What is a tripwire, and how can you develop an irresistible tripwire offer? Do you want to know how you could triple, quadruple, or increase your conversions?
Read on to learn how to create an irresistible tripwire. And learn the secrets to increasing conversion rates in your sales funnel.
Related: Tripwire Marketing Ideas with Premiums Plus Tips and Tricks
How to Create an Irresistible Tripwire Offer
Are you investing a lot of money, time, and effort in driving traffic to your website, yet it isn’t converting?
Are you active on social media and use paid advertisements, but your conversion rates are low?
What if I tell you that a tripwire could help you improve your conversions dramatically?
The Tripwire Funnel
The Tripwire funnel is also known as a product splinter. It is a strategy for converting visitors into clients through an exciting offer.
The funnel illustrates the lead conversion throughout the sales funnel stages.
A sales funnel works to turn visitors into leads and leads into customers.
In contrast, the customer journey illustrates from interest and awareness to consideration and conversion. It may be very simple or complex, depending on your marketing strategy.
The Entire Sales Funnel Structure
It’s crucial to remember that a successful tripwire isn’t to make money on the tripwire sale. It’s to convert leads into first-time customers.
Then, once you’ve attracted those consumers, they’re more likely to buy again with your firm.
People who purchased tripwires were ten times more likely to buy their core offer. That’s a compelling statistic favoring tripwire marketing in your marketing funnel strategy.
What is a Lead Magnet?
Most of us know what a lead magnet is in the sales funnel cycle.
A lead magnet is usually an opt-in that gets someone to put their name in. Then, it makes people raise their hands and say they will listen to whatever you say. So that is what you call a lead.
These are where we get some of our leads:
- Lead Magnets
- Contests
- Convo Surveys or Conversation Surveys
Survey Funnel vs. Conversation Funnel
During a survey funnel, you ask a lot of questions. In a conversation funnel, you ask many questions. And give answers back to simulate conversation or listening.
Are you using surveys in your business right now? For example, do you use surveys in your marketing and your funnels? Do this if you want to see people convert at a much higher rate at the end of that experience.
How to Increase Conversational Survey Conversions
The Secret Trick for Higher Conversational Survey Conversions
Usually, you ask many questions and ask them to give you an email address or contact information in the end.
The Secret Trick is: Recap their answers.
Read their responses back to them for every third question you ask in your survey. It simulates listening.
We’ve almost doubled our opt-in rate on the back of surveys by doing this simple thing.
The Trick that Will Double to Quadruple Your Sales Funnel Conversion
It’s very easy to get lost in the weeds of marketing funnels. They can become extremely complicated and murky. You can do so many things depending on your business.
The science behind the funnel is rather basic.
I’ll tell you a secret that will double, triple, or quadruple the conversion of each stage of the sales funnel. It’s a simple method, but it’s a major catalyst.
Note: If this stage of our funnel does not work, we won’t be able to use it. Similarly, we seldom see campaigns succeed.
That’s the Tripwire. If the Tripwire phase fails, we won’t be able to use funnels. Similarly, we find that campaigns are unsuccessful in general.
What is a Tripwire
The Tripwire is an irresistible offer that pushes a prospect over the edge to buy something from you. – Perry Belcher
The Tripwire is an irresistible offer that pushes a prospect over the edge to buy something from you.
Tripwires are a popular and lucrative sales funnel technique that gives consumers a limited-time small discount after they join your email list.
What’s good about it is even if your customer does not choose to opt-in to your mid-ticket item, they will still be on your email list from their initial purchase.
An email list allows you to contact them for:
- Sales and Marketing
- Seasonal Offers
- Product Launches
A tripwire is a premium product or service that you offer at a discounted price. This offer is so irresistible that it pushes the prospect – over the edge – and causes them to buy something from you.
Creating a Tripwire
We bought a company a few years ago called survive in place through an experiment. It did $30,000 a month when we bought the company.
The guy who owned the company sold tripwire products worth only $50-$500. So we got lots and lots of leads, lots and lots of prospects, but not lots and lots of buyers.
