What is an Irresistible Offer?
When most people first think of creating an irresistible offer, the natural tendency is to think about drastically discounting your product or service. It’s probably because thats they type of marketing we are most frequently exposed to.
When you think “great deals”, what is the ONE day, out of the entire year, that comes to mind?
Yes, exactly Black Friday.
So, since discounting is how most marketing and advertising is done, it makes perfect sense that discounting is the first place our minds go.
That being said, “sale-oriented marketing” and an “irresistible offer” are not the same.
Significantly discounting your product can be one way component of an irresistible offer, but discounting alone often isn’t a way to create a true irresistible offer.
Yes, it’s true, people love saving money, but more importantly, people are looking to get the most value for their dollar.
It’s important to keep that in mind when creating an irresistible offer for your product or service.
“An irresistible offer is about making the customer feel like they are getting maximum value for their dollar.”
How to Create an Irresistible Offer
There are many different strategies and methods to creating an irresistible offer.
Your irresistible offer should communicate the value of your product or service so clearly that anyone considering to purchase believes the ROI will far surpass the investment.
You’ll know you have an irresistible offer when people say something along the lines of, “Wow, only an idiot would pass that up!”.
The most effective irresistible offers are the ones that leverage multiple strategies. This is often called stacking an offer. A simplified version of an irresistible offer is a good deal stacked on top of another good deal.
Here are a few of those strategies and methods:
- Bundling & Value-Adds
- Attention Grabbing Risk-reversal
- Discount correctly
Let’s dive into each of these topics a little deeper.
Bundle Your Products
Creating bundles of your products is a great way to increase the value of your offer and make more sales.
Remember, people are looking to get more value for their dollar. If a customer can, for example, get five products for the price of three, this can be an irresistible offer.
For example, cell phone companies like Verizon and AT&T do this with new cell phone sales. For only ~$50 more, you can get a car charger, protective phone case, and a package of three screen protectors. The phone case alone is $40, so people run the logic in their mind, and think “well, only an idiot wouldn’t take advantage of THAT deal,” and they pull their credit card.
Phone companies use the bundling concept for an up-sell, but you can use it for your core product offering as well.
Do you have multiple products or services that you can bundle?
Create a handful of offers that you believe would make your customers say to themselves (or out loud), “Wow, you’d have to be an idiot not to buy this right now!” and run them by a few of your loyal customers to get their feedback.
Create a Value-Add
Depending on what type of business you have, and goals you are wanting to achieve, there are certain financial metrics that cary more weight than others. The value-add offer model is a great way to continue to charge full price, but you sweeten your normal offer by throwing something in with the sale.
Value-adds are exactly like bundle pricing. The difference with value-adds is that your customers get a secondary product or service that increases the real, or perceived, value of the product they are purchasing, at no extra cost.
For example, if I sell toothpaste, I could throw in a tooth brush with the purchase of a full-price purchase of a tube of toothpaste. The toothbrush makes the toothpaste more valuable.
If you can get creative, there are quite a few ways to add value without having to spend a lot of money or cut into your profit margins.
Brendon Burchard’s latest book launch for his new book The Motivation Manifesto debuted at #1 Barnes & Noble and spent multiple consecutive weeks on the NY Times Bestsellers list, largely because he created a value-add offer with the sale of his book. When you purchased a copy of The Motivation Manifesto, you also received access to a 12-week online training program, that was based on the concepts in the book and valued at $297, for free!
This is a perfect example of adding substantial value without affecting your profit margins because the cost of delivering the online course is virtually the same whether he gives the course away to 100 people or 100,000 people.
What is something that you can throw in with your product to increase the value of a sale without destroying your profit margins?
Risk-Reversal
The goal with a risk-reversal is to take as much risk as possible off of the customer’s shoulders. When you reduce risk, you remove friction from the buying process, and increase the number of sales you make.
There are actually several ways that you can take away the majority, if not all the risk so reassure people that they have the opportunity to confirm that their purchase was a quality decision.
Money-Back Guarantee
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re familiar with money-back guarantees. The key here is to make your money-back guarantee stand out.
Instead of giving the typical 30-day money-back guarantee. Give your customers a 365-day money-back guarantee.
