As a business owner, the traffic you own – your email list – is the lifeblood of your business. It’s the resource that keeps on giving – the one you turn to every time you’re launching a new product, having a sale or want to get that engagement up on the new content you’ve recently posted.
Surely, having an email list of leads who are your ideal audience members is an asset to your business – isn’t it?
Well, let me ask you a question about that:
Wouldn’t it be better if that list of leads was a list of customers?
Successful online business owners know that collecting email addresses of leads who visit your website is the first step to creating a database of recurring customers – but there’s a step in between that can’t be forgotten:
Getting your leads to make their first purchase with you.
This is a critical step in your business growth because once a lead buys from you a first time, the chance they’ll do it again (if you delivered well before) is significantly higher.
Therefore, it’s in a business owner’s best interest to try their best to convert new leads to customers as soon as possible.
One strategy for doing that? Selling tripwire products.
Tripwire products are high-value but low-cost items that you can pitch to your new leads who join your email list with the sole intent of converting them to customers. The idea is to get the new lead to pull out their wallet immediately to make a purchase with you, rather than waiting to be pitched at a later time.
Tripwires come in many forms. For info-product creators, it could be ebooks, templates or short online courses with a very specific learning goal.
What makes a good tripwire generally, though?
The Offer: Tripwires are meant to be irresistible, something the lead doesn’t have to think about long. They solve an immediate problem the lead is having as well. It’s not just about charging someone for a 68-page ebook. You need to consider what you’re actually offering to the lead and how those elements of your offer assist them in achieving an immediate goal.
The Price: The price of a tripwire is also what contributes to a customer’s desire to say ‘yes’ and pull out their wallet. Usually tripwires are less than $100 USD, sometimes much lower. Tripwire products could range from $7 ebooks to $97 mini-courses. The price should, of course, be commensurate with the value you’re offering, but you also need to keep your target audience and what they’re willing to spend in mind.
The Deadline: Finally, a strategy for selling tripwires that is often underutilized by business owners is the deadline: giving your new leads a specific time by which they need to buy. Since tripwire offers are such low-cost, irresistible products, usually that time is only around 15-20 minutes. You don’t want a lead to take days to consider purchasing such a small offer.
The strategy is simple but effective: a new lead opts in for your free lead magnet, at which point they are taken to an offer page for your tripwire where they also see a countdown timer that informs them they have a limited amount of time to purchase the product at the stated price.
While many website and sales funnel builders might tout that they have a countdown timer ‘widget’, you’ll want to invest in a product which can actually create authentic deadlines for your leads. To do that, you’ll need Deadline Funnel.
Deadline Funnel (aff. link) is a software that works with your email autoresponder and website or sales funnel builder to track your leads going through your funnel and assign them each their own unique deadline. So it doesn’t matter if someone enters your funnel on February 12th at 2pm or September 15th at 3am, each lead will have the same opportunity to purchase your product.
What makes the deadline you’ll set with Deadline Funnel truly authentic? Well, if a lead doesn’t purchase before their deadline passes, Deadline Funnel will automatically ‘lock them out’ of your offer by forcing a redirect to another page of your choice (like an offer expired page or a second order form with a higher price).
Utilizing deadlines to sell your tripwire products as limited-time offers can increase your conversions and ultimately turn more of your leads to customers instantly after they opt in.
Interested in trying Deadline Funnel for yourself? Click here to claim your 14-day free trial (aff. link) and start adding deadlines to your tripwire offers!
Guest post by Jack Born