We found that the buyers who did buy something bought a lot more.
Most of the sales we were getting in the business came from buyers who had bought something from us before. What if we just had more buyers? How do we get more buyers?
Irresistible Tripwire Offers
If you’re creating a tripwire, here are 2 Tips to make it irresistible:
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First, offer things that are much, much lower risk.
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Offer items that are pretty irresistible for the profit equation.
Offer Things that are Low Risk
Whether it’s buying an idea, buying the truth of a person’s friendship, or buying a product, it is an equation.
It’s a scale. Imagine that your client has a scale like this.
On the one hand, there’s the value or the status increase from whatever you’re selling.
And on the left hand, it’s the cost of the risk.
It’s Risk vs. Reward.
If the reward is greater than the risk, you do well.
Conversely, if the risk is greater than the reward, you’ll do wrong.
Customer Acquisition
Many people bring in leads and immediately ask them to give them a lot of money. And ask them to trust them immediately early in the process – this is problematic.
If you went out to drink a coffee cup with a girl you met an hour ago and said, ” Hey, you want to hit it? ”
You might not get the response that you want. But you might get a kick in the junk because you’re out of order.
There’s a sequence for everything, even romantic friendships and dating. People go through stages. A process that usually starts with something very non-committal and very low-risk.
The same is true in a business relationship.
Customers will be more willing to take risks and be more dedicated after getting to know you better. They’ll move up the ladder as they get to know you better. They’ll advance up the ranks as a result of your expertise. Your consumers will then be more ready to take more chances and commit more time.
Everyone knows that you must go through these nurturing steps. You must go through this when dealing with a consumer. There’s a science to this. It is the same with dating someone or forming a friendship.
You cannot alter that process, but you can accelerate it.
Suppose you can get people to do things that go in that order of a funnel sequence.
The quicker you can get them to do it, believe it or not, the more likely they will do it.
When somebody buys something from a tripwire, we could wait till tomorrow to return and try to sell them something else. But, if we did that, our results would reduce by 90 percent.
It’s no different than romance.
Romance is a lot like marketing. – Perry Belcher
It’s no other than getting the girl to give you the first kiss.
So given that you got a girl to give you the first kiss. When will she most likely give you a second kiss?
A minute or two later – if it was any good. Your lady will most likely give you a second kiss if it is an enjoyable and pleasurable experience. It is much more likely than if you go back and see her tomorrow when she’s out of that dopamine brain chemical.
A second kiss right after is much more likely than a day after.
Dopamine floods our brain when we make a purchase, no matter how small or large. Dopamine is something that every woman who’s ever purchased a pair of shoes has experienced. Do you experience the same rush of excitement?
What do you usually do after purchasing a pair of shoes?
You purchase another. And a dress and earrings. We have an endless thirst for more things to acquire. We tend to want.
Once we’re in motion, we tend to be in action.
Dopamine is the first trigger. After that, there are a couple of other triggers.
Serotonin increases your status.
Oxytocin is the love-inducing hormone. When we are around other people, oxytocin helps us relax and cooperate. In a community, it makes you feel at home.
Bottom of The Funnel
The bottom of the funnel is where you want leads to end up, and you’ve spent a significant amount of time marketing to get them there. When leads choose to buy from you or a competitor, this is the point when they do so. The bottom of the funnel is where you turn leads into consumers in a nutshell.
The Harley Davidson Community
For $10, you may get a Harley-Davidson tee.
You buy two of them. You have spent $20 so far.
Then you become a member of the Harley Club. Every weekend, you go to the dealership to see what’s new. These guys are fantastic at fostering community!
We do a similar thing online.
The biggest thing we have to do before any of that works is: Get this person to commit to buying anything from us.
Do you have an entry point offer in your business? Something low ticket and Low risk?
This trick should be life-changing for you because it’s a little advanced.
I would get 100 people to come in.
I would do my best to sell 10 of them something for much less money because I know that two to four of them will go ahead and buy the $47 thing.
