#131 - Best of 2022 - 3 ways a $27 can help you sell more courses
7 Dec 2025 · 0 min
Kate McKibbin breaks down self-liquidating offers, low-ticket products priced around $27 that pay for your ads while building a buyer list. She shows three ways to use them: funneling people into membership sites, upselling to courses under $1,000, or warming prospects for high-ticket calls. One student spent $20 a day and made $4,000 profit in the first week.
Questions this episode answers
Self Liquidating Offer
$27 (notes a trend toward $7 in some cases)
Episode 103
June 22 (Australia time) / June 21 (most other regions)
$297 (represents about $200 off and includes bonuses)
Really, the purpose of that offer, as I said, is to allow you to go out there and probably market more and list, build more than you would have previously wanted to or previously had the budget to, because it's paying for its own budget and it's allowing you to grow that budget.
This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.
Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFunnels co. And welcome to episode number 103 of the Doing It Online podcast. Now today I want to circle back and talk about one of my favorite nerdy online marketing tools, one that we haven't really chatted about for a while, but one that once again is coming back into its own. And there's a few reasons for that and we'll talk about that today. But what I want to talk about this, you know, this particular nerdy tool is what they call a self liquidating offer, which I know it's like such a boring bro marketing name, right? That's why we rebranded it. We call it the Mini but mighty offer. What this means, what this is, is it's. And you guys have seen them everywhere. I'm sure they are usually $27, although there is a little bit of a trend for them to be $7 at the moment. And we can chat about that as well in a minute. What really, what the purpose of these offers are is that it is a paid way of growing your list. It's a way to go out there and do one of the things which I think is so important in any online business and that is to wherever you can make your marketing pay for itself. That's what the, that's what it means by self liquidating. It's kind of a weird term by self liquidating. It means it pays for itself. It means it the revenue or income that comes in from those little small offers. That $27 offer is enough to cover the cost of those Facebook ads or more. So it basically means you go out there, you give Facebook a dollar. It gives you a dollar back in sales as a minimum. And, and if done right, they should actually give you a little bit on top. That also helps you to grow your Facebook ad spend. Just say you're giving, you know, Facebook $10 a day. And they're giving you back 11. Then the next day you can give them 11 and they'll give you back $13 and, you know, and so on and so on. And that's how, you know, you're able to quite rapidly scale up again with just giving, taking away a lot of that risk, a lot of that uncertainty. Now, of course, not everyone gets to do that from day one. There is usually a test, you know, and this is definitely one of those strategies that I think generally work best for people who a, have dabbled in Facebook ads before, but you don't have to. We've seen people come in who've never done Facebook ads before and they absolutely, you know, blow it, hit it out of the park first go. But generally, as with anything, when, if you're going to come in and Facebook ads plays a part of it, it's useful, right, if you've done it before because it takes you kind of starting with a lot more educated guesses rather than just pulling things out of the air. For example, you know, which audiences, or you might have a few audiences you've used before that have worked well. So when you come in and you're going to start testing your ads, you don't have to go, okay, well, let's find an audience. You, you can already hone in on those ones that have worked. That's why we normally recommend for people who want to, you know, who are coming in to this strategy. And I want to use the strategy in their business that they have dabbled in Facebook ads before. But like I said, not. Not absolutely a requirement because we've also seen people who do amazingly well and they've never done a Facebook ad before. So. But anyway, let me. I've gone off on a tangent. Let me bring me back. So what is a slow. Well, as I said, it's slow is SLO stands for self liquidating offer, by the way. Sorry, it's the shorthand for the nerd marketers out there. Like I said, it's an offer. And its purpose isn't what a lot of people think it is. It's purpose. Like, I think people see these and go, wow, they must be selling like thousands of these $27 offer. $27 offers. And making all this money from the $27 offer. Actually, most people don't end up with much in their back pocket just from that offer. Really the purpose of that offer, as I said, is to allow you to go out there and probably market more and list, build more than you would have previously wanted to or previously had the budget to, because it's paying for its own budget and it's allowing you to grow that budget. What it's also allowing you to do is to not just list build and grow a big list full of people who aren't quite ready to invest yet or who are maybe still just in that, hey, I'm going to opt in for everything and still in that kind of Google and guessworking phase of whatever it is in their buyer journey, it allows you to actually start building your email list with buyers. These are people who are a little bit further down the road who have, who are like, no, I do value this outcome enough. I do want to get results, I do want to make a difference and I want to do it enough that I'm willing to make a bit of a micro commitment, like more than just putting in my email address. I'm willing to put down $27, $7, whatever it is. And that is, that is quite, that first jump. It's quite a big jump. The third thing it allows you to do is it really does allow you to give people a sort of a taste test. Like this may be their very first, you know, experience with you. And particularly when you compare, like for example, if you say you're going out and you're using the same budget to do list building