#73 - Tripwire VS SLO

That's a different thing. But once it's rolling, once it's scaling, you'll just be like, okay, well how many leads do we need? We know that's going to cost roughly that amount per lead, but it's going to pay for itself back. So I'm happy to spend that because it doesn't even feel like spending it because it pays it back on the day.

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 guys, it is Kate here from hello Funnels, and welcome to episode number 73 of the Doing It Online podcast, where today we are going to be hosting a virtual smackdown of sorts. But you're not a violent type, a nerdy type, where we pit the good old tripwire and the self liquidating offer up against each other. And I'm going to dive into what they are, what they do, pros, cons, and who and when each is best suited for because there's some real magic here. Like, I love both of these strategies. I think they're both super powerful, but I know these are two really super common strategies that people go out and they'll attempt at the wrong time in their business or in the wrong way and then they will think, oh, these don't work for me. And this one of my pet peeves is when, you know, that happens when people get the wrong strategy or the wrong advice for their business and they're trying to implement a strategy that's not designed for where they are right now or the types of products that they have. So they go out there, they take what is a great strategy, but it's, they put into place, but it's just never going to work at that time for them. And then they just think that strategy is terrible, it's a bad strategy. But actually it was just there's a mismatch in the timing or in the offer or, you know, or where they were in the what phase they were at in business. So that's what I want to stop happening as. Like one of my missions in life is to make sure that, you know, marketing strategies and businesses are, you know, a perfect match. So, so if you have been thinking about adding either of these strategies to your business, then this episode is definitely for you so guys, you should all know that it is one of my success pillars here at hello funnels to that where possible and whenever possible, we want to make our marketing pay for itself. And what does that mean? Well, it means that rather than, you know, the traditional way or that the way that most of us have been sort of taught to go out and do list building and marketing and I'm talking about the paid ways here guys, obviously, or organic is separate. But you know, for most of us, if we're wanting to get a big boost in our business or we're wanting to speed up the growth of our business, or if we've got a launch coming up or we have a funnel and we want to scale that funnel and start making more sales, normally one of the go to ways to do that is go, okay, I'm going to start running some ads. But the problem is with that is that while ads they get more and more expensive. Right? But also it means that you're spending the money up front and then normally there's this lag and it's not even a guarantee that you're going to get your money back. So, you know, let's look at launches for example. It's really common for say the four to six weeks before a launch kicks off for people to ramp up their spend and you know, go hard on list building. They want to add, you know, an extra couple of thousand people to their email list before their launch. So they've got new warmer people on their list, which is great except for the fact that it means you having to pay upfront. So just say you've spent $20,000 or even $2,000 on your list building before a launch and you do that, you know, like a month or so out and then you have to run the launch and do all this stuff. And so you're not getting your money back. You're kind of like in the hole for a certain amount of time. And the other thing is that when it comes to launch time, when it comes to opening up your car and start making sales, the first X number of sales, like you know, that's just going back and paying back the marketing money you've already spent. Or another way to look at it is a certain percentage of every sale that comes through is going to be sort of paying back that that marketing budget. So it means you're less profitable, it means it's less risky, it means it's more stressful. Because if you spent $20,000 on a launch, then in your head you're like, well I've definitely got to make the $20,000 minimum to get my money back. But of course I want to make a lot more than that. So all of a sudden your goals for your launches have to be exponentially higher to cover off that initial investment. And what if when you were doing your list building, Facebook went a bit nuts and Your ads were 10 times the price? Like, it just makes things harder, more stressful and less reliable. So this is why we love it when people kind of figure out how they can start unlocking this like little superpower for their business and making their marketing pay for itself. And by that I mean is when you're going out there and you're doing list building or you're doing any kind of online promotion, the goal of that is, is whatever you're spending in marketing is that you're going to pretty much immediately get that revenue back, or at least a good portion of it. And again, this depends on which of the two strategies you go for and