In a bad economy, it’s always tempting to increase the “thud factor” of your offer. Give away more bonuses… offer better payment terms… special discounts for repeat customers… longer guarantee period… you get the picture.

The problem with this is that you cut your profit margins to the bone and can easily look just like all your competitors’ offers. So why not turn this on its ear and go in the complete opposite direction?

I’m talking about shrinking your offer in order to generate a lot more business – without compromising your profits. Here’s how to do that.

How I discovered the immense value of a tiny offer

About 25 years ago (yes in the dark ages of pre-Internet history), I published a newsletter about direct marketing called “Results” that sold for $97 per year. I had been invited to speak at a business conference about my experience with publishing newsletters and building a loyal subscriber base.

The conference presenter said that instead of paying the normal speakers’ fees, he was going to allow all the speakers to sell from the stage and keep the proceeds. Although this is a common practice now, this form of compensation was new at that time.

Two days before the event, which required that I fly 3,000 miles, I received a call from the conference presenter informing me that the terms had changed. He was now demanding a 50% share of my sales.

I told him that if that was the case, I’d pass and wouldn’t be participating. He became irate and threatened to sue me because my name and picture had been featured in the promotional materials and people were expecting to hear me speak. Being fairly new to the game, I was properly intimidated and reluctantly agreed to show up.

But I was determined to turn the tables on him…and still get paid handsomely at the same time.

Selling a “slice of the pie”

Originally, I was planning to sell my copywriting program which was priced around $500. But I couldn’t help but do a slow burn every time I thought about giving the conference presenter $250 for every copy I sold after he pulled his bait and switch on me.

So here’s how I created my tiny offer and the very interesting results it produced.

Once I got on stage, I did everything in my power to deliver the most valuable, usable content I possibly could. And the audience seemed fully engaged.

After sharing a lot of great information for creating a paid newsletter and selling subscriptions, I closed with my offer for the audience.

Now, remember, a subscription to my newsletter was priced at $97. And in those days, that was considered a fairly high price.

But what I offered the audience members was a 3-month subscription for just $1. All they had to do was meet me at the back of the room and give me one dollar and their business card to get a full 3-month subscription delivered to their mailbox.

Now, financially they were getting a great deal. But at the same time, they were also getting a “slice of the pie” – a mini-subscription rather than a discounted offer on a full year subscription.

I can still recall the exact numbers. There were 360 attendees in the room and I sold 342 mini-subscriptions!

After I collected all the money and business cards, I walked over to the conference presenter and handed him a stack of 171 dollar bills and said with a big smile, “Here’s your 50% share”. He looked dumbfounded as he took the stack of bills.

The real magic of the tiny offer

So maybe you’re wondering what the big deal is. After all, I traveled 3,000 miles and paid my own plane fare and hotel to make a measly $171.

True.

But that’s just the starting point. Once I got back to my office, my assistant entered all the names and addresses into our database and we sent out the first issue. Along with that first issue, these new subscribers also received a flier promoting my copywriting course.

Then, when it came time to mail the third issue, we included a flier offering the one-year subscription at the full price of $97.

Between the copywriting course, the paid subscriptions and a couple of consulting engagements I got from those new subscribers, I ended up taking in about $60,000 in sales.

And the conference promoter? He didn’t receive a penny of that. His total take was the stack of 171 dollar bills I handed him.

And that’s where the real magic comes in. You see, anyone who pays for a product – even if it’s just a small amount – is far more likely to buy from you again than someone who starts by getting something for free.

So why not take advantage of this for your business? Take a popular product or service and create a “slice of the pie” that you can sell at a low price. I’ve done this many times for my own business and for my clients. I’ve used it to successfully sell software, information products, vitamins, health club memberships, consulting services, newsletters, electronics, dental and medical services, and much more.

Two key points to remember. First, because you’re selling a “slice of the pie” rather than discounting the full version of your product or service, all future sales are at full price. But when you start by selling the full version at a discount, it’s extremely difficult to ever get the full price later.

Second, my extensive testing has shown that it’s important to keep your price below $10. I’ve had excellent results with prices of $4 or $7. Once you break the $10 barrier, it no longer seems like such a great deal. So keep your price low, remembering that a customer who pays any amount for a product is far more likely to buy that same product later at full price than someone who took a freebie offer.

Alright, now it’s time to go slice up your pie.

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If you need a coach to help grow your business, why not hire one who pays YOU first? Get the details by clicking here

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Conversions of prospects to paying customers seem to be getting tougher and tougher to generate. Particularly in this stubborn, downward economy.

