You know you’ve crafted a great offer. It’s so good, any qualified prospect would be a fool to pass it up. Still, many do.

So what can you do to improve the pulling power of your offer? It’s easier than you think: simply add a bonus and a guarantee to what you are already proposing.

Let’s take a closer look. First off, the bonus. Think of your bonus as the icing on an already good cake, the reward or extra incentive your prospects receive for taking action or for doing what you want them to do.

You see, if you have made your offer and they are still listening or reading your letter or website, I would say they are interested in what you are selling.

Your bonus is that extra reason that takes their interest to the next level, to the stage of actually acting on your offer.

If you’ve ever watched TV infomercials, then you’re well-familiar with the attention-grabbing power of, “But wait, there’s more!” Often, the bonus is more of the same, at no extra cost (an extra set of Ginsu knives), another product (a cheese grater with your Slap Chop), or a supply of any product consumables (extra ink cartridges for a printer). Those are all known as related offers.

But unrelated offers work equally well: movie theatre tickets, gas cards, a nice pen, a donation to your favourite charity, a free book or report, free Air Miles … Almost anything you can think of that would be desirable to your target audience can become a bonus offer.

Bonuses need not add a lot of extra cost to your sales, or even any cost at all. You might find a company willing to supply you with free products, or products and services at a discount, or you might buy other incentives, in bulk, at a very low perunit price. Just be sure your bonus offer has a clear, unmistakable value to your prospect – a bonus the prospect has no interest in is no bonus at all.

So now you’ve sweetened your already great offer with a valuable bonus. It’s time to close the deal. It’s time to remove the buyer’s risk from the transaction. You do this with a guarantee – the second component that will improve the pulling power of your offer.

The fancy marketing term for this is “risk reversal.” Risk reversal is when the seller takes away the financial, psychological, or emotional risk factors attached to the decision-making process of purchasing your product or service.

Risk reversal shows the client you are confident your product or service will do what you say it will do. It shows the customer you can deliver on your promises. Taking away risk lowers the barriers to gaining your customer’s trust, and thereby eliminates one of the main obstacles tobuying. Let your prospects know early that you are committed to their satisfaction. If they are ever dissatisfied, you’ll take care of it.

Your guarantee can offer money back; it can offer lifetime or limited time product replacement; it can promise to redo the job to their total satisfaction – whatever it takes to make your buyer feel safe.

If you’ve never offered a guarantee before, it may seem risky to you – all that expense of redo’s, replacements and refunds. But, in fact, guarantees are very safe to offer, provided your products or services are of reasonable quality. The US Direct Marketing Association reports that the average take-up rate on guarantees is just two percent, or less. So don’t fear offering a guarantee. All other things being more or less equal, people would rather buy from a business that offers the security of a guarantee.

You may think people are immune to the lure of guarantees, but test after test shows that the same offer attached to a guarantee will out-pull an offer with no guarantee.

Adding a good bonus to your offers and backing them with a solid and genuine guarantee is the onetwo combination that takes your everyday, same-old, same-old offers over the edge, making them interesting, exciting and, most importantly, irresistible to your target market.