when will depend on which one of your goal, which sort of objective you have for this particular marketing strategy. Ultimately, to the good old way of spending 20k and then waiting 4 weeks and crossing your fingers and toes and hoping you get it back is when you have something like a tripwire or self liquidating offer. When you have those in place for your marketing, you go out there, you know, you do some paid marketing. If you've done it right, then for every dollar that you're spending, you're getting that dollar back again, you're going to go out there. Or if not more like if you, if you get it, if you do it right, you should hopefully get, you know, up to two times it back. But the goal is really just that it covers its own costs. And could you imagine how different that would be? Imagine how differently you would plan things, how much less stressful it would be like, okay, I'm going to go do some list building. I don't need to allocate budget for that because it's going to pay for itself. Yeah, you can allocate some budget to test, that's a different thing. But once it's rolling, once it's scaling, you'll just be like, okay, well how many leads do we need? We know that's going to cost roughly that amount per lead, but it's going to pay for itself back. So I'm happy to spend that because it doesn't even feel like spending it because it pays it back on the day. So for example, that's what all these self liquidating offers are all about. You see them out there, they're $27 here and there. And the goal isn't for the person to be making profit off these, some of them do, but it's quite common that they're not profitable, not for this initial offer. The goal is that they pay for themselves. They allow people to list build, they allow people to attract a slightly higher quality of lead because this is a buyer, not just freebie seeker. So that person is particularly if they've come in, they've purchased something, got a good response or a good result, a good experience with whatever that little thing is they purchased, they're more likely to buy again. So anyway, there's all these win wins. And I'm not here necessarily to convince you of how amazing these two strategies are. Instead I wanted to break down and talk to you about which one, which one is which, which one is going to work best for you and when is the right time to pull the lever on either of these two strategies and to start implementing this really, really cool way of, you know, pouring a little bit of extra fuel onto your business. So first up, let's talk about self liquidating offers. So self liquidating offers, like I said, you've probably seen them everywhere. They've got really, really popular start of 2020 with the pandemic when people sort of really freaked out and panicked about, you know, offering their higher ticket offers and everyone was like, I've got to have a low ticket offer, I've got to have a low ticket offer people. No one's going to want to spend, you know, more than that. So I've just got to keep the wheels turning. Not true as it turns out. But anyway, that's another point. So what these are is like I said, it's a low ticket offer, usually under $30, that is promoted directly to cold traffic. So there's no funnel in front of it. It in itself is an opt in, even though it's a paid one. So this is, we would call this like top of funnel kind of activity. It usually has some kind of order bump or upsell as well. And the purpose of those is just to increase that average cart value, which means that it, it makes it more likely that you're going to be able to cover the cost of getting that person to click through and buy from paid ads and hopefully even better get some extra on top that you can then either put as profit in your pocket or reinvest back into scaling and growing your ads. You would like I said, you would have seen Them everywhere. They're really, really common. The pros of these exactly that they are really upfront. They're really one of the quickest things that you can get set up and tested. I love this particular strategy so much. We created a whole extra project around it which we call funnel fuel which we made kind of exclusive to our ecourse empire people recently. But it's literally it's a five day process to come up with offer because only a little bite size offer, create the sales page you need, you know, set up the automations you need, set up the tech that you need which again isn't crazy, expensive or complicated and get it out there with ads and testing and seeing how it works. Like it is a really really fast to get up and running and it's really fast to test. Like it's fast to get that data. Like does this offer work? Whereas if you're going out there and obviously creating some kind of bigger offer or like creating a free challenge or some other piece or of your some other kind of promotion, it normally takes a lot longer to be able to actually see the stats and see the data. Like this is one of the things I love about is it's so fast, fast to get up and running faster, create faster, get it rolling faster, start getting some data and faster start getting some results as well. Because the other benefit of this offer and the other like the real objective of this offer is it's obviously it's nice if people, you can make your list building pay for itself and then have that confidence to grow your list