Creating Tripwires to Make Money

In one of my other blogs, we have spoken at length about and what they can do for your business. In this post, I want to dive into tripwires a little deeper and talk about creating tripwires to make money!
How do we start converting leads?
How do we start converting those leads that we’ve got into customers so that we can start making money from our efforts with our online marketing as well?
So, a typical online funnel is going to offer a freebie, and that’s our lead magnet. Our lead magnet is something obviously that we’re giving away for free. And then we’re going to move into what we call a tripwire.
Now, a tripwire is a term that’s been around for a while. The concept has been around for a very long time. The term tripwire in the online marketing world isn’t that old. It’s probably about five or six years old. But essentially, a tripwire is a precursor to your main offer.
[clickToTweet tweet=”A tripwire is an irresistible, low-ticket offer that exists for one reason only…to convert prospects into BUYERS!” quote=”According to Digital Marketer, a tripwire is an irresistible, super-low-ticket offer that exists for one reason and one reason only…to convert prospects into BUYERS!”]
Creating Tripwires to Make Money!
How do we get them to dip into our pocket?
Sometimes people get suspicious with a Free offer. They ask questions like, “What’s the catch?”, “Why am I getting this thing for free?“, What do they want from me anyway?” Whereas, a low-cost offer in this case, usually converts better because it alleviates that suspicion of “What’s in it for me.”
Okay, if I am not paying any money for this service, this offer may be too good to be true. So once somebody puts their hand into their pocket, they then become a buyer from a lead, and they can start to justify their purchase with you. It emotionally breaks down that barrier so that when you offer something next time, they’re not feeling as guilty about spending more money with you.
It’s a psychological step that if someone’s been able to dig into their wallet for even just $5, it’s much more likely that they’ll spend money with you down the track because they have made a commitment in the first place. It doesn’t have to be a lot, it just has to be something that breaks that ‘freebie’ barrier where they’ve actually committed to purchasing something for you.
So, you’ll find that once you’ve been able to sell them a little thing, it’s a lot easier to sell them more little things or some bigger things as well. So, that’s why we call it a tripwire. It’s the part that starts the whole journey of the buying process once they’ve actually committed to buying something from you.
Is a tripwire offer new?
If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember these from the old days. You used to be able to go and buy for $1, a whole month worth of tapes or CDs. I lived in Australia and we had those as well. Netflix did something like this when they first started up. But, if you remember, it was that you pay $1 and you get, in the mail, a whole series of CDs or records. This was one of the original first tripwires that were around. And then book clubs came along and then all these other services too.
So, the concept of the tripwire is not new, it’s been around a while. It’s a matter of getting a lead to make that first initial purchase, and then from there, they subscribe to a monthly fee to get their latest records or their latest tapes.
Creating a tripwire.
There are five points that you need to consider when creating tripwires to make money. It’s just a matter of getting your mind around it and what you can do to create your own tripwire.
1. Start with a lead magnet.
Obviously we’ve talked about lead magnets. But, the beginning of your tripwire really starts with a lead magnet because a lead magnet is going to help you segment your list. Now, I know a few of you have got different avatars for different clients that you could service.
Lets look at Insurance as an example. You’ve got people that are looking for insurance for motor vehicles. You could have people looking for health insurance, you could have house insurance, all sorts of different types of insurance. Each person is a different client. Each avatar has a different need. And when you’re creating tripwires, you’re trying to create a way to segment your list and put these avatars in their own category
Now, you may have a list already. I know I’ve got a couple clients that have thousands of people in their list, but they’re in just one list. Having people in just one list makes it very hard to sell to people, especially when you want to try and target specific messages to those people or personalize the message.
So, if you can create tripwires or lead magnets that segment your list, then you can start selling offers that are actually relevant to that particular part of the audience.
2. Offer a Relevant Lead Magnet
When creating a tripwire, you don’t want to offer something that is not relevant to your lead magnet. So, if you’ve got a lead magnet that is a cheat sheet on how to do ABC, your tripwire should be something relevant to what you just offered in the lead magnet. Since you’re going to be selling this tripwire, it is usually positioned on the thank you page.
Thinking about this in a logical fashion; someone will go to your website, they’re going to download a cheat sheet for ABC. On the thank you page when you say, “Here is your cheat sheet for ABC”, it’s at that point there, that you want to offer the tripwire., Its the next logical step in your sales funnel for them to take with you, which is your tripwire.
Don’t want to necessarily wait for them to come back to your website later or you don’t want them to be waiting for your email a couple of days later because by then, the heat’s gone out of the whole purchasing equation and they’ve probably forgotten what it is they’re getting from you in the first place. 🙂
Strike while the iron’s hot! You want to really get in there and say, “Hey, while you’re here, you’ve just got my lead magnet, now why don’t you spend $5 or $6, or whatever the price is, to buy the next logical step.”