Or maybe a much more expensive thing immediately after that initial transaction.If you have an upsell.
I’m going to have a lot more customers. So I will have more opportunities to show that upsell. The more customers I have, the more opportunities I can show what’s next in my funnel.
What Makes a Good Tripwire
Check out these Tripwire Case Studies.
The Columbia Records Club
The Columbia Records Club Tripwire is the best tripwire offer in history. You probably don’t remember anything like this, but you may have seen the one they did with CDs.
When you join the Columbia Records Club, these were the 13 records or tapes for a dollar from Columbia house. They sent you extra records every month. It was one of the most successful marketing strategy campaigns ever in history.
At one time, this company in Terre Haute, Indiana, was selling 15% of all the music produced in the world. They were the iTunes of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. So that is an amazing program. They went from 8-track tapes, then cassette tapes, eventually to CDs.
It was a super irresistible offer nobody could resist.
And they knew their metrics.
They knew that for every person who joined this they would be in their Club for nine and a half months at $20 a month. And they were going to make back $180 – $200 for every person they gave 13 records or tapes. They knew their mathematics.
This offer drove everybody crazy because nobody knows what you’re doing.
The great thing about having a good tripwire offer is it drives your competition freaking nuts. And when they go out and try to do what you’re doing, and they don’t know their numbers, they go broke, and you get rid of them quick.
They just can’t compete for the most part since they don’t know what they’re doing.
Tripwire Offer Premium Models
Survival Life Tripwire Offer
When we started this survival business, we used to sell reports like this.
-> Insert UGLY COVER <-
It was a $7 report. It looked like all military field guides. A $7 report and cold traffic converted to 2.3 percent when we made the change.
Tripwire 2.0
The second part of the Tripwire is Tripwire 2.0.
We’ve done this for three years. First, we paid $30,000 for that firm, generating $30,000 a month. Then, after nine months, it made $900,000 a month by using a tripwire model.
It was life-changing that we sold so many of these.
Continuity Program
We took leads into a continuity program. It is a membership program on the back.
And built a giant business with 60000 members at $20 a month – a super good business!
We did that for two and a half to two and a half years.
The Power of Premiums
Use a Premium
Understand the power and the strength of premiums. If you’re not using premiums in your business, you’re missing 2/3 to 3/4 of your conversions. If you want to triple, double, or quadruple conversion of any offer that you’re making, use a premium.
Tripwire Offers
Physical Products for Free Plus Shipping Offers:
In this case, you offer a physical item for free if the consumer pays the shipping charge. You may sell a real book and charge just for delivery.
This Tripwire Offer is a typical marketing strategy online. For example, drop shippers frequently use this. It’s when you give away a “free” product in exchange for the cost to ship a paying customer through the door.
Typically, you’d charge a shipping fee to send the goods. But, it should be enough to cover the cost of the product + shipping expenses. The aim is not to lose money through a transaction. You then attempt to discover the most significant impulse buy in this price range that matches your topic.
American Gun Association Tshirts
We use t-shirts.
>Insert AGA Shirt
These t-shirts, a lot of this is for the American Gun Association.
Everything you see here converts over 10 percent to ice-cold traffic.
A premium is anything that entices someone to buy what you’re selling. It’s a gift that you get when you buy something else.
If you can go back and look at these offers in time:
The football phone from Sports Illustrated
Back in the savings and loans days, they tried to get people to open CDs and move from banks to saving loans. They gave you free toasters and steak knives, and even shotguns.
A premium doesn’t have to be something related to what you’re selling. It just has to be something someone wants.
State knives have nothing to do with bank accounts. Neither do toasters. Neither do shotguns. But all those things are desirable—generally desirable things.
At the time, these companies used to do that.
Make America Great Hat
Donald Trump raised money using to make America great hat. That’s a premium.
It was a premium used for political campaigns.
One of the first times we used these, I packed shirts. Leads pay 6.95 shipping and handling. We give this shirt away for free.
We do that transaction.
Then, leads immediately get poured over to another page.