But at the same time, many marketers cloud the issue of poor conversion rates by blaming it all on the economy. And that’s never the case.

More likely, it’s because you’re actually trying to sell the wrong thing – and by that, I mean the wrong attribute of your product. And if you dig just a bit deeper, it’s easy to find other, more meaningful attributes that will ramp up your conversion rates in any economy.

The “headline test” for determining if you’re selling the right – or wrong – attribute

Every marketing piece must have a “hook” – some important element of your product or service that you build your marketing piece around. One of the easiest and most effective ways to tell if you’ve picked the right hook is to give it my two-step “headline test”.

        Step 1: Write a headline (or subject line if you’re using it for an email) that focuses on            your hook

       Step 2: Read your headline or subject line, then based only on that answer the question         “Does this make me urgently want to read further to find out more?”

Using my “headline test” in the real world

Let’s take a couple of examples of actual subject lines that landed in my inbox today as I’m writing this. The first subject line comes from Apple and reads:

Make their holiday light with MacBook Air

The second subject line comes from Inc. Magazine and reads:

Renew and give a subscription completely free!

Now, let’s apply my headline test. For each of these subject lines, when you read them, do either of them give you any sense of urgency about opening the email to find out all the details?

Of course not. They are sloppy, lazy subject lines. So it’s a foregone conclusion that a much smaller percentage of readers will actually open those emails. And fewer opens clearly means fewer conversions.

So where did they go wrong?

To refresh your memory, every marketing piece must have a hook that the entire piece is built around. And that hook is some attribute of the product you’re selling.

In Apple’s case, the hook is the light weight of the MacBook Air. But the way they use this attribute is almost nonsensical. By attempting to connect it to the holidays, they’ve created a subject line that makes no sense whatsoever in the real world.

I mean, how many times have you ever woke up in the morning with a burning desire to “make yours or someone else’s holiday light?”

The obvious answer is that it’s never crossed your mind.

Now, let’s take a look at Inc’s subject line: “Renew and give a subscription completely free!”

This one is a prime example of lazily leaning on one of the most abused words in all of marketing – the word “free”. Many marketers believe that “free” is a magical word that cures all manner of ills. And if you use it, you don’t have to do much else to generate a great response.

That, my friend, is a fatal error.

“Free” is only relevant if what you’re offering is truly valued by your prospects – and the more value they attach to it, the better off you are. But in this case, there’s very little value attached to this at all.

So let me ask you the same question I posed about Apple’s subject line: How many times have you woke up in the morning with the burning desire to renew your subscription to anything so you could give another subscription to someone else?

Hmm, let me count the number of times. A bit of quick math comes up with… zero.

And I’m sure that zero is not the answer you want when your own prospects consider the attribute of your product that you’ve built your hook around.

So let’s take a look at how to correct this common problem and bump your conversions up to where you’d really like them to be.

3 secrets to creating compelling hooks that convert more prospects to paying customers

We’ve actually covered the first secret already, which is applying my two-step headline test to any marketing piece. First, build your subject line or headline around an attribute your prospects highly value.

Then, read your headline or subject line. If it makes you feel a real sense of urgency about reading more to find out exactly how you get what’s promised in the headline or subject line, you’re in good shape. If not, then you need to move on to the next two secrets.

Conversion Secret #2: Sell the outcome

The reason why so many marketers have such ineffective hooks is that they choose to focus on some feature of the product they want to sell. The lightness of the MacBook Air is simply a feature. Yeah, it’s a pretty cool feature, but not strong enough to get me out from behind my desk and into the Apple store.

A great way to solve this is to focus on the outcome your prospect wants most when using your product. So let me show you a headline from one of my own web sales pages that demonstrates exactly what I mean. Here’s the headline I recently used for selling my coaching services:

      Now you can build your business with greater ease…

      Increase your sales and profits — even in a down economy…

     And reignite the purpose and pleasure you once felt from being in business

     (And see a very real increase in sales of at least $25,000 in the first two           weeks or it costs you nothing)

This is what’s called a “stacked headline” and while it obviously takes more space than a subject line, I’ll also give you an illustration of a single line in just a minute. But the important point is whether by reading just this headline, you’d feel a real urgency to find out more details of what this is about.

My conversion rate for this piece tells me that the answer was a clear “Yes”.

