Make ‘em An Offer
They Can’t Refuse
In this issue:
- Is it possible to sell sand in the desert?
- What every online marketer ought to know about price …
- 10 sure-fire ways to enhance perceived value, conversion and dollars per click …
- Plus more!
Dear Web Business Builder,
Most business people don’t realize it, but playing around scientifically with your offer is one of the most powerful ways to increase sales. In fact, it’s one of Clayton Makepeace’s secrets of success…
He doesn’t talk about this much, but I’ve been watching. He’s a master at expanding his role as a copywriter to include the crafting of powerful offers that stack the deck in his favor when it comes to writing world beating controls.
So today, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and stuff your kit bag full of tricks for crafting irresistible offers online. Study this page carefully and you’re almost guaranteed a boost in both response, and revenue per click.
Shall we start at the beginning?
At the core of your offer, are your product, your price, and your terms of sale. Let’s take a look at each …
Is it possible to sell sand in the desert?
You may be able to sell sand in the desert and refrigerators to Eskimos once, but it’s no way to build a business …
No amount of honest copy can compensate for a lousy product, or a product that nobody wants. A winning offer starts with a great product!
That said, a great product doesn’t sell itself. Copy is critical to getting people to try it. The perception of value must far outweigh the perception of price.
It’s your job as a copywriter to make that happen, and when you do your job well, you can actually INCREASE the price point at which a given product can be sold.
But at the end of the day — when the copy is doing its job — there’s always a right price.
What Every Online Marketer
Ought To Know About Price …
Of course, only the market can tell you where the pricing sweet spot is. And before you test, it’s important to first understand your business objectives. Your goals should be different, depending on where in the customer lifecycle you’re working.
If you are working with a front end product, your goal should NOT be to maximize profits, but rather the number of customers you can acquire at break-even. With a back-end product however, profits are paramount.
Let’s suppose your net profit margin is 40% on a back-end product. If you could increase the price of your product by just 20% without seeing a drop in sales, you’re profit margin would jump by a third!
Or let’s say you decrease the price of a front end product from say $67 to $47 and your sales double. You’ve not only increased your profit margin, you’ve doubled the number of customers to sell additional back-end products to. Over time, the increase in profits could be staggering!
But there’s more to the pricing story. There is a psychology to the numbers …
You already know people buy on emotion, and defend their decisions with logic. Let me show you how this applies to pricing …
What if I believed the romantic getaway guide you’re selling would make me look smart on a date? Would I be open to the suggestion that it costs something meaningfully less than $10, if you offered it to me for $9.99?
The answer is oddly enough, yes. That 1-cent can have a significant impact on sales according to tests conducted by The Professional Pricing Society. And the reason is simple …
Because I’m emotionally hooked on the prospects of impressing my date (I’ll leave the rest of my desires to your imagination), I’m more than happy to believe the absurd notion that $9.99 is somehow meaningfully less than $10.
What about $9.95? Four times the impact? Not according to the Professional Pricing Society — just 4 cents less margin (a full 2%) – for you.
Some other findings …
Above $10, .99 is perceived as “greedy”. Better to go with .95 or .75. Above $100? Better to stick with whole numbers.
And believe it or not, sometimes sales actually go UP when you raise the price.
Now let’s talk about some ways you can tinker with your terms of sale.
10 sure-fire ways to enhance perceived value,
conversion and dollars per click …
Here are some proven formulas …
The Bonus Pile On Offer – After making your product presentation, you pile on a number of related premiums for ordering now. The premiums you choose can have a dramatic impact on sales. The most effective premiums are tools that help your prospect to capitalize on the promise of your product even more quickly and easily.
Wherever possible, attach a believable reason for making these free extras available. Put a value on them if you can. And find a credible way to limit their availability by time or quantity.
The Free Suit of Cloths Offer – This offer turns the Bonus Pile On Offer upside down by selling the premiums first, and then presenting the product as a vehicle for obtaining them.
You sell the premiums as through they were the primary attraction, and then tell your prospect how he can get them by simply taking a risk free look at your product.
