The Real Difference Between a Tripwire and a Low Ticket Offer (Most People Get This Wrong)

Have you ever noticed that everyone uses different words for the same things? This is a presentation that goes along with my podcast episode, Million Dollar Grit, around low-ticket funnels. And the, the words that you see on the screen, you probably heard me use in conjunction with other words, and everybody has different definitions. Everyone interchanges these words. And what happens is not only are you confused about the terminology, but you are also confused about the strategy. So I want to unpack that here today. A basic low-ticket funnel works as follows. We start with something free. You can see here, a lead magnet would be, you know, like a free download, a free book. And then that thank you page, that thank you page is considered prime real estate because that is where you can offer some sort of low-ticket item. Now in a, in a free offer funnel, it's just these two pages right here. Free offer, thank you page. But if you're doing a tripwire, you actually go from here and these two become one page and it's now a tripwire. Okay. This is usually something inexpensive. Now the rest of these things over here are traditionally what happens in a LTO, low ticket offer funnel that you're running traffic to. So you can, in theory, go from free offer to tripwire to order bump to OTO, or you can go free offer to thank you page, or you can go start right here and do order bump and OTO, or you can do everything. Okay. This is why sometimes people get confused. The free offer. Most people know about this these days. It's very common. It's a lead magnet, a freebie, a download. Could also be called a squeeze page, an opt-in. And its job is to grow your email list, not to find buyers. Now, when you run ads to a free offer, Facebook is optimizing for people who give email addresses, not people who buy things. And that's why sometimes the leads can be less quality. You might hear people call lead magnets freebies. You might hear people call lead, uh, like landing pages, opt-in pages or squeeze pages. You might hear it called free download, free gift. Okay. And when you are running ads to an offer like this, It's usually a lead campaign optimized for opt-ins, not purchases. It is a cheaper type of ad to run, but a lot less buyer intent, right? So maybe you spend $2 a lead, something like that. The thank you page is step 2, and this is what happens after they fill in their email address and they're actively anticipating their gift at this moment. So they are going to read whatever is on that page. And what marketers figured out was, why not put a paid offer right there? And that moment of anticipation, highest attention, that is where the word tripwire came from. The goal was to convert a lead into a buyer at the exact moment. Okay, so the thank you page in just a basic funnel is just a thank you page and usually invites them to follow them on social media or something like that. But marketers have put tripwires behind this opt-in page because they realize that it is prime real estate. So what is a tripwire? A tripwire is just a term for a low-ticket offer, but it's actually about the placement. That is why we call it a tripwire, because it's placed on the thank you page of a free opt-in and it has a full credit card order form. So the buyer has got to consciously get their card out Fill out the form. It's not a one-click purchase, right? So if you go to Million Dollar Grit right now, milliondollargrit.com, you opt in for the book. That's free. That's the freebie. The thank you page is going to offer a private podcast. I believe it's $9 or $12, somewhere in that range. That is a tripwire. The expected conversion rate is only 1%. And I find that a lot of people, when they put tripwires on their thank you pages, they get discouraged because they're like, man, nobody's buying. But it's very normal for it to be low because the intent in that funnel is not to buy. And you're going to find something really interesting here in a minute about these low-ticket tripwires and how they function when they're not a tripwire, but they're actually the first offer somebody sees. So hang tight and I'll explain that in a minute. Don't panic if you only get 1 out of 100 people to buy. Because Facebook or Meta is finding people who are good at opting in. They're not necessarily buyers. Now, if you were to actually take that tripwire and make it the first page in a funnel where ads were going directly to it, you would be doing a purchase campaign. And Facebook finds people who are good at buying, people who take out their credit card after seeing an ad. So the very same offer that was only converting at 1% when it was on the back of a free offer, might actually convert at 3, 4, or even 5% if it's the first page in the funnel. The offer did not change, but the traffic quality did. And also the frame with which they were walking through the ad. Now, the low-ticket offer, we tend to call it a low-ticket offer when there's nothing free in front of it. So if it's a free offer to a low-ticket tripwire, we call that like a tripwire funnel or a lead funnel with a tripwire. But once the paid offer is the first page in the funnel, it becomes an LTO. And now you're going to be running purchase campaigns. You're going to be finding people with a proven tendency to buy after seeing ads. And an example with this would be if you go to aboutdarnetime.com, it's $37 right out of the gate. There's no free opt-in, and we're going to get about 3% of people to buy. But if we put that on a thank you page as a tripwire, it would probably plummet to like half a percent. The low ticket offer funnel goes by a lot of names. Okay. It's called LTO, low