much faster and to be able to invest a lot more into your marketing. You know it's going to come back but obviously the real objective is that you're getting this higher quality of person coming through and getting on your list and then a much higher percentage of people who then go to purchase your other offers. So whether you have a funnel or you have a launch or whatever you've got coming up, we found it time and time again is that people who come through these self liquidating offers or like we call them the mini bit Marty offers are far more likely to particularly as I said if you've done your job and you've given them a good experience to then take another step with you. That's kind of like the, the pros of this. Like it's fast and it's amazingly powerful. I think people are always really shocked. Like when we added this into our Equals Empire program I saw it really as like that missing puzzle piece. For a lot of people who they already had an offer perhaps that they were selling and they. But they were maybe capping out with being able to do Facebook ads and scaling. Like the scaling was going slow because ads are getting too expensive or they didn't have a big buffer behind them to be able to spend and then be okay for sales to come in 60 days later. You know, having this added just, it made it so much quicker and so much easier. Like we had people who, you know, both just popping this in front of their existing funnels and with a week getting like 5, 6, 7 sales of their signature offer, which costs them nothing because it had come through, you know, that it had paid for itself. So what are the downsides of a self liquid grading offer? Because I want to make sure that everyone is kind of clear. Can I cross this? So the downside is the Facebook ads. So really it is like, well, there's two things. First of all, you have to get the offer right. There is a real art to it. And that's why we dedicate a whole big chunk of our program and our training is to help people to figure out exactly what is going to be that offer. Like what is going to be something that is a super hells yes for people who see it. Because it is, you know, it does take something a little bit extra special for people who are cold traffic, who maybe have never heard of you before to see something, value it enough and trust you enough to hand over their hard earned cash. Like there is definitely some secret sauce needed there. So that's the one thing is like nailing that offer. If you don't get that offer right, the rest of the strategy falls down. The second thing which makes it a bit trickier is the Facebook ads side of things. Again, that's why I usually recommend the self liquidating offer. It's going to work best for people who already have maybe dabbled in Facebook ads a little bit or are happy to, you know, to spend a couple of weeks having a play. This is not for people who are like, I'm just going to whack this up and leave it and I'm not going to be happy to play with the Facebook ads. Like you need to be understand that again the Facebook, like if you've got a good offer, learning the type of ads you use, they're pretty simple. But learning the right type of ads, the right type of ad types and targeting and all of that stuff. There is again, there's a little bit of an art to it. I know a lot of people have gone out, they've tried to figure this out on their own and they've just, it's been a disaster because of both those two things I didn't realize or they didn't know what they didn't know about how to set up the right types of ads and the right types of targeting and the messaging, the ads and the same with about how to set up that right type of offer. So if you definitely don't feel super confident to go and do those two things on your own, I mean that's exactly why we created the Funnel Fuel program. So tripwires on the other hand are a slightly different beast. A tripwire is actually for those of you who haven't come across them or I'm sure you have, you just perhaps you know what their name was. It is an offer that shows after somebody has opted in and normally you'll go out there, you'll be promoting whatever your freebie bribe is or your lead magnet is. And then people pop in their details, they hit submit, they land on what would normally be a thank you page. But instead of being a standard thank you page, it says like hey, before you head off to your inbox to get whatever goodie you just opted in for, we've got this limited time only offer for you. And then you'll have again a special offer just for people landing on that page. And again that offer is usually sub$30. So the two upfront, the, the objective is very similar for them both. They're designed really both to help cover off that cost of marketing now and sometimes one is going to work better for the other. And this is where, why inside our final fuel program we actually recommend people. Well, we start with a self liquidating offer but that you also have a play with the tripwire and figure out okay, where is my business at right now? What do I have more of for people? As I said before, if you're don't feel really confident with Facebook ads or you know, you're not happy to spend a couple of weeks sort of having a test, having a play, getting that confidence, building that up, then a tripwire can be a nice little first step because you don't necessarily