The prime benefit of this approach is readership. The lure of something valuable accompanied by the repeated assertion that it is free, has a tendency to disarm the prospect and keep him reading. Again, be sure to include a reason why the premium is being offered.
The Alternative Choice Offer – Give your prospect a choice between yes and yes. Instead of asking him “if” he wants to buy, ask him “which” option he wants to buy. No matter what he chooses, he’s bought. Three options almost always works best.
Offer them on your order device. Simply spell out each option and put a check box beside each one. There are two ways you can play it.
You sell the deluxe version in your body copy, and then take away from it to create lower priced alternatives. Or you sell the standard version in your body copy, and add to it to create higher priced alternatives.
The Up Sell Offer – When the prospect clicks to order, instead of the expected order device copy, you surprise him with an offer to upgrade to an enhanced version of the product, and then give him a choice at the bottom of the page to either take the gold version, or the standard.
The Down Sell Offer – With this one you are trying to salvage a lost sale. I like to do this with a pop up. Anyone who abandons your order page receives a pop up that offers to take something away from the product to make it available at a reduced price. The law of contrast works in your favor, because the reduced price seems lower than it would have had it been the only one offered.
If you are working with google pay per click (where they do not permit pop ups), you can test a “no thanks” button at the very bottom of your sales page. People who click on the button are presented with the down sell offer.
The Better Together Offer – With this offer, when the prospect clicks to order the product, you present him with the option to add a second product to his purchase at a reduced “package deal” price.
The Forced Continuity Offer – Here, a continuity program with a free trial period is bundled with the product on the order device with no option to decouple the product from the continuity billing. The prospect must accept the “until forbid” add on, or he is unable to order the product.
The Bounce Back Offer – This option makes a secondary offer on the fulfillment page where the prospect downloads the product, or alternatively in the confirmation email that is sent immediately on purchase.
The Installment Offer – This offer is usually used with high-ticket items to reduce the perceived cost. You simply divide the purchase price up into monthly installments, perhaps adding a small finance charge.
$259 a month for four months sounds a lot less than $997 one time. This is especially effective with moneymaking products. You can make a very compelling argument that the product will actually pay for itself each month and more, so it really doesn’t cost anything at all.
The Risk Free Offer – It should go without saying that you should always offer a strong guarantee with everything you sell. There are several ways a powerful guarantee that’s tied to the actual results you are promising can help you …
First, it removes roadblocks to the sale. If your prospect is teetering on the edge, very often, using your guarantee as a way of implying his decision is not final will topple him onto the buy side of the fence.
Second, if your guarantee is aggressive, and particularly if it is tied to results, it communicates your confidence in the product. If the penalties of non-performance are steep, risk is not only relieved, it is reversed. As a seller, you better deliver, or else! This naturally gives your offer more power. If your guarantee is truly audacious, put it right in the headline.
Third, a results-based guarantee gives you yet another opportunity to reinforce all of the reasons your prospect should buy. It’s a golden opportunity to plant even more vivid images of imminent satisfaction in his head. Avoid the lazy guarantee that simply says: if you’re unsatisfied you can get your money back.
Tip: The longer the guarantee, the higher the response, and the lower the returns.
Mix and Match For Mega Results!
Finding the right offer can have a remarkable impact on sales and profits, and it should be one of the very first things you test. You can easily combine several of these ideas to come up with hybrid offers to try.
Almost all of them leverage the law of commitment and consistency. Remember, as human beings, we are all powerfully conditioned to remain consistent with our prior commitments.
When we make a decision to buy — even if that decision is tentative — our tendency to stick with that decision is very high, and our resistance to being loaded up with more of a good thing is very low.
Are you leveraging this immutable law of human nature to the max in your marketing?
Until next time, Good Selling!
Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
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Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant & direct response copywriter based in Toronto, Canada and publisher of the world famous copywriting anthology “Masters of Copywriting” featuring the selling wisdom of 44 of the “Top Money” marketing minds of all time, including Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton, Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Richard Armstrong and dozens more! Check out http://www.Sellingtohumannature.com
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