Reason #1 Most Opt-In/Sample/Trial Offers Suck: Zero thought put towards a strategy for evolving prospects into customers

Nobody wants to hear this… but MATH… not MONEY… makes the business world go round.

There are a whole lot of businesses out there with a fuck load of gross income… with no net to be found anywhere.

Why?

Shit math i.e. Customer Value Optimization.

Customer Value Optimization (C.V.O.) is different than Conversion Rate Optimization (C.R.O.).

Most people are primarily focused on increasing the conversion rates of individual elements of their marketing (sales pages, opt in pages, webinar forms, etc.).

C.V.O. is not only focused on increasing conversions but it also focused on increasing the value of each of the customers who convert as the result of your efforts.

You want the Customer Value to be as high as possible because when it is, not only are making more money from them over longer periods of time… but when you’re making more money, it becomes way easier to keep filling the pipeline with more high value customers because you’re able to strategically spend MORE than all your competitors to get them.

This makes you difficult to compete with.

There’s a law of marketing that says, “The person who can and will intelligently spend THE MOST MONEY to get a customer – wins!”

An example of making yourself hard to beat is when you can sell something for the same prices as your competitors, for example, a $100 dollar product… AND spend $100 dollars to get that customer because your funnel is set up to predictably convert another $100 dollar sale to them in the near future.

If your competitor is limited to spending far less than $100 dollars, uses lame strategies to get customers because they’re ignoring C.V.O. and they are irresponsible with the money they do bring in… they will be less visible in the market than you are.

The Five Elements of Customer Value Optimization

We’re only going to going into detail about #1 on this list but I wanted to give you some perspective on what the five elements are to give you the big picture.

1. Your Lead Magnet

Your Lead Magnet is nothing more than the ethical bribe that get your perfect prospect to agree to trade their time and contact information for some specific, actionable resource they can use to get them one step closer (a measurable result) to what they desire.

When done right, this simultaneously serves the dual purpose of establishing you as an authority on this topic in your perfect prospect’s eyes.

Fluff, coupons, a trial nobody seriously benefits from, or a straight-up sales pitch don’t accomplish this.

This is the highest leverage point in your funnel so you don’t do yourself any favors by thinking you can cheat just because it’s free.

2. Your Introductory Offer

The goal of your introductory offer is to convert your perfect prospects into customers as quickly as possible, as cheaply for the customer as possible.

This was the whole point of Columbia House Music Club’s incredible converting “Buy 12 CDs for only 1 Cent” offers that reigned supreme for YEARS.

There are marketers out there who make it a goal is to at least get their prospect to give them $1 dollar to get their lead magnet.

I can remember when Perry Marshall, a very smart marketer, was offering a book for only 1 cent.

Why bother with trying to get someone to give you this little bit of money that does nothing to offset the cost of what you’re delivering?

I don’t care how cheap the ink, paper, glue, and graphic design is… even at the lowest quality, all of the above plus delivery has to cost more than 1 cent.

He made this offer because he knows an object in motion tends to stay in motion and it has proven true that when a prospect takes their wallet out and becomes a customer – for any amount of money – they tend to keep spending money.

When selling physical products, sometimes the introductory offer is you only asking the person to pay shipping and handling.

The reason this kind of offer has worked so well forever is because it’s obvious to the prospect you’re losing money by giving them the product for free which makes it’s easy for them to be okay with just paying to have it sent to them.

This kind of proposition is all about lowering the barrier of resistance so that you can fast forward the relationship and get this person to go from just spectating on the prospect side of the fence… to being a customer who now has skin in the game.

If you want to quickly open your prospects minds to the idea of giving you the kind of money that keeps you in the black, you want to look for a common-sense way to test offers like this.

Why?

Because your goal should be to NEVER make serious offers of your real products to cold prospects. You want to be making sales presentations to CUSTOMERS.

And preferably, you want to be making your first real offer to them five minutes after they’ve bought an introductory offer from you.

THIS IS THE PLACE TO OVER-DELIVER!!!

Do NOT cheap out here!

Groupon is the PERFECT example of an awesome introductory offer NOT capitalized on by some businesses.

Groupon fits into this category because you have to spend money on the offer to even have access to the discount offer.

This is a huge differentiation from the people getting free discount coupons in the mail in a Val-Pak envelope.