and you were getting a bunch of people coming in for some kind of freebie opt in because that commitment for them is so small, the likelihood of them even opening that first email with the link in it and then clicking through and even like reading what or consuming whatever that free thing is so low. Like for some people it's as low as 20%. Now again, that's an extreme case, but that just means that you still spent the money. You haven't, it hasn't paid for itself at all. That's this money that you have to hopefully recoup two, three, four months down the line by hopefully converting them into a sale later on. And that person hasn't, because they haven't made that big of a commitment. They don't even consume it. They don't even get that first experience of what it's like to work with you, that first bit of value from you. These people who have made some commitment tend to be more likely than to open those emails, to consume that content, to actually perhaps put it into practice or place whatever it is that you have told them or you've, you've taught them or you've helped them with in this little mini offer, but they've now it's kind of like this tick, tick, tick of just benefit, benefit, benefit. One, you've gone out there and your list building is essentially free. It's paying for itself. Two, it's bringing in people who are much more who are that further down the buyer journey, who are more ready, who are more likely to invest, who are already proven that they're happy to invest, they're more committed to getting an outcome. Three, those people have then actually been more likely to take action, more likely to consume and have that first experience with your offer. And so therefore, if you've done your job right and you've given them a great taste, a great first piece of value, they're also going to be more likely to then take your following offers. And I know a lot of people have this really weird misconception. Oh, it's not weird. I suppose it makes sense. But they have this misconception that a $27 offer, okay, well then you need to have like a $97 offer behind it and then a few months later, like a $300 offer and then a thousand dollars offer. And then like people think that you can't from $27, you have to slowly jump people up, down this like crazy long buyer journey. But it's actually not the case. We use our $27 offer very successfully to help indoctrinate people and introduce people and warm people up for our $5,000 offer. And there's nothing in between. It goes from $27 to $5,000 and it works really well. It's like been one of our most effective funnels, one of our most effective marketing tools that like in the last two years especially that, that we have. And this is one of the reasons I'm such a big believer in it, because it can be so powerful. Like for example, we were diving into. And I promise you I will get to the how this, how you can put this into your business in just a sec. But I just want to make sure that it's like you guys kind of understand why I love, love, love this strategy so much. Like we were diving into some stats the other day. We've got a tool, it's called Hiros. I'm not an affiliate for it in any way. It's more of a spendy kind of tool definitely. But it's really good for being able to see long term trends and things like that. And long term profitability of Facebook ads, for example. It allows you from when you started it, so only starts collecting data from obviously when you start paying for it. And we've been using it for over a year. But I was able to see which face Facebook ads from 12 months ago. How that like when people had clicked through from those and then maybe purchased three, four, five months later, which you can't see in normal Facebook ad tracking. And we found that one ad which is one of our Mini but Mighty ads which I think we spent around about $30,000 was over 12 months on this one ad has brought in over a quarter of a million dollars in sales over that 12 month period. So it's really good ROI like I said. And one ad like we haven't had to create a whole bunch of new ones. Like once we kind of found that audience and found that ad we've been able to pretty much leave it. Like some of these ads have been running for over two years now. We do probably, they are probably due for an update. But that is the power of it. Like, and that is, I said like that's that $27 offer coming through to our $5,000 sort of more higher touch program. I hope you kind of seen how powerful they can be. I hope you're excited about potentially adding them into your business. And so now I wanted to give three ways that you can do that. Three ways that having a Mini but Mighty offer in as one of your marketing tools can help you to sell more courses right now. And these are what things that I'm seeing happen with our clients, our Ecosys empire clients and also from our own programs and our own testing. First of all, one of the first ways, and this is just such a no brainer if you have a membership site guys, and it's under $300 a month, you are crazy if you do not have a Mini but Mighty offer because you can as part of your Mini but Mighty offer or even as simple like the most simple version of this I've seen is people using their Mini but Mighty offer to go out there and say $27 you can come in and you can get X and it's usually like one module of their one of their juiciest trainings from inside their membership site. And then the upsell or the order bump is something like for an extra dollar do you want to also get a 30 day trial inside our membership site so you can get some support to go with this and see what it's like and then if you don't, don't cancel in that time you'll just stay as a member and who's not going to say yes to that dollar? Like people get crazy high conversion rates from that. And then again, as long as you're doing your job correctly and your membership site is you're going to get a lot of people staying. And so that's people that's directly like. It's quite difficult usually to run an ad to cold traffic directly to an offer that's any kind of commitment. But this they've already committed, they're already excited. That's one of the things I know particularly with membership or membership sites is because they generally