The landing page asks potential clients if they want to join the American Gun Association.
A Tripwire Has To Identify The Market
The Tripwire or the Premium has to identify the market.
If this were just a comfortable Black t-shirt, I wouldn’t know that someone was into guns. So, it wouldn’t do any good for sales.
Survival seeds playing cards. We have all these seeds that you plant on playing cards for our gardening market.
We do the credit card, not for the survival market.
We do this a couple each for a swab well, mark this bracelet, the flashlight, this tool.
This little gadget here converts 16.6% to ice-cold traffic on Facebook. It’s currently my number one converting tripwire.
Makeup Tutorial Premium
It’s a phone case that looks like a makeup palette.
We’re using this Premium in Makeup Tutorials to get people to join the American Beauty Association.
If I just gave away a phone case, it wouldn’t help me. So I have to give away something. Then, after giving away or offering something at a premium that identifies the market.
They will get this Premium when they join the American Beauty Association on a junior level.
So then, I will upgrade their membership in the next step. So that’s an advancement for us.
Digital Marketer Premium
Ryan uses the investable invisible selling machine book as a physical product premium. This physical premium will get you to take a free trial in digital marketer labs.
How many people took that trial?
It used to convert to 4%. We added a T-shirt to it. And it now converts a little over 11 percent.
If you want to sell your book and get your point across as an authority, you can do that, but you’ve got to add something else.
Guess what nobody wants to receive as a gift? A book. A book is a work.
A T-shirt is fine, especially a t-shirt that says I’m smarter. That’s a digital marketer mantra.
When we added the t-shirt to the book, conversions went up over 10 %, hovering around 11%.
It’s huge for us because you’re taking a trial in a digital marketer lab. It’s $40 a month.
Even companies that sell tarot cards on Amazon and sell books on Tarot found out that they sold better if they added tarot cards to them, even if they charged way more.
Best Converting Items on Amazon Have Premiums
Some of the best converting items on Amazon have premiums.
The Charcoal Mask
The number one charcoal mask on Amazon comes with an applicator as a premium.
Many “for dummies” books are starting to add premiums when applicable.
So they couldn’t sell a “ukulele for dummies book” for $12. 95. But they can sell it for $49.95 if they give you a ukulele.
Kiss Me I’m a Copywriter Coffee Mug Premium
Yanik Silver is a good friend of ours who teaches copywriting.
He has a copywriting course that’s $2,000. For years he tried to increase the conversion on this course. He’s a maniac tester. Nothing increased the conversions. Nothing!
He added a “Kiss Me I’m a copywriter” coffee mug and got a 16% increase in conversion to a $2,000 product. It’s nonsensical, but they wanted it.
The Very Best Tripwires are Personalized
The very best tripwires are personalized premiums. Longtail premiums that help people to identify.
People buy things that remind themselves and tell others who they are. – Perry Belcher
Sorting – An Unhackable Mental Tick
We have a sorting in our brain that has to sort information. It’s involuntary. We sort people by their clothes, the cars they drive, how they cut their hair, speak, etc. It is sorting.
If you tell ten people you’re having a baby, the first question they ask is if it’s a boy or a girl.
They mentally have to sort that. So when you’re doing this, you’re playing with a mental tick that’s not hackable. It is always going to work.
Sorting Tip Jars in Starbucks
They put two jugs in at a Starbucks instead of one tip jar and two-chip jars.
So they put Spiderman or The Incredible Hulk one day and Mac or PC another day.
And tips went up by 400% because people voted with their money! They just wanted to be sorted.
A Vegan Big Dually Pickup Truck
When I left to show that day, we walked out, and there was a Big Giant Dually pickup truck out.
This big Diesel pump in cowboy machines sports large letters on its rear.
Someone must have gone to a science store and paid at least $30 – $100 to have these huge letters painted on the back of this truck, which read VEGAN.
It’s the most unusual thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
You may assume what a guy who drives a huge diesel pump truck wants you to know, but it’s doubtful you’re thinking about it.