The Groupon buyer is intensely motivated to visit your business because they already spent the money to get the discount whereas the person who gets a coupon for free in the mail has no negative repercussions if they don’t use the coupon you sent them.

If you’ve ever used Groupon, there’s a chance you’ve had an experience where you’ve gone to redeem it and had the business you bought it for try to weasel out of it when you went to redeem it or… had the employees deliver half-assed effort just because you’re using a Groupon.

Why would hourly employees, who have no stake in the business, treat Groupon customers different than “REAL” customers?

Because behind closed doors, there are narrow-minded owners and managers who label anyone using coupons as being “mooches” or “cheap skates” looking to “take advantage” of the company.

As a general rule, we all love free shit… but there is a social stigma to ASKING FOR IT.

Especially if there is someone present who we’re trying to impress.

So a guy goes with his girlfriend to a restaurant for her birthday. He will happily accept a free dessert offered when the waiter finds out you’re celebrating…

…but two weeks later this same guy wouldn’t be caught dead telling the waiter he has a coupon for a free dessert when eating at the same restaurant.

Instead he orders the dessert and looks at paying the full $12 dollars as a badge of honor. (Often times this same “cool” guy has all his credit cards maxed out and struggles to make the min payments)

It’s this “coupon stigma” that leads owners/managers to sneer at all the smart people who love to spend extravagantly… but who like the idea of hedging their bet on a brand-new business they’ve never tried before with Groupons.

You also can’t ignore the reality that most business owners over estimate how awesome they are.

They fall into the 80% percentile with an “okay” or “poor” service/product but insist on operating with the delusion they’re in the top 20%.

When you pair this with the fact that most business owners suck at marketing you have a recipe for failure.

Dumb business owners feel like they should never have to stoop to the lowly act of discounting/free samples/trial offers.

They link discounting or giving anything significant away for free with admitting to the world that their offerings are inferior and that the only way they can get traffic is to give away their stuff for pennies on the dollar.

This loser mentality negatively impacts their C.V.O. business math so naturally damn near every discount offer they begrudgingly put out there COSTS them money.

So even if a Groupon offer floods them with takers, they have no proven mechanism in place that converts all these first-time customers into raving fans.

Their mechanism is to cross their fingers and pray that people come back.

It doesn’t take long for them to only see the money they’re losing on the first transaction.

When an owner stays alive by the skin of their teeth for years due to their marketing ineptitude, out of both desperation and pettiness, they become bitter towards anyone who is not a lay down life-time regular.

If a customer doesn’t give it up on the first date, they’re not worth the hassle.

These short-sighted business owners are idiots because instead of over-delivering and winning over customers who can be turned into multi-buyers… they’re pissing people off by treating them as lesser quality individuals because they’re not paying FULL price.

Naturally, this “fuck them freebie seekers” prejudice carries over to all businesses.

DO NOT BE THIS PERSON!!!

You want your perfect prospects to be absolutely floored with delight about what you gave them in return for trusting you with their attention.

You want them to know that this trade off is undeniably weighed in their favor. They should ALWAYS feel like they’re getting the better end of this deal.

You want them imagining all the awesome things that can happen for them when they make the decision to consistently give you serious money.

3. Your Core Offer

This is the ultimate thing you’re trying to sell and it is often the only thing a business has to sell.

Most people spend 90% of their time, trying to optimize their core offer.

And since the quality of what you present in your core offer is 40% responsible for making a sale, it is indeed vitally important.

However, think about how much better it would be to have DOUBLE the number of people looking at this offer.

Better than this… to not just have cold prospects seeing the offer but to instead have CUSTOMERS looking it as the result of optimizing your lead magnet and setting up the small transaction that converts prospects into customers easily.

Marvelous cold offers presented to cold traffic convert at around 2-5%. Your core offer presented AFTER you’ve turned someone into a customer can convert at 20-50%.

When you’re dealing with someone who has already agreed that they trust you with their credit card information, even if it was only a penny, you’re dealing with a much higher quality of lead.

4. Your Profit Maximization

People who are buying multiple times are always better than people who only buy once.

Yet most businesses have no cross sells and upsells.

They only have one core offer they make.

Successful businesses offer something on the backend that allows them to increase the immediate value of the customer.

If that wasn’t enough of a benefit, this purchase brings them further along the path to getting their outcome which only serves to enhance the possibility of them getting addicted to giving you money.

5. Your Return Path

This is the process of getting your customers to come back more often.

This is also the process of turning unconverted leads into customers.

