Tripwire vs. LTO: The Funnel Terms Nobody Actually Explains

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie Chenell. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I'm going to unpack some terminology in the marketing world, specifically around low-ticket funnels. And this is a direct result of a client who was asking me a question about a tripwire, and I sort of launched into this diatribe of the difference between low-ticket offers, tripwires, what the conversion rate looks like depending on how they're positioned. And I'm going to share that all with you now. To begin, most people understand what a free offer is, right? It's a lead magnet, it's a download, it's something that you give in exchange for an email address. And this is a very common, popular way to grow an email list in the digital marketing space. When someone downloads an, a freebie of some kind, they end up on a thank you page just by the nature of the fact that you're clicking on a button to trigger that email address to go into your customer relationship manager and to trigger an email that's gonna fire with the free gift. So the natural next step is that you land on a thank you page. This thank you page is prime real estate because you know that in anticipation of the gift that they're about to get, they're going to read what is on that next page. Marketers figured this out and decided, well, wouldn't it be cool if we offered something that was, that was low ticket, low cost, and put it right on that thank you page? And the original term for that was tripwire. This idea, it's kind of a bad name, right? Isn't tripwire like people tripping on wires and causing bombs to explode? So I'm not really sure that that was the greatest name, but it's the name. And that low ticket offer, $9, $10, $12, $20, even $30, sits on the thank you page of an opt-in and tries to get your lead to become a buyer. Typically when you are running paid traffic, and we'll just talk about Meta traffic for the sake of this conversation, the, the actual Facebook campaign is optimized for leads, which means it's out there looking for people that are notorious for giving email addresses for free stuff. But that doesn't mean that these people buy. So if you are running traffic to a free offer and you put a tripwire offer on the back end, which is a low-ticket product, it's not going to convert well. But that doesn't mean the tripwire isn't working. It's just a nature of the fact that the person has got this idea of free in their head and the ads are looking for the people that are apt to put their email address in, and these are not necessarily high quality leads. If you put a tripwire on the thank you page of your opt-in and you see a 1% conversion rate, that's pretty standard. That means for every 100 leads that come through that funnel, 1 becomes a buyer. It's pretty standard. Now you might say, oh my gosh, 1% conversion is low, and it is low in other arenas, and I'm about to talk about that. In a minute, but keep in mind that that tripwire page is not a one-click purchase moment. They actually have to go get their credit card out or, you know, fill out the whole order form. And I think people call this, they misname it and they're like, well, I'm putting a one-time offer on the thank you page. I'm like, that's not a one-time offer. One-time offers are something slightly different. They actually have to make a conscious decision to go get their credit card. And that's why the conversion rate is low. Now let's take that tripwire offer. Let's say it's a $12 ebook or something. Okay. If you were to take that tripwire offer and just make it where ads run to that directly, we no longer call it a tripwire. Now we actually call it a low ticket offer. Now there are a lot of names for this. You may hear it being called a slow offer or an SLO offer. That is an ode to Russell Brunson, I believe. He was the one who coined the term self-liquidating offer, SLO. The idea being that you spend money on ads and then people pay for this offer and it liquidates your ad spend. That's where that came from. Kathy and I renamed this, uh, PLM, which is a paid lead maker. Same, same idea is that you're like getting your leads paid for and you're getting very high quality leads because they're actually customers. The more standard name is LTO or low ticket offer. Notice though that people don't call it a tripwire. It's not really a tripwire when it functions as the first page in a funnel. It's more an LTO. Now, if you are running ads directly to an LTO, you might actually find the conversion rate go up. So whereas it was 1% when it was a tripwire, as an LTO, It's now 3%. What's happening? Well, it's not that the offer changed, it's that Meta— Facebook, Instagram— when you run ads to an LTO, it's naturally looking for buyers, right? Because most of the time those ads are what we call sale campaign ads. They're not opt-in campaign ads. The downside is those types of ads are more expensive. The upside is that Facebook is now being trained to look for people who have a tendency to take their credit card out after they see an ad. And that is a different type of person than the person who gives away an email address. If you decide to have a freebie and it's working really well and