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Steven Werley

How To Develop Effective Tripwires In Your Sales Funnels

May 10, 2017Business & Marketing

How To Develop Effective Tripwires In Your Sales Funnels

by May 10, 2017Business & Marketing

Every piece of a sales funnel is important, but without an effective tripwire, you might as well throw in the towel. If you’re sitting here asking, “What the heck is a tripwire?!” you came to the right article.

What is a tripwire?

A tripwire is a nifty little low-cost item to turn someone who has an interest in your business into a customer. Now, it’s certainly more complicated than that, but maybe it’s easier to answer what a tripwire isn’t.

A tripwire IS NOT your core offer nor a free giveaway. A tripwire IS something related directly to your core product, which should mean it’s related to your lead magnet as well, assuming you have one.

I want to reiterate the whole point of a tripwire is to generate a customer. The idea is that someone makes a small purchase (around the $10 mark) without any pressure. Once they’re already your customer, you can start hitting them with your core offer.

Do I need a tripwire?

This is a fun question, and it gets asked more than one might think. Short answer, yes.

If you want to have an effective salesĀ funnel that is executing for maximum ROI a tripwire is 100% necessary. If you’re thinking, “Why would I bother, can’t I just sell them my core offer?” Not if you want to make money.

Very few people look for a product and purchase it on the spot after looking at multiple products from various companies. We’re talking <1% of all buyers. Therefore you need to cater to the ones that can bring you in consistent money. Also, if you simply rely on people looking to buy your product you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to people that don’t know they need it.

You need to warm up your audience. Yes, you can do this with a lead magnet, but that’s not enough for someone to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars with you. Customers love being loyal and being fans. They’re looking for the brands they love, not the ones that just fills a little hole in their heart. Providing significant value at an inexpensive rate is a huge opportunity to do this. Provide as much value as possible and over deliver on everything.

What the heck should my tripwire be?

The only person that can answer this is someone who works in your business. You can sub-contract the work out so a professional can learn about your business and help develop a successful funnel. Chances are though, it’s staring you in the face.

First, you need to understand everything about your core offer. Since a tripwire is something less, you can give customers a taste of your core offer. Don’t mistake this for giving them an incomplete product. If you provide customers with just a piece of your core offer it’s going to upset them because they’re going to realize they paid for something they didn’t get.

When I say give them a taste, maybe if you’re a personal trainer and your lead magnet (free offer to collect an email) is a “10 Days to Better Bicep” workout. Now we know your goal is to get someone in the door. What you can do is have your tripwire be a $10 one-hour personal training session. They get their feet wet and you can see if they are interested in getting continual personal training from you from there on out.

Another tripwire could be a 12-week full body lifting plan to build on your lead magnet. You want to give someone more of the same or something that compliments your lead magnet. Then, saying they’re committed, when they’re done working out those 12 weeks they should feel successful, but also have their itch start to come back because they want more. This will lead them to the doors.

Of course, you do this by retargeting them with ads and setting up some email sequences, but it’s the ultimate goal.

Connect The Pieces

Once you have your tripwire(s) developed it’s time to implement it into your funnel. First, you have to decide whether this is a realistic offer to make directly after someone opts into your list. If so, do it, and send an email sequence. A gain logic fear (GLF) sequence is the most popular. If not send over the sequence to warm them up to the offer.

You might be asking why it might not make sense to offer the tripwire right after opting in. In my experience, I prefer to offer it in almost every situation except if someone opts into your list to do a challenge. Generally, the value of the challenge will lead to a tripwire and core offer immediately. However, if you do a challenge, and let’s say you’re offering a running course – if you provide logs that help the user calculate what pace they should run and what not, offer it. If it’s a direct help to the lead magnet always offer it right away. A lot of tripwire purchases can be impulse decisions and if someone just opted into your list they may just go, “Oh what the heck, it’s just $7.”

Then you have the option to connect the tripwire to your core offer immediately. It really depends on your tripwire product and core offer product. Try and make a logical decision, but don’t be afraid to perform A/B tests. You should always challenge your logic. It will help your funnels be more successful once you move past the testing phase and into the money making stage.

Hope this helps develop and utilize tripwires effectively in your funnels. If you found it helpful give it a share! You might help someone else along the way.

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