They might not want to be misidentified. So, for example, the vegan driver may not want you to think that he is a cowboy farmer, a redneck. But on the other hand, it might also have been a vegan woman who enjoys horses.
- Car Stickers – You’ll see people put those stickers on the back of their cars.
- Tshirts – They’ve got t-shirts that they wear.
- Badges – We kill it in badges in the survival space. Survival Life is like Boy Scouts for big boys.
But this is the thing that’s hard sometimes for us all to swallow:
Whatever you’re selling, people just don’t want it. They’re not excited about buying it.
It does not mean your potential customers don’t need it. It just means that your potential customers don’t want it. But if you give them something they want (a reason), they’ll buy what they need.
So give them something they want, a reason to buy what they need.
While we all need healthy teeth, few enjoy visiting the dentist’s office. So, if I owned dental practice, I’d figure out ways to incentivize people to visit because no one wants to go.
Guess how many people want to sign up for your continuity program? Approximately zero.
You have to give people a reason to buy your product or service so that it will have value for them.
Important Point: Once you go through a premium or sell something, you intensify the Premium and copy the pitch you need. You need to know this: You haven’t sold that thing yet.
Your job is to immediately begin selling the benefits of what you do after you make the sale. But if you start telling them too much about it before, you will lose the sale.
The Sports Illustrated Football Phone
It’s Sports Illustrated’s most exciting Christmas gift ever! Football! Beautiful television production.
Here’s the unbelievable catch: the football phone is free if you get Sports Illustrated at their most significant Christmas Savings ever!
So this is the crazy part: That’s a two-minute long-form commercial. Fourteen seconds is how long they talked about Sports Illustrated.
You’re probably all talking too much about what you’re selling. But, unfortunately, you’re not talking nearly enough about what your people want.
The 13 records and tapes offered 8% off. It’s a big deal if you look at it.
The page told them what they were buying. Then, the rest of the page showed them what they were getting. Most of the other page is about what the potential customer wanted: the football phones!
At the time they released that commercial, it was a Hail Mary! Sports Illustrated was going to go out of business, and they only had 360k subscribers. Today they have three three million fifty-seven thousand.
But check this out: the football phone sold 1.6 million Sports Illustrated subscriptions with the introduction of the football phone. Premiums work, folks!
Agora Publishing
I’ve studied these guys for ten years. Richard Vickery and Clayton Makepeace. They write these big long-form sales letters to sell newsletter subscriptions to financial services.
Expensive stuff, and they have digital premiums. They have special reports as their premiums.
We went out, and when we returned, Clayton started showing me most of their sales letters.
- Their sales letters average 3500 words.
- Only 200 words, talk about what you’re buying.
- The other 3300 words talk about the premiums you’ll get.
They sell $1.5 billion worth of newsletters a year because they figured out that one fact!
Continuity Upsell to Associations
We talked about using a premium at the beginning of your funnel. Let’s talk about moving down the funnel.
These are some of our Association Continuity Programs:
- We were selling something called the Family Protection Association on the back of all our survival stuff.
- We sell the American Gun Association membership on the back of our gun-related front ends.
What’s your take rate on the upsell if you sell ten front ends?
What do you think you sell on the back guess 30%. It’s pretty good.
It’s pretty good when you’re selling information back ends when you’re selling information membership, it’s much much lower physical product memberships.
American Gun Association
We were selling a membership to the American Gun Association with no premium. We had a 7.7 % conversion.
Better if you add a gift. That might help you probably lift that even more.
Out of a hundred people who bought our front end, 7.5 % bought our continuity program when we added this Hoffman Richter Knife to the upsell as a premium.
Hoffman Richter Knife
Limited Edition Hoffman Richter™ Reaper
We went to a 23 % conversion to the continuity program when we added this.
Personalized Hoffman Richter Knife
And when we customized the knife with their name and the anniversary date they joined the American gun Association, we went to 32 % premium—all monthly recurring revenue.
