Point 3: Does the offer speak to a desired end result?
The members of your market are searching for solutions. What does your market really want? If you can craft a gated offer that promises that solution, prospects will gladly give you their contact information (and their attention) in return.
Point 4: Does the offer deliver immediate gratification?
Your market wants a solution and wants it now. Establish and communicate how long it will take your leads to consume and derive value from your gated offer so that they know what to expect. If it takes days or weeks, your gated offer is not delivering immediate gratification — not by a long shot.
Point 5: Does the offer shift the relationship?
The best gated offers do more than inform; they actually change the state and mind-set of your prospects so that they’re primed to engage in business with your company. After your leads have taken advantage of your offer, determine whether the value it provides will actually teach the leads how and why they should trust and buy from you. For example, if you sell gardening tools and supplies, a checklist entitled “15 Tools You Need to Create a Successful Container Garden” educates prospects on the tools they need while simultaneously moving them closer to purchasing the products you sell.
Point 6: Does the offer have a high perceived value?
Just because your gated offer is free doesn’t mean that it should look free. Use good design through the use of professional graphics and imagery to create a gated offer of high perceived value in the mind of your lead.
Point 7: Does the offer have a high actual value?
The right information at the right time can be priceless. The gated offer that delivers something priceless will enjoy very high conversion rates, but if you’re promising value, you have to deliver on it. A gated offer has high actual value when it lives up to its promise and delivers the goods.
Point 8: Does the offer allow for rapid consumption?
You don’t want your gated offer to be a roadblock in the customer’s journey toward becoming a customer. Before customers buy from you, they want to receive value from your gated offer. You want the gated offer to help move the lead to the next step, so ideally the gated offer should deliver value immediately. In other words, avoid long e-books or courses that take days or months to deliver their value.
Designing Deep-Discount Offers
Acquiring leads is the goal of the gated offer discussed in the previous section, but how do you acquire buyers? Remember that the key to success online is the sequence of the offers you make to new leads and customers. The best way to acquire buyers is by making an offer at such a deep discount that it is difficult to refuse. A deep-discount offer is an irresistible, low-ticket offer made to convert leads and cold prospects into buyers.
In the following sections, we discuss the six different types of deep-discount offers you can employ.
Using physical premiums
As the name suggests, physical premiums are physical products. Offer something that your market desires and discount it deeply. Beauty counters use this tactic by letting customers test out products for free before they purchase them, or by letting them take home trial-sized products to try out. Even online retailers have adopted this tactic, as shown in Figure 3-6.
Source: https://www.huevine.com/products/try-before-you-buy
FIGURE 3-6: HueVine uses the free + shipping method for their beauty products.
Employing a book
A physical book can make an excellent deep-discount offer. Books have an extremely high perceived and actual value. If you need to establish authority and trust with your market before making more complex or higher-ticket offers, the book is a great deep-discount offer to employ. Consider offering the book at a steep discount, or free plus shipping and handling. Although we don’t recommend a physical or digital book for generating leads, it’s a highly effective way to convert prospects and leads into customers. Remember, the objective of a deep-discount offer is to change the relationship with a lead or prospect and turn the person into a customer.
Leveraging the webinar
Webinars are one of the most versatile offers available to digital marketers. You can conduct free webinars to generate leads, plus you can offer a webinar as a product. Remember that when you’re charging for anything and particularly a webinar, you should deliver value beyond what you’ve charged to attend.
Selling software
Software and application plug-ins are effective deep-discount offers because software saves people time and energy, so these are highly sought-after commodities. When you use software as a deep-discount offer, the deep discount price is likely to cause a “buying frenzy,” resulting in a highly successful acquisition campaign.
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