The next logical step needs to be relevant to what they just purchased.
I want you to understand that.
I don’t want you to offer something that’s completely irrelevant to what they’ve just downloaded because that doesn’t make sense.
[clickToTweet tweet=”A confused mind never buys – The Social Media Bloke” quote=”A confused mind never buys – The Social Media Bloke”].
What is the price point of a tripwire?
I’ve seen them as low as a dollar. Sometimes you’ll see a dollar trial. But I’ve seen them as low as $5 up to $49. There’s no real rule about it. It’s just relevant to the price point of your core offer, which is your big ticket or your main ticket item.
So, if you’ve got a core offer of, maybe you’re offering a membership for $100 a month, then maybe a $5 trial or $1 trial might be relevant. But if your core offer is, “my live event for $3,000”, then $45 or $49 may be a low point, or low barrier to entry for that particular tripwire.
The other strategy is that you can also create several different tripwires for different market segments. Now in your market segments, you may have different needs for different customers. A tripwire may be relevant to only one part of your market segment, it may not be relevant to everybody that’s in your segment.
3. Sell to your Current List
It is a great idea to introduce your tripwire to prospects on your list. If you’ve got an active list already and it’s not segmented, then you may want to send out two to three emails about a specific offer that you’ve got.
Give it a limited time and say, “for the next seven days, this is what I’m offering”. Now, not everyone from your list is going to buy this from you, which is cool, because you’re trying to segment your list. So, if you’ve got a large list and you send out these emails, you’ll have a number of people who purchase that particular tripwire product . And from there you can actually start to segment your list.
That will give you more personalization so that when you’re trying to sell something later, you know exactly who you’re speaking to, what part of the market you’re speaking to because you’ve got that segment on your list.
Not everyone will buy from the initial email but that’s okay. That’s what you want. You want to find out what is it that they like and what is it that they’re into and what they’re not into.
4.Introduce buyers to your core product
Every tripwire is designed to move them along the sales path. So, now they’ve purchased something through the tripwire. Now, we want them to consider the core offer, because you’re not going to make money on your tripwire. Very rarely you’ll make money on your tripwire. If at best you can break even, then you’re doing really well.
But what you’ve done is you’ve broken down that psychology and now you’re ready to move into the offer. I like to offer 3 key options at this point; “Here’s what I’ve got, here’s what you need, here’s why you need it.” You don’t necessarily need to do it that particular day that they bought the tripwire, but not too far past that day you want to be offering your core offer.
Okay, so there’s that core offer there. But this is why the tripwire’s great. Because it introduces people to your core offer easily in a nice logical format.
5.Rinse and Repeat
As we have covered, you can run different tripwires at the same time. Creating tripwires to make money can take on a few forms – You can run them sequentially, you can run them concurrently, it doesn’t matter. But it’s possible to be running a number of them all at the same time so that you can start to find out who is on your list or who are the people that are buying your products and how do you get to market them down the track.
And then, always be testing. I’ve seen tripwires that I thought were going to be a hit and I spent a lot of time making this awesome tripwire and it didn’t work. It was poo and it was just not worth it.
But I spent a lot of effort trying to make that happen.
And I didn’t test it.
I probably wasted three or four months just thinking it was going to be the right thing. In actual fact, I should’ve tested it. I should’ve gone and done some dummy tests for some parts of my audience and seen if it was going to be something they were going to be into. And if it isn’t, don’t waste your time building or creating it.
So, always be testing your tripwires to make sure that they are worth your time.
Easy ways to Create a Tripwire
You may want to take your main core offer, or whatever your large ticket item is, the one that you want to make money with, and basically break off a little piece. If you had a Book as the core offer ( Not the best choice) but in this case, you may break off a chapter and give the chapter as part of that tripwire.
Or let’s let’s say you’ve got your own course. It’s a coaching program over a period of however many months, maybe one of your key modules is your tripwire to get them into that list of yours.
Maybe it’s another product that your offering.
Maybe it’s a physical product that your core offering and you can choose something that you can give them on a cheap option to get into that particular list.
I would say to just get creative with what you want to offer and always test to see if its a fit for your audience.
So to recap, a Tripwire is giving a customer the ability to make a small purchase with you to test the waters and see if they like you more, before they make a bigger purchase. It is offered immediately or shortly after giving you their email address for your lead magnet.
A tripwire “starts” the buyer/seller relationship, and is intended to raise the chances of that customer purchasing your core offer.
Have you ever used a tripwire before? What were the results?
Let me know in the comments below.