you put a tripwire on the thank you page, and then only 1% of people buy, you may walk away thinking that that tripwire sucks, and you could very well be wrong. That's pretty standard. Now, if you take that tripwire and you decide, you know what, let me just run traffic to it directly. Let me turn it into an LTO, a PLM, an SLO, whatever you want to call it. And you notice the conversion rate goes up. You might be confused, but this is the, this is the reason why. Now, if you are taking a tripwire offer and you are putting it as the first page in a funnel, this is where you really need order bumps and OTOs, and that's because The cost to get someone to buy is much higher than the cost to get someone to opt in. If you are running ads to your lead magnet, you may be paying $2 a lead, right? So for every $10 you spend, you are getting 5 leads, but you're not getting any sales. If we take that tripwire and we make it the first page in the funnel and we run a sale campaign, that customer will cost you probably $30 or so, some— somewhere in that ballpark. And so you'll have to spend, you know, $150 or probably more to get 5 customers that are 10 times more valuable than leads, but they are more expensive. And so your ads are more expensive. In order to combat that, we use order bumps. Now, order bumps are those little Uh, checkboxes that you see right as you're checking out where you can add something to your order that's inexpensive, that works with the offer. And if you go to my funnel, my funnel right now is a tripwire funnel, but it's also kind of an LTO. I'll explain. But if you go to milliondollargrit.com and you opt in, that's a freebie, right? It's a free gift. On the thank you page is a tripwire. It is a $12 audiobook. If they fill that out, there is an order bump, which is that checkbox where they can get a spreadsheet that matches the auto, uh, the audiobook. You don't have to have an order bump when it's a tripwire. Of course it's nice, you can get more income, but you cannot run that as an LTO without an order bump because you will never break even. The order bump, which usually gets about 30% uptake, meaning for every 100 people that purchase purchase the LTO, you're going to get 30 people take the order bump. That's going to help pay for the ads. Now, once they check out, some funnels have an OTO, and that is the true way that you would, uh, label that next page. OTO stands for one-time offer. Some people call it upsells. That's another name. These pages do not have credit card order forms, and that's the key difference. And that's why you never want to call a tripwire page and OTO page, because a tripwire page has a full credit card form. An OTO page doesn't. An OTO page always comes after the credit card information has already been entered, and they have an option. They can say yes or they can say no. Again, if you are running an LTO, which means you are running directly from ads to a paid offer, you're probably going to get about 3% of people to buy the LTO. You're going to get 30% of those buyers to click that button and get the order bump. And then you'll probably get another 5 to 10% of those buyers to take you up on the OTO if it's well structured. And that's the yes/no button. Now, when you put that whole funnel together, we call it a paid lead maker at Funnel Gorgeous. Those funnels can break even or be profitable, which is really helpful. So you can spend a lot of money on ads, which you need to, to get those high quality buyers. You get a lot of that ad spend liquidated by sales and ideally you break even. In Unicorn Status, you actually make a tiny bit of profit, but none of this is a tripwire. Okay? A tripwire is an order form sales page that lives on the back of a free offer, and you will never really know if that offer is a good offer unless you run traffic directly to it. Because if you are only depending on the traffic that is coming after downloading a freebie, You're not getting a good indication because Facebook is not actually finding people who are apt to take their credit card out. They're just finding people who are apt to opt in. And that is the difference. So if you've ever been confused about lingo, here's a quick recap. A free offer is called a free offer. It's called a lead magnet. It's called a freebie. It's called a squeeze page. It's called an opt-in form. The page that happens after they opt in that has something for sale is a true tripwire page. This tripwire page has a credit card order form on it. It may or may not have an order bump on the credit card order form, and it may or may not have an OTO behind that order form, right? Which is that one-time offer. That tripwire is going to convert at about 1% or less sometimes, and that's kind of normal. If you take that tripwire and you decide to turn it into an LTO, and that means you're going to run traffic directly to it, you're going to spend inordinately significantly more to get people into the funnel, which means you cannot run it without an order bump and at least one OTO page. But ironically, you will find that the conversion is usually higher direct to a low-ticket offer. Hope that helps.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey. With resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.