So you’re probably wondering what a ‘Tripwire’ is and how does it work?
A tripwire is a low priced offer that will be much easier to sell to customers than your main product, then having the opportunity to up-sell them once they’re in your sales funnel. The idea is that once the customers have bought from you once and they have seen how valuable only a fragment of your offer is, they would be much more inclined to buy your main, more expensive product.
Not many people would be willing to spend a lot of money to buy from someone they don’t know, or if they’re unsure about the product or service quality.
You are basically using tripwire as a form of indoctrination; you’re giving a lot of value for a small compensation and thus building a sort of trust between your customer and your products/business.
Many of these tripwires are quite cheap and don’t bring any significant profit to the business. But bringing direct profit is not their purpose. The purpose is to find new customers that would be interested in buying your main product, the one that actually brings in the money.
This brings us to one of the main characteristics of tripwires, and that’s their price. The main idea is that it should be only a fraction of the cost of your main product or service. For that reason, tripwires usually cost $7, $20 or $37. There are instances when the price of the tripwire can be significantly higher, but those are special cases when you have a really high-ticket offer.
Another important thing about tripwires is context. I mentioned it a few times already in previous posts, but it’s one of the essential things when running a well thought out business. You have to place your offers and all of your business operations into context. When I say context for tripwires, what I mean is that you have to offer something that highly pertains to the main offer itself.
For example, if you have this amazing weight loss program, but you decide to offer a tripwire that caters to the needs of people who want to get back into shape or gain some muscles, you’re definitely making a mistake. Just think about it, a person who wants more definition wants to find out how they can gain the muscle mass, and in your main offer, you’re offering them a way to lose weight. That’s not what they signed up for. It would be a miracle if people who bought your tripwire offer would take you up on the up-sell and buy your main product.
So, now that we’ve covered the main tripwire features, how can you, as a business owner, create one?
Well, it all depends on the products and the services that you offer.
If we take the previously mentioned weight loss program that spans over the course of a couple of months, there are a couple of things that you could do.
First, you could write a book and sell it in the form of a hard copy. In this book, you try to give them as much useful information as possible, but you try to be as specific as possible too. For example, you concentrate on the dietary aspect of losing weight, but you tell them that it’s extremely important for them to work out if they want to achieve amazing results.
With this book, you’re showing them how it could all be for them; you’re showing them how they could achieve all this. You’re also giving them a reason, some proof that they should trust your skills. Also, you’ve given them a lot of information and the steps that they can follow on their own. Now, you can up-sell them to your more expensive program and start earning money.
The second option for a tripwire, if you have a weight loss or fitness program in mind, is to offer a free two-week trial, or a one-month trial, depending on the duration of your program. This option right here is a combination of a tripwire offer and the main offer because you’re actually offering a chance for people to test and try out the main offer for one month before deciding if they want to continue with it.
Strategically, the best way to handle a trial offer is to ask for their credit card information upfront, and only charge this small price for the trial period. However, you need to make it clear to them that they will be paying in full if they don’t cancel the trial before the month is up. This way, the ones that want to stay in the program are all set, and you are asking only those who would like to leave the program to take some sort of action. So, instead of asking them to opt in, you’re asking them to opt out if they’re not interested.
And trust me, when they start seeing the results, they won’t be so quick to leave the program.
The third tripwire option if you have a really high-ticket fitness or weight loss program is to offer a session or two for $97, for example. And even though this price sounds like a lot; you remember when I said that the tripwire price should be only a fraction of what the main product or service costs. Well, if your main product is worth $1,000 or $5,000, then those $97 for a tripwire are really not a big deal.
You could also create a couple of training videos that would target a specific body area that could act as a teaser for the main program. For instance, your tripwire topic would be “How To Get Rid Of Persistent Belly Fat With 30-Minute Workouts.”
On the other hand, you can have multiple tripwires if necessary. Nothing is stopping you from offering both a hard copy book and a trial offer as a tripwire. The book could be your primary tripwire, so to say, and you would offer trial offers now and then. Not only because you don’t want to lose money, but because you want to create scarcity, to spur people into action to take you up on that offer.
Tripwires are not a recent development, they’ve been around in the world of marketing for a very long time, but the notion of offering tripwires was greatly popularized with the advent of the internet, and I can rightly say that it has since changed the rules of the game.
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