product I can see that this is just an attempt to take advantage of my good nature.

One final issue I have is with immediate refunders. This is when someone buys and their refund request comes through within minutes, often without even having had time to download or peruse the product that they've purchased. Most of these people know exactly what they're doing and many of them are purchasing just to share the files illegally. Those people need to be removed from those who are able to buy.

The worst thing is that often people fall into more than one of these categories with the same refund request.

 

Why Firing Customers Is Important

One of the main reasons I do this is so as to not have to waste my time dealing with these people again. A single refund isn't just going into PayPal to refund a sale. It's probably having to send a follow-up message, as well as amend my accounts to show the sale and refund, all of which is an unnecessary time drain.

But, most importantly, I do this so as to prevent other marketers having their time wasted. On many of the systems, when a customer has received a certain number of blacklist requests, they are blacklisted from every purchase using that system. I think that's doing other marketers a favour and I hope that they would react the same way.

I know that a lot of people would say that it's not worth losing any sleep over awkward customers and I agree. But, this is well worth it for the time that it saves in the long run and the peace of mind that this brings.

 

Do You Fire Your Customers?

As always, I'm very interested to read your opinions on this post.

I hope that, if you're a customer of mine, you agree with and support what I have to say. Being able to rid myself of awkward customers gives me more time to write blog posts and create and support my other products.

Do you sell your own information products? If so, how do you deal with less-ideal customers.

Just please use the Reply box down below and provide your ideas and thoughts.