need to have ads running to make these work. Now if you're already getting a trickle through of traffic, if you already have a couple of opt ins that people are just opting into already, or maybe you're promoting them on social organically, then adding a tripwire behind it can kind of be that first step. And for anyone who has already a lot of organic traffic and you're already getting a lot of opt ins then I would a hundred percent recommend this is one of those beautiful pieces of low hanging fruit that you can just slot into your business and instantly start making some extra revenue. So then the objective to become slightly different. In that case, it's not about making your marketing pay for itself, it's about making your marketing actually put some profit in your pocket which is, you know, tick, tick again. That's where the two, that's the two different methods. And yes, when people come to me and they go, oh, which one should I do? Which one should I do first? Usually my answer is actually why not do both? Because the offer that you have for the tripwire and the offer that you have, the self liquidating offer, the pages that you set up, they're pretty much the same. You don't have to change them very much. And we talk about the subtle differences inside funnel fuel about, you know, the small tweaks you can make on the different pages to or to the offers. So make one more ready to be a tripwire and one to be a self liquidating offer. But this is kind of like a double your bang for your buck kind of scenario. If you're going to go and do one, why not do both? Most people will find that one will work better. Like I said, if you are someone who has an opt in that you're already running ads to and that works well for you, pop a tripwire behind it and start helping getting that tripwire to help cover the cost of your ads. Or if you're someone who just organically is getting leads right now, amazing, well done. You hop in a tripwire or if you're someone who has a funnel going and you know you want to amp up that funnel, well then I would definitely be looking at a self liquidating offer. Or if you're someone who does regular launches and you want to add, you know, make those launches do even better in between your launches so that your, your ads don't kind of like die down and go quiet, you can look to add that, you know, that self liquidating offer up front. Plus for those of you who do launches like challenges and things like that, again where the, the opt in, like people have to sort of opt in for the launch and that's what you're going out and doing your marketing. You can have your tripwire on the thank you page there as well. Or maybe you'll create one specific to that challenge or to that summit or to whatever other live workshop or ever it is you're doing all to help make your marketing pay for yourself. It's so, so super powerful. And if you want to learn how to create both of these amazing marketing assets for your business in just five days, we show you exactly how to do that in our Funnel Fuel program. Now normally, like I said, this is normally just for our Ecourse Empire clients, but we are actually going to be running a special round of Funnel fuel very soon with some amazing discounts and bonuses, but only for people who are on a Funnel Fuel wait list. So we are opening the doors when we don't normally, but it's only for people on our special Funnel Fuel wait list. If you're on that wait list and you want to jump in for this awesome offer, it includes getting $500 off the program price. Plus the first person who when the doors open, jumps in and purchases actually wins a $500 voucher and they get the course cost back. So that means you actually get it for free. Plus you get $500 in your pocket plus you get over $2,000 of bonuses. And included in that is a 30 day free trial into our eCourse Empire program worth 299. Although personally I think it's priceless. It' favorite things on the Internet. Now the doors open for our waitlist only VIP offer 7am November 24th, that's Melbourne, Australia time which is noon November 23rd Pacific time. And the doors only open for 48 hours. And like I said, the very first person when those doors open who jumps in and buys Funnel Fuel will not only get that $500 well they get the $500 discount but they also get the price completely that they pay completely refunded and they get a $500 cash either into their PayPal account or whichever is going to work for where you are to spend on whatever you like. We kind of recommend that you spend it on your Facebook ads getting your funnel started but completely up to you. Plus I said over $200 in bonuses. Everyone gets $500 off the program price. Our amazing 30 day free trial into Ecourse Empire. All you have to do to get on the waitlist is go to hellofunnels co waitlist and there'll be a link below this episode. Get on there, set your alarm. You do not want to miss out on this. It's going to be so much fun. We're all going to nerd out. Create our, you know, our tripwires or our self liquidating office together, get them out into the world, get the ads running, get those sales happening and really, really kick off this year with a bang. I can't wait to do it with you guys. Make sure you head to HelloFunnels Co waitlist. Get on the waitlist and I'll see you there. 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.