What I’ve done here is focus on the outcome my prospects think about on a regular basis and value the most. I can assure you that they would like to build their businesses with less difficulty, they’d like to increase sales and profits in these tough economic times, and they’d like to feel revved up about being in business again.

In fact, the promise sounds almost too good to be true, so I have to temper it by locking it down with a powerful guarantee right up front. And that guarantee further promotes the sense of urgency to find out exactly what I’m talking about.

Now, in order to come up with the outcomes that your prospects frequently think about and value the most, you have to “enter the conversation that exists in the prospect’s mind” as the legendary copywriter Robert Collier said.

What is it that keeps your prospect up at night? What goal do they want to achieve that would mean more to them than anything else? What problem do they repeatedly encounter that takes away from working on things that are more important? What robs them of the pleasure they’d like to be enjoying?

Answer those questions, then focus on one or more of the attributes you come up with and you’ll have a powerful, authentic subject line or headline that will get far more people to read your marketing piece. And far more people to buy your product.

Conversion Secret #3: Sell the offer

The third secret to higher conversions is focusing on the offer, rather than on the product itself. If you can make an offer that gets directly to the heart of “the conversation that exists in the prospect’s mind”, you’ll enjoy much higher conversion rates than you would with typical sales copy.

Here again, it’s best to feature this offer in your headline or subject line. To illustrate exactly what I mean, take a look at an alternate, offer-driven headline I created for the same sales piece that used the stacked headline I showed you above:

What if your business coach absolutely guaranteed
you’d make money?

It doesn’t take much effort to see that I’ve used this headline to enter that all-important conversation going on in a prospect’s mind when considering hiring a coach. The biggest question they have is, “How do I know this is going to work and I’m not going to lose a lot of money?”

The headline addresses that concern directly, creating a sense of urgency to find out how the heck I’m able to do this. Here again, the readership was very high and the conversion rate shows this was very successful.

Don’t let your conversion rate be a victim of lazy marketing

The fact is, it’s always easier to pick some feature of your product and focus your hook on that. But it’s a very lazy way to market and your conversion rates will continue to be low if you rely on this method.

But when you put a bit of effort into determining the exact outcome your prospects really want or an offer that solves one of their greatest problems or helps them achieve an important goal, you simply can’t lose.

So why not exercise your hook creation muscles now and start enjoying higher conversion rates regardless of what condition the economy is in.

P.S.  If you’d like to see the entire marketing piece that’s built around this hook,
just click the “Coaching” link in the navigation bar at the top of this page.

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Learning is a wonderful thing – and it should be a lifelong endeavor.

But learning can also be a stumbling block when used incorrectly. What I mean by this is when you use learning in place of activity.

Many people are going to create that new product, re-do a dated web site, install a new piece of software, test a new marketing strategy, etc. – once they feel they’ve learned enough to master it.

That’s a big mistake.

Once you have the basic skills, you’re ready to go. You don’t need to be the master of some skill, have the hottest web site, the most dazzling graphics, or have an airtight plan that will get you a first page ranking on Google.

Just start. It’s the best thing you could possibly do for your business.

In their book, “Rework”, authors Jason Fried and David Hansson, founders of 37signals (they make Basecamp) talk about a concept called “Build half a product, not a half-assed product”.

What they mean by this is once you have a basic plan for a good product, get started. And once it’s good enough, launch it. You can always add more bells and whistles later. And half of a good product is always superior to all of a half-assed product.

A real life example

Most entrepreneurs have at least a bit of a perfectionist streak. And they usually strive to make whatever they have better. And better, and better and better.

Yep, I admit to having that tendency myself.

So last month, I decided to challenge myself to act rather than perfect. I created a new training program and used only the most basic methods to put together the content. And we used a simple, inexpensive WordPress plug-in to manage and deliver that content.

Most of the members of my mastermind group told me I was nuts. That I needed a hot “theme” to really give the site some sizzle. That I needed more expensive, more powerful software to manage the content delivery. That I needed broadcast quality videos to really capture peoples’ attention.

I ignored all their well intentioned advice and did it the “simple is better way” instead.

This allowed me to have the pilot project up, running, and on sale in just four days. And within eight days, we were sold out and took in $121,000.

Had I spent more time learning and developing, it would have taken at least three months to have the pilot project ready to go. That’s a far cry from four days!

And now that I have my “half a product” version done and it’s profitable, I can relax and use some of the proceeds to fine tune and improve it on a much more leisurely schedule.

Hey, if I can learn to put a limit on learning, you can too. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

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