It’s an expensive Association for Consumer Associations at $20.00 a month. Most Consumer Associations are $30 a year.
It’s a pretty big lift and a fantastic game-changer in our business.
What To Do if Membership is Not Selling
So after the thing when after I went to see Richard and those guys they said:
They don’t want what you’re selling, but they want your stuff.
It just resonated so much with me. Because over the last three or four years, we’re beginning to hit a large portion of the market. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of members now.
But it becomes more and more difficult to get people into the organization. So we’ve got attrition. We’ve got people falling off, and membership became harder for us to sell.
- Add more benefits.
- You make it better.
Where would you tell them about all those new benefits they will get when they join in? Your sales letter or in your video. Let me show you my Wistia screen here.
I begin by informing them of the Premium they will receive – the knife.
Here’s what we say: First, let me tell you about the knife. Then I begin to talk about the membership and all of the advantages it provides. The longer this becomes, the worse that I do.
By the time I got down to close, I was only talking to 25.5% of the people. Or about half the amount of people I was talking to that we’re interested in the Premium.
I ran them off, talking about what they were getting, not what they wanted.
We got an immediate double in conversion rate when I pushed the close earlier.
Double your conversion by pushing the closing up at the end of the premium.
You don’t think that will work, but I promise it will. So try it, and it will blow you away.
Split Test: Physical Newsletter vs Digital Newsletter
We stopped putting a physical newsletter into our membership. We did a digital newsletter instead.
Agora Publishing which has a billion some dollars mark, told me this: When they do a Digital newsletter versus a physical one, just the physical one gives them 2.6 X the stick. So if they’re keeping somebody for months, they’ll keep them for nine months just by sending them a physical newsletter instead of a digital newsletter.
People like getting things they can touch and feel.
Plus, information published online right now is considered free. So the value of it is lower.
Information you get on your hand is considered more valuable.
Use Premiums To Increase Big-ticket Continuity in Your Stick Series
Andrew Lock’s a good friend of mine and a Retention Specialist. He sells a $400/month Continuity Program. He realized that at four months of his membership at $400/month.
It’s on podcasting, so it’s very high-tech stuff. At four months, Andrew was getting a big break. His stick was about four months on $400.
So at 3 1/2 months now, he sends his members a signed book and a box of brownies.
His premium’s total cost is about $12.
It adds 2.3 months of additional stick to his cycle. And he is getting $900 for sending out a $12 premium.
Premiums are at the beginning. Your funnel meets the middle of your funnel and the end of your funnel, all the way through. There are a lot of other ways to use Premium.
10 Ways to use Premium
Premium works for these:
- Front end sales
- Continuity
- Upsells
- Retention
- Webinar
- Event Attendance
- Affiliate Contests
- Book Campaigns
- Launches
- Contributors
Affiliate Contests
If you’re not running contests for your affiliates, you’re losing a lot of your effectiveness. Affiliates will kill themselves to win a prize.
I don’t know why it is or why that’s true, but you can add a premium here. Your affiliates will burn their lists up and kill themselves to win a prize versus making a commission. It’s just true.
Contributors
If you’re running media properties, e give premiums now to our contributors who write stories for us and send us videos. So it works across the board.
49 Things to Split Test for Higher Conversions
These are the things we test to make sure our Sales Funnel Works well:
The sale process for most of us starts at the email level.
Split test and check if your target audience sees your email. For example, check if your emails are delivered or if nobody is opening them. If they do not receive their letter, they will never get to see it.
So if they do not see the email or your newsletters have a poor delivery or opening rate, they’re never going to see their letter.
Where to Start Split Testing and Optimizing Your Sales Funnel
Most people start optimizing on the sales page. But the earlier you optimize your funnel, the more successful you will be.
These are all our Split Tested Secrets that can double, triple, and quadruple your Sales Funnel Conversion!
What stage in your sales funnel do you plan to change first? Please share with us in the comment section below.
If you’ve tried any of these tests and tricks, I would love to know how they worked. Please let us know how it worked for you and if there are any trick upgrades you’ve done!
