Welcome back to our series on Sales Funnels!
So far, we’ve discussed the FREE Attention Magnet and the EASY Intro Offer. I gave you some guidelines for ethically using the concepts of “FREE” and “EASY” as well as examples of how that might look in an actual scenario. Now it’s time to move on to your offers.
An offer is when you give someone a chance to help herself by purchasing a valuable product or service from you at a fair price. However, if you go back to the three phases of buyer psychology, before your customer will commitment she will consider. This means that you can’t offer your product until you have educated your customer enough to overcome her objections. So, just like the Curiosity phase was comprised of the first two steps of your sales funnel, the Consideration phase is also comprised of two steps – your Main Offer and your More Offer.
* These two offer steps also work in concert with your customer’s Commitment phase. This will be discussed in the next post along with step 5 of your funnel.
Your Main Offer
Your Main Offer is the thing that this whole funnel is designed to sell. You gave away an Attention Magnet to break through the noise for this. You sold your customer an Easy Intro Product to get him over the buying hump so he would buy this. This is it! So what is it?
Here are some ideas:
- A More Expensive Product – This is where you can offer a product that costs more with profit built in. After all, you probably lost money on your Easy Intro Offer, so, now that your customer is over the buying hump, here is where you make some cash.
- An Online Course – If you’ve created an online course to teach something that is foundational to your business, this is a good time to offer it. The nice thing about these is that, as long as the information is current, you can create them once and relaunch them over and over to maximize your profit.
- A Sizable Book – You can offer a physical book or an ebook here as long as it is a substantial work and worth the price your charging. It should be a comprehensive dive into a subject with lots of take-aways that your customer can use immediately.
- A Membership – You can offer a membership at this level or at the next level. If you offer it here, it should be something like a buyers club, a professional association, or a connection to a large group of like-minded people.
- A Service – You can offer a service as long as it’s ongoing. For instance, if you’re selling a carpet cleaning service, it needs to be a recurring, once-a-month kind of deal. I wouldn’t sell a one-and-done here unless the profit margin is huge. As a service business, the most valuable thing you can come away with is regular face-time with your customer.
Here are some guidelines:
- Price It Right – Price your main offer at 5 to 7 times the price of your Easy Intro item. So, if your Easy Intro Offer was for $9.95, you should value your Main Offer at around $50 to $70.
- Make Sure You Have Margin – You have to build profit into this step or else you’ve wasted all the hard work it took to get your customer here.
- Don’t Sell Everything – Pack your main offer with value for sure, but leave yourself things to offer as bonuses so you can over-deliver and blow your customer’s socks off.
- Don’t Tie Up A Lot Of Personal Time – It doesn’t matter what people pay for this if servicing it eats up your life. If it’s a course, have it on video. If it’s a membership, have it built to run on auto-pilot. Remember you want to be able to deliver this and move on to the next offer, not babysit this one.
Your More Offer
Your More Offer is exactly that. It’s either more of what they just bought or a way to get more out of what they just bought. This is where you sweeten the deal by offering things that aren’t necessary, but are really helpful, fun, or convenient.
Here are some ideas:
- Speed – Everyone loves speeding things up. If there is a skill that we have all lost in the last 100 years is it the ability to wait for anything. Sell ways to consume or use your Main Offer more quickly and people will jump on it.
- Convenience – Remember when we discussed the power of “EASY?” Well, here is where it comes into play. Just like speed, people are always looking for ways to get things done easier. If your Main Offer is a book, offer it as an audio book or a set of videos to make it easier for people to consume. If your Main Offer is a physical product, offer training videos, express shipping, or companion products that make using it easier.
- Membership – This is the other place where you can offer a membership. The More Offer usually costs more than the Main Offer, so fewer people will buy it. This means that you need to offer more exclusivity with your membership. If they got access to training with your Main Offer, give them limited access to you or other experts that you recommend. If they got access to better pricing with the Main Offer (buyers club), give them access to special selection here.
- Live Events – Live Events could really be offered at either level depending on their size and scope. If you are hosting a conference with speakers and vendors and the whole sha-bang, you’ll need to charge a higher price for tickets. If you’re hosting a small local gathering with appetizers, a short presentation, and lots of mingle time, you won’t need to charge as much. Live Events are a fantastic way to build on a Main Offer. If you sold them training, give them access to the author or creator of that training at a live event.
- Bundle Stuff – As you can see, there are many things you can use for your More Offer. The truth is that you will probably need to bundle several of these things in order to create a product worth the larger price tag of this offer. Just make sure that you maintain sufficient margin to cover your time and talent.
Educating Your Customer
Regardless of what you offer in these two steps, you need to properly educate your customer about the benefits of what you’re selling. Remember, this is where you anticipate and overcome their objections. There are several tools you can use to accomplish this.
Here are some ideas:
- Case Studies – Sharing stories of how other people just like your customers have used your products or similar products successfully will inspire your customers to believe that they can achieve the same results.
- Clinical Research – Giving people hard data that supports your claims will help answer many of their questions regarding quality, effectiveness, and safety.
- Personal Stories – Remember the Four Kinds of Stories? This is the perfect place to use them. They work like case studies, but they’re are warmer and easier to relate to.
- Sales Letter – You’ve seen these. They are the long, scroll-down, tons of information, followed by a guarantee and an offer web pages that internet marketers have been using for over a decade. Regardless of what you may think about them, sales letters work and this is where you use them.
- Video Sales Letter – If you don’t want to write a sales letter, record it on video and end it with a purchase link. You can either be on camera or just read a powerpoint presentation into screen-capture software. This can be very effective as well.
- Product Reviews – Try to get a person with credibility in your market to review your product. People are far more willing to try things that are liked by people they like.
Here are some guidelines:
- Follow the Same Guidelines – The guidelines for the More Offer are basically the same as the ones for the Main Offer with some minor adjustments.
- Price It right – You should price this offer at 7 to 9 times the price of the Main Offer. If your Main Offer was for $47, your More Offer should be somewhere between $300 and $500.
- Don’t Sell Everything – Since you are dramatically increasing the price, you’ll need to proportionately increase the number of bonuses you give away. People need to feel like their getting the whole world for a more-than-fair price.
- You Can Offer More Personal Time – Since the price is higher fewer people will buy. This means you can commit more of your personal time to servicing this product or service. Sometimes access to you is all it takes to make the higher price worth it.
OK, there are steps 3 and 4 – the Main Offer and the More Offer. Later this week we’ll cover the final (and most critical) step in the Sales Funnel – the Recycle System. Be sure to stay with us, because if you don’t get your p0 right, you could lose everything you’ve built in the first four steps.
What offers have you made to your customers? How did you do it? Share your story and let’s talk about it.