cover a really broad range of things, it can be hard to really dial into that pain point enough that having an ad to cold traffic would be effective. But if I said you pull out that one of those juiciest pieces, one of those really specific this is an outcome, you know, that everybody wants and you've got a really great, whether it's training or a workbook or a toolkit or something or some scripts or templates that you can bundle up together and that most people who join your, you know, your membership site really, really want that. You can offer that as your intro and then hey, for a dollar want some extra support to help you implement it. Of course they're going to say yes, you know that and different versions around that work really, really well for membership sites. The second way is for people who have DIY style online programs, group programs that are under a thousand dollars. And that again is allowing you to actually sell your program, your thou up to a thousand dollar program directly from this cold traffic. Like you don't need anything in between you. This kind of bypasses like your webinar funnels and stuff like that. Like yes, you can obviously have those on the back and it's always our recommendation that if anyone is going to come and do a mini but mighty offer to really optimize your profit, you definitely want to have a funnel behind it. And there's a whole strategy around that as well which we won't get into today. But that's where you start to see that real profit, that real, real benefit once you have that marketing paying for itself. That's why with our program which teaches it, we call it funnel fuel because it really helps you fuel your funnel. Anyway, I'm going off on tangent again but for those of you who, if you have an online program that's 197-297-497997 any of those price points, you could absolutely sell it as an upsell directly from the shopping cart they say so you have to guys, again, if you're going what's an upsell. That upsell is so I always, I always forget that I can drop some terminology. Not everyone understands it, but an upsell is you. Again, you would have seen them. You are in a checkout. You pop in your details, you click Buy now and it goes through. And on that thank you page, there's usually a, like a, hey, do you want to add this to your order to make it even better? Click here now and it's instantly added. To have those work really well, you need to have a checkout that's decent, but most of them have, you know, some sort of option for you to do that. Now, whether you don't necessarily need ThriveCart or SamCart, a lot of your, your courseware software have upsell options and things like that. Another thing that we chat about inside the program is different options. But yes, just you guys know what an upsell is. All right, so circling back again, sorry guys, it's like Tangent City today. How do you make this work? Well, obviously you've got to have that really good, strong $27 offer to start with. It has to be nicely related as like, like a first step. And it has to be making sure you're bringing in the right people. But then on that upsell page, I said there's a few different ways of doing this, but one that we've seen work really well. And again, you would only want to do this if your program was really good DIY and it made sense. But to allow people to either go and have a trial or say, you know, come in, try the first module or whatever for X number of days. And again, you want to keep it at that real candy aisle. Can't say no first price. So maybe it's $1, $7, something like that offering a. People also offer like a portion of it, like again, just a section and they go, it's normally 9, 9 7. You can get this bit for 1, 9, 7 or again, I've seen work really well. And you only want to do this guys, if you're not using PayPal because PayPal and lots of split payments equals nightmare. But I've seen a lot of people have it work really well where they go, hey, do you want to actually upgrade your offer? Get a whole program and explain, obviously you have a nice sales page and what, what this program is and why it makes that what they've just purchased even better and helps them to get even better results. And you say, but you know, normally it's, it's, you know, your split payments are say 197amonth for over six months. You'll get your first payment for literally a dollar or $7. And then after that it's five monthly payments of your 197. And so it's because people are able to have that real micro commitment right away. And you know, again, it has to make sense. It has to be helping them to have that better experience, has to be helping them to be able to do it faster or better or quicker or cheaper or whatever, all of those things. But you can expect up to like a 15% conversion rate potentially if say you're going out there and your $27 offer, your mini bit mighty, that initial offer was maybe making 10 sales a day. You could be making another sale a day as a minimum for off the back of that of your higher value program. And we had one of our lovely students, Hayley, she did just that. She was spending $20 a day on her ads. And she made over $2,000 in sales of that initial offer from her $20 a day just of that first, you know, her $27 plus her order bump. And then on top of that she made another, had another four people take up her $500 program. She ended up actually with close to $4,000 in profit in her very first week from a $20 a day ad spend. So again, this is how crazy powerful this can be and how simple it can be. As long as you do it right, you get that first offer right, you set it up right, you got the right ads. There is a lot of places that people kind of do get this wrong, but if you do it right, it is just so amazing. It is such a. It's one of our favorite things to see people set up. The third way that you can use a $27 offer to help you sell more courses and programs and things like that is for people who have. And this is a strategy I've seen work really well. If you either sell via sales call already or offer like a strategy call as part of your sales process, or you do one to ones and part of your offer is offering maybe a bundle of one to one services, you can actually make that call, that first call, your upsell, whether