How You Can Use Tripwires to Build Your List and Increase Sales

Tripwire marketing is a term used to describe segmenting your audience to make lower-cost sales in order to get them into your sales funnel. Once inside the funnel, you have the opportunity to upsell a higher priced class or package. There are many benefits to using this tripwire strategy.

One common example of a tripwire offer that we often see is free plus shipping. In the coaching world, you might offer your book as free plus shipping. I work with a life coach that does this very effectively. While her followers get her best selling book for only the cost of shipping, she gains leads to her sales funnel. These leads are then ‘warm leads’ for her other programs and services.

A tripwire item is a great tool because as you’re driving traffic to your content, you can offer a very targeted, lower-priced offer to your audience. Yes, you should still keep your freebie to grow your email marketing list but some visitors are skeptical about getting spam from all these different lists they subscribe to so they may feel safer testing out your low-priced offer instead.

You can also offer more than just one tripwire offer. If your audience has a variety of pain points and you have a variety of solutions, try targeting each tripwire item based on the pain point and you may see sales from both items simultaneously. Instead of just offering all your content for free (which means you’re working for free) you set it at a very low price range to attract people, anywhere from $10 to $25 or whatever your market can handle. This tripwire method provides your clients with the content that they need while giving you the compensation that you need to survive financially.

Many coaches do this really well with webinars. Here’s how that looks: You offer free webinars to your community but if they do not attend live, they have an opportunity to purchase the replay at an additional fee. Why not offer a free replay? You certainly can but you may want to reward those who make the time to watch a webinar (which is always chock full of valuable information!) while weeding out those who aren’t serious about working with you. Also, you work extremely hard to grow your community and your expertise so why shouldn’t you get paid for putting together these webinars?

If you choose to use webinars or even audio recordings, you can repurpose that replay and sell it as a one-hour mini master class on your website, charge a low-cost price for your guides, workbooks, short videos, or video series. You can even create a short program (often called a challenge), for example, two days, three days, or even seven days to jumpstart a specific need for your client for $37.

These tripwires will help you confirm that the content you’re creating fulfills a need that your ideal client base has. It will also give your ideal client a taste of what it’s like to work with you while providing them with a solution that works for their business.

Do you have a sales funnel? So many business owners procrastinate or are scared to create a funnel for various reasons. Most commonly, they get overwhelmed at the idea of having to have multiple offers for their prospects and like anything else, once you start to overthink an idea, it gains a life of its own and seems impossible to create.

That’s why I’ve created, Creating Implementing and Optimizing Your Sales Funnel. You’ll get 8 easy steps you can follow to create your high converting sales funnel along with worksheets, and exercises. Learn More.