If you have rock-solid confidence in your product or service, give a 90-day double your money-back guarantee. If a customer isn’t satisfied with their purchase you’ll give them double the money they paid.
Wow, talk about a risk reversal!
Results In Advance
This concept is usually based on the honor system.
“Pay a percentage now and send us the rest if you get results we promise.”
I’ve seen Ryan Deiss implement this concept with his live event, Traffic & Conversion summit. The total price of a ticket to the conference is $1,400 but you only have to pay $700 in order to attend and if you don’t make at least $5,000 within 90 days of the event with what you learn at the event, you don’t have to pay the remaining $700.
I’ve also seen some internet marketers use this concept to enroll students into their high-end coaching programs. For example: A year-long program has a price tag of $15k but you only have to pay $10k up front. If you don’t get the results you want, you don’t have to pay the difference.
Warranty
This is a pretty common concept, but again, make your warranty stand out.
Put a rock solid warranty on your product to remove any doubt in a customer’s mind that they are purchasing a quality product. Warranty’s typically only make sense for physical products but they can also be applied to software products too.
“Our products have a lifetime warranty. If anything breaks… we’ll fix it or send you a new one for free.”
Payment Plans
Payment plans are a great way to reduce risk. I hesitated to include this here because it’s not really a reversal of risk, but it does have an impact on the level of risk a consumer has to endure.
Payment plans, allow your customer to get all or most of the benefits of your product today while minimizing the immediate financial risk.
This is a very effective marketing tactic.
Discount your products or services – correctly
While discounting is the go-to when you think of a sales promotion, it’s not the only option and often isn’t the best option, either.
In the first chapter of the book Influence, Robert Cialdini tells a story of a small business owner who wrote a note to his manager to cut the price of their product in half because it wasn’t selling. The manager misread the note and ended up doubling the price instead and the product flew off the shelves.
The principle at play here is perceived value.
People have a value association with the price of a product, therefore, discounting your product may not generate enough sales volume to offset loss in profit from selling your product at full price.
Here are some concepts that make discounting more powerful.
- Exclusivity
- Urgency
- Loss Leader
Below I’ll share some ways that you can incorporate those concepts into your irresistible offer.
Segmented offers
A great way to create exclusivity is to create segmented offers.
You can segment your offers by channel. For example, you could have a specific offer just for Facebook.
Or you can segment your offers to your database based on purchase history.
If you have an advanced CRM & email marketing tool like Infusionsoft, this should be a super easy concept to implement.
If you’re using a basic email marketing tool like iContact, Aweber, Constant Contact or Mailchimp, it may be a little more difficult.
Put simply, you’d create an amazing offer that is only available to people who have purchased your most expensive product or service and market that offer only to those people. This is powerful because you can tailor your messaging to that specific group and they feel like they are apart of the family.
You can also create different offers for people who have purchased any of your product vs. people who are just subscribers to your newsletter.
Early Bird Discount
The epitome of an early bird discount is the Black Friday “door buster”. People start to line up hours, even days in advance to be one of the first 100 people to get a flat screen TV for $300.
Although it’s fun to joke about people going crazy for more material things the day after Thanksgiving, their behavior goes to show that these types of promotions are very effective because the offer has very strong exclusivity and urgency components. It’s exclusive because only 100 people will get that price, and it’s urgent because it’s only available to the first 100 people.
According to Twitter, 62 percent of shoppers Tweet about purchases they’ve made. (Link to source)
Rewarding the early customers with an added bonus, on top of the offer they are already expecting, is a great way to jumpstart and maximize the word-of-mouth marketing that will evolve from your irresistible offer.
Limited-Time Offer
A discount becomes a limited-time offer when you put a deadline on it.
Instead of just marking down your product and putting it on sale, create a limited-time offer.
Give Your Product Away For Free
Giving your product away for free, or a free trial period only makes sense if you know that your average customer will come back multiple times per month or per year.
This is what’s called a loss leader.
“Get the first one free”
You get them to try your product for free because you know that a certain percentage will come back and buy your products or services.
Wrapping up
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, your irresistible offer will be most effective when you take several of these concepts and stack them into a single offer.