it's a 197 or just $97 or somewhere sort of in that range, maybe you could even do as low as 47. But I don't like people to be charging less than $100 for their time. But you know, again, as long as you said that right, as long as you are making sure that it is make sense for people. It's going to enhance their experience, it's going to literally upgrade and make whatever they've bought better. Then it can be a total no brainer for people. And for some niches this works so well because people, they just go, yes, this is great, but I just want to speak to someone, I just want to have someone show me how this is done and you can offer to do that or if you're already in more scaled phase, you could obviously have this as something that you have someone on your team do or where they go, all right, you've bought, just say they bought some kind of template or something like that. They could upgrade it and have somebody chat them through how to use it, how to apply it, how to get make more out of it and then through that, because obviously this is going to enhance their experience, it's going to give them that other touch point. You could obviously as well explain to them on that call the further ways that they could work with you if they wanted to go another step further. So these are three very different offers, three very different scenarios. But that all works so nicely behind a $27 offer if it's done right. I said membership sites, DIY programs that are under $1,000 can be sold directly from cold traffic, which is crazy. Or for people who have higher touch programs, one to one, offering a call as your upgrade just works so beautifully. Now for those of you who've been listening to this, go, hell yeah, this sounds amazing. I would like to set this up, but of course I want to do it right. I don't want to waste months and definitely real money dollars on Facebook by not doing it right, by trying to Google and guess my way to this. Then you're going to want to listen up because we are about to open up our wait list. In fact, actually I think it will be open right now as this episode goes live to Funnel Fuel. Now Funnel Fuel is, it's one of my favorite programs, one of my favorite pieces of Ecourse Empire. It is normally only available inside Ecourse Empire guys, but as a special little. But because we know how powerful it is and we've seen how well it works and because a few of you been asking for it as well, we are going to be opening the doors to just that Funnel Fuel on its own, but only for people on our VIP wait list and the doors for that VIP wait list offer which will be for 24 hours only open 22nd of June Aussie time or 21st of June for pretty much everyone. Else. Now it's not just the exclusive access that you get when you join the wait list, you also get $200 off. That's like an amazing, amazing discount off the program. So it's going to be just 297 plus you get over $1700 in bonuses. Plus the very first person to who purchases from that waitlist offer when those doors open, as I said, On June 22 or June 21, depending on where you are, will win a $500 cash voucher which you can use, we hope you use towards your Facebook ads to make your first maybe mighty offer. Give it a really good kickstart. But of course you can use it however you like. Plus you will actually get the full cost of the program refunded back to you. That's $500 in your pocket plus the program refunded back to you. But only if you're that very first person who purchases, but everyone else who purchases within that, that 48 hour period, sorry, they said you get that amazing discount get turned off. You actually get a chance to buy the program, you can't buy it elsewhere. Plus heaps and heaps of awesome bonuses. If you want to get onto that wait list, if you want to. You want our help and you want to know our exact process. You want to get all our scripts, our templates and we've got everything in there, guys. We've got like the way that final fuel is set up is it's a five day program. We take you through day one, you're going to create your offer. Day two, you're going to set up pages. Day three, like all the way through to creating your ads. We show you step by step, we and we have literally templates, plug and play for the design, for the text, for everything for your sales page, the whole bit all the way through. And these are proven. We've run them with hundreds of people, they get amazing results. So and I said the only other way to get access to this is inside our ecosystem program. But we are allowing just those people who jump in quickly and want to take action and want to get this set up in their business before the end of the year. You can come but you have to get onto the waitlist. If you go to HelloFunnels, co waitlist or grab the link out of the show notes, make sure you pop your details in, get onto that wait list and then put the time, the date, everything in your calendar because you want to make sure you are there you are the first ones in so you can get not just this amazing offer. But also the Chancellor said to win a $500 cash voucher depending on where you live will either PayPal you or whatever to you. So don't worry. You get it. We're not going to like send it in the mail plus your investment back in full. But as I said, you have to be on that wait list before the doors open on the 22nd of June Aussie time or 21st of June if you're, you know, US, UK, Europe, anywhere else. Really excited to kick this off. We've done this before. It's so fun. It's one of my favor favorite ways to run a little mini promo for a program because it kind of feels like an event or it's like a party. Like everyone's there waiting. We love sitting there looking at our Google Analytics, at the people who are like waiting to jump into the be that very first person. It's like a real. Yeah, it's like a celebration atmosphere which I think is kind of cool. Make sure you're there, make sure you're on that wait list. And we can't wait to share this amazing system with you. Get on the waitlist guys. We will see you there. And yeah, until next time, guys. Keep doing what you do and we'll see you online. Bye.
Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.
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