What is Tripwire Marketing?

Tripwire marketing involves segmenting your leads based on interest and selling them a low-priced entry level item before buying into your main item or service and then further upselling them from there.

Confused? Let me break it down for you. The process revolves around the tripwire offer itself. The tripwire offer is a low-cost, painless offer that is easy for your prospect to buy into. So instead of asking someone to buy, for example, your monthly fitness subscription service for £30 per month, you would first offer them your complete subscription service for 30 days for just £1.

This is not only something painless for them to purchase, but teases them to what you offer as a full package.

The idea is to find your core offer to your customer; this is the ideal bread and butter sale for your company. If you were a website designer this would be a full website build, a massage therapist would be a massage, pool cleaning company would be pool clean.

Once your core offer is in place you need to break it down into its simplest form as something that can be offered at a rock bottom price yet still provides a prospect with value that’s relevant to their needs.

For the website designer it might be a logo design. Massage therapist might be a lotion and DVD pack. The pool cleaning company might offer a pool check.

"why not offer a free product first, isn't that better?"

The answer is no. Free does not mean better. A lot of tests find that low cost offers actually convert to full sales far better than free offerings. Free offerings should always be left as the lead magnet (see April edition). People tend to be suspicious of free offers now; we all know there’s a catch. But with a low-cost offer, we alleviate that suspicion.

"so how do I use this with Infusionsoft?"

It’s simple; I’ll take you through it. First you need a lead magnet – this is worthwhile for anything free you can offer. Use something valuable to the customers you are targeting, for example try offering a free swimming pool health guide.

Set your traffic to come to a squeeze page on your website that allows the prospect to enter their details into an Infusionsoft web form to receive their free health guide.

Now you have their details it’s time to start the nurture process in Infusionsoft’s Campaign Builder. Those who have attended the Lifecycle Marketing course should know all about this. Don’t go straight in with your tripwire offer, nurture your prospect on what you do and the value you offer with a few emails first.

Now it’s time to hit them with the tripwire. For example – send a ‘book a 30 minute pool health check for just £5’ offer. A good trick here is to offer your main product at the checkout of the tripwire offer. You can assume that if the prospect has clicked through to book the ’30 minute pool health check for just £5’ that their wallet is already open. This is called striking with the wallet open.

If your prospect bought straight into your main product then great, the campaign was a success. If not, but they bought your tripwire offer it’s time to get back in touch. Give it a few days and start nurturing about the core product and offering it at the bottom of your emails each time. After a while it will be fine to go straight in with a core product offer.

Once you’ve succeeded in selling your core product, it’s time to rinse and repeat. Once this marketing campaign is in place for you and working successfully you’d be wise to start implementing more tripwire offers into your funnel.

Start to really segment your lists based on engagement and advert targeting and offering more relevant content, offers and emails. Relevance is king and once you have built a highly relevant and targeted funnel that works you should be seeing an enormous increase in your conversions.

All credit for this goes to Ryan Deiss and DigitalMarketer.