ticket offer, SLO, self-liquidating offer. It's pronounced slow offer, right? Russell Brunson was the one who kind of coined that. And then of course, Paid Lead Maker, PLM, that is the name we gave that funnel. And that's how we talk about it. And it starts with an offer that's less than $40 on that first page. Look at the difference between the traffic cost when you're running ads to a free offer. You're probably getting $2, $3, $4 a lead, right? You're getting with $10, 5 leads, 0 buyers, lower quality, lower intent, but more people. When you run a low-ticket offer, it's a purchase campaign. You're going to spend a lot more money. You're going to spend $150 to get 5 buyers, but it's going to be 10 times more valuable, valuable because you have higher quality and proven buyers. So the more expensive the traffic, the more revenue per transaction is required. And that's why if you are running a low-ticket offer, you absolutely need an order bump and an OTO. Otherwise, it'll get too expensive to run your ads. The order bump is something that gets added right at the point of checkout. So it's right on the order form. It is low price, complimentary to the main offer. It's added with one click. We expect about 30% of people to actually take us up on this offer. Okay. In the About Darn Time funnel, we have a $17 order bump, and that means it is helping us pay for the ads. If you are running a low-ticket tripwire, you don't usually have to have an order bump or OTO unless you want to. But if you are running it as a purchase campaign, you absolutely need it. The one-time offer, which a lot of people use that terminology when they're talking about tripwires, And it confuses people because they're like, oh, well, I have a one-time offer on the back end of my lead magnet. I'm like, that's a tripwire. A one-time offer, an OTO, is a separate page, and it is defined by the page that comes after checkout when the credit card info is already saved. The buyer only has to click yes or no. For example, in About Darn Time, once they check out, they are offered the course Speed of Write for $77, and they can click yes, add to my order, or no thank you, complete my order. We expect about 5 to 10% of people to take us up on that. The OTO pages might also be called upsells, next offers, one-click upsells, but an OTO page never has a credit card form. If it has a form, it is a tripwire page, not an OTO, and you don't want to confuse the two, the two. And this is why terminology matters. The full PLM funnel, LTO funnel, SLO funnel, slow funnel, whatever you want to call it, for About Darn Time looks like this. We have a $37 course. Let's say we have 100 visitors to the page, 3 buy. We have an order bump for $17. 30% of those buyers say, you know what, yes. And then 5 to 10% of the buyers say yes to the OTO. The goal is to break even, meaning what we spend on ads and what we make in the funnel net out to zero. It's awesome if you can make a profit. We call that unicorn status. Status. And you'll see here the math, right? So you're getting 3 buyers at $37, you're getting 1 to 3 buyers of $17, and you're getting $77 if one person says yes. So the goal here is to spend on ads, sell it, liquidate, or profit. And that is the PLM machine. But when you put a free offer in front of this, like I showed you in that first slide, you're not actually optimizing for purchases, you're optimizing for leads. So those costs are less, but you don't necessarily expect to liquidate. A lot of people put a tripwire on the back end of a lead magnet thinking it'll liquidate it, but it never does because the conversion rate is always so low. So the feature tripwires live on a thank you page after a free opt-in. An LTO is the first page in the funnel. They can be the exact same offer in the exact same price. They just have a different name because of where they are placed. You'll notice that the traffic source is often different. Facebook will optimize for different actions. The conversion rate will be different. The order bump requirement is optional on a tripwire, although it's nice to have, and it is absolutely required on an LTO. You cannot break even without it. The ad cost is lower in a tripwire than an LTO. And a real example of two types of funnels running here would be The milliondollargrit.com audiobook and free book versus the About Darn Time class that is $37. So I will put that in the show notes. You can go take a look at those offers and those funnels and see the difference. How to know if your offer is actually any good. If you put it as a tripwire first, do not judge it on tripwire traffic alone. Okay. You may call it a failure, but you might be wrong because of the traffic. Instead, take that same offer, add an order bump, and an OTO and run a purchase campaign. And if it converts at 3%, your offer is solid. Okay. Remember, 1% on a tripwire is normal. 1% on an LTO, the offer might need work. And be sure to match your campaign type to your goal. If you were doing a lead campaign, it needs to go to a free offer with a tripwire on the back. If it's a purchase campaign, you go directly to a low ticket offer funnel. Wrong campaign leads to wrong— a lot of confusion. Here's a quick reference guide you can screenshot. This is the terminology cheat sheet, so you can see all the different names that these are, right? You can see, no wonder people get confused. They all mean the same things very invariably. And then we have these over here. So I hope this has been helpful. Now you speak funnel fluently. Now you understand the difference between the traffic type, the stack, and what is required. And make sure to test before you quit. If you want to hear this full episode, you can go to milliondollargrit.com and hear me talk about it.