Most businesses only have one or two of these five elements working in their favor. Most people have something in place to get leads and an offer to make to those leads.

Those are only two of the five components you need in order to have a successful business.

You want to use these five elements as a check list that you run all of your marketing campaigns against . . .

What is the quality of my lead magnet?

What is the quality of my introductory offer?

What is the quality of my core offer?

What is the quality of my profit maximizer?

What is the quality of my return path?

You want to gauge whether you have all of these in place… how they’re performing now… and what needs to change.

If you don’t have all of these in place, Step 1 is getting them in place.

If you aren’t measuring them, step 2 is to start measuring them.

You can use Google Analytics for some of your math (fine for the majority of businesses), and something like Kissmetrics, Mix Panel, and Woopra for high volume sales in launches because they let you see stats in real time.

For split testing you can use Optimizely (harder to use for beginners) or Visual Website Optimizer.

Reason #2 Most Opt-In/Sample/Trial Offers Suck: Zero appreciation for the fact that the difference between a “Free Sample/Trial” and a “Meaningful Free Win” is vast.

Your Lead Magnet can become something incredible if you will get the MATH in your business working in your favor.

A great indicator that a business’s math is bad is when their “free sample/trial” lead magnet seems worthless.

We show up to the market in one of two ways…

Little Dick/Tits Energy: I’m scared that you’re gonna laugh and run away when I show you mine

Big Dick/Tits Energy: I’ve got more than enough to satisfy you so I can be laid back and generous

Let me first cover some of the fundamentals of what a lead magnet SHOULD look like.

A well-crafted lead magnet consists of a hunk of value that offers a solution to a specific problem for a specific market within the context of an overarching problem in exchange for a prospect’s contact information…

Example: Your Complimentary Guide Reveals How Legendary Lesbian Lovers Enlighten World Renown Sex Researchers With Their 7 Common Sense Secrets For Mastering The Clitoris.

In the overall scheme of becoming a worshipful lover, pleasing your lover’s clit with your tongue/hands/toys is but ONE of the many acts you wish to be adept at.

But this is an alluring enough topic that it can stand alone and when acted upon, have the perfect prospect feeling like they accomplished something if you show them what not to do and what to do in this area.

And when you’ve sufficiently demonstrated that you know your stuff, they’ll be wide open to hearing everything else you have to say about giving your lover the kind of sex that keeps them addicted to your touch.

If you teach everything under the sun in regards to how to increase the frequency, quality, and variety of orgasms… how does it hurt you to completely give away the store on this one topic?

It doesn’t if you are the real deal and you get the math of your business tuned to the point where you can show up with Big Dick/Big Tits Energy.

Now, the biggest mistake you can make when crafting a lead magnet is to make it TOO GENERAL AND BROAD SWEEPING.

Look at all the examples of vague language in the offer above versus specific language…

“Tips”

VS.

Step-By-Step Action Plans

==========

“Bodacious Life, Love and Sex”

VS.

Insights Into The 48 Laws of Cultivating a Sex Life That Keeps Your Pussy Glistening and Your Face/Everyday Aura Radiantly Glowing

==========

“receive my video”

VS.

Receive Module 4 of my “Practical Steps For Living Everyday With The Energy of A Worshipped and Well-Fucked Woman” Seminar

==========

“How to Spice Up Your Love Life, Even When You Don’t Have One”

VS.

15 Baby Steps For Easing Yourself Into Your Very First Experience With Your Very Own Taboo Fantasy Guaranteed To Deliciously Electrify Pleasure Points In Your Body You’ve Never Felt Before

Specificity is ALWAYS more desirable than generality.

Here’s the next thing you must realize…

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

One of the smartest places to start with your lead magnet is to answer the number one question they have about the topic and answer it with one-page cheat sheet.

Believe it or not, this can be BETTER than putting together a DDD-sized report on the topic.

Why?

Because if your conversion depends on people actually reading an 80-page report… you’re dramatically lowering the odds of winning them over.

You’ve got to remember that people don’t even read the books, use the learning apps, or watch the videos of courses they pay hard cash for.

Embracing this reality allows you be tits-up proud of something on the smaller side.

But as it goes with any marketing related, you can test both options and prove to yourself what your market favors.

That's all for today we'll meet again tommorow and discuss the How To Enhance The Desirability of Your Trial Offer in the next blog.

Till then stay awesome.