Tripwire Funnel Done Right

So let’s picture ourselves in a situation: there’s a developing business that has created a great lead generating system, but the product seems hard to sell, so the leads are developing extremely slowly. What is the right move for the company’s sales strategy?

The most obvious way of optimizing the sales funnel mentioned above is simply adding a tripwire!

What is a tripwire? What is not a tripwire?!

Remember all of the special sales, trial offers, bundles and you will spot a pattern. Most, if not all of the suppliers, offer a cheap or free option for those, who proved to be interested, to kick off the buyer’s journey, a tripwire. This article will get you into the basics of tripwire marketing, enhancing your sales funnel.

Do you remember the time when you bought a 3 months subscription for some streaming service (to which you have been subscribed ever since) for the price of one? The time when you entered the store to buy your favorite chocolate bar on sale but left with a whole bag of groceries? Those are tripwires (a.k.a product splinters).

So how does a tripwire work?

The general mechanism is quite simple: you see a tempting offer, which by all definitions is favorable to the buyer, and naturally, you make a purchase. This starts a relationship with the supplier and builds the customer’s trust. In turn, a service/product provider’s initial investment into the tripwire offer pays off in the long run. But that’s only the basics of how to make a tripwire, that actually works.

Tripwires are usually confused with lead magnets. Both work in a very effective and somewhat similar manner but have a different place in the sales funnel. Lead magnets are made to turn prospects into leads, while tripwires work best by turning leads into customers.

Think it over. If you put a tripwire at the very beginning of your funnel, the prospect will probably just take the cheap offer and forget about it, while a lead is more about a long-term relationship with a guaranteed investment pay off.

A good analogy to the tripwire products would be dipping a toe into the water to check out the temperature. You have to give your leads a taste of your core offer by using a splinter to push them towards the bigger purchases. Building your customer base this way is highly efficient according to Ryan Deiss over at DigitalMarketer.com: “People who purchased tripwires were 10 times more likely to purchase their core offer.”

Tripwire ideas

In the world of digital marketing, there’s no shortage of tripwire ideas. Splinter offers might be represented as the following items: 

• books, 
• reports, 
• webinars, 
• free or discounted trial periods, 
• demos, 
• and so on. 

Any valuable product related to the core offering may work out as a great addition to your tripwire marketing strategy. 

The RGray Tripwire Example

We ourselves use a pretty efficient tripwire. After a little bit of experimenting, our team truly understood how to make a tripwire. The object of our marketing experiment was a digital marketing consultation, that we used to provide for free. Considering that its average market price is around $150/hour, we decided to make it $20/hour instead of giving it away for free.

Previously, leads who came to our website through the inbound channels agreed for a free consultation were converting poorly. In half a year, we had 112 leads, who were interested in the free option, but only 12 people converted, which is roughly 10%. After setting a price of $25/hour, the number of interested leads lowered to 44 – it was a 61% plunge! But those, who agreed to pay, were far more eager to convert – 24 leads or 54% became our clients. 

A considerable change, wasn’t it? 

For further details on this case, consider contacting our team.

Anyway, while creating one of your own tripwire products, don’t forget to experiment. Split your core offer into different shapes and sizes and try selling it with various price tags. There’s no ultimate recipe for a quality tripwire marketing, but you will eventually find the best offer if you keep looking.

How not to trip on your tripwire

Considering all, that was mentioned above, there’s one more thing, that people usually miss while creating a tripwire offer.

Choosing the right price may be the trickiest.

However, the key feature of the tripwire product is its affordability, if the price will be too low, compared to the core offer, the customer will not consider moving down the funnel. For example, if the core offer is worth $799, the client will probably not be ready to make that purchase after a $9.99 trial version.

On top of that, look at the example of our tripwire and check out how people see non-free products and services. Ridiculously low pricing may sometimes scare off the possible customers, because they may see the offer as a truly worthless one and not bother spending their time on it.

One more rather obvious, but still quite common thing marketers trip on is low-value offers. The whole purpose of a tripwire product is to be tempting, so no worthless, unattractive offer will ever bring you customers, no matter the price. A garbage product won’t push anyone for a bigger purchase.

Always put yourself into the lead’s shoes and watch over your feet.

Afterthought

So, price, value, and relevancy are the basic, must-have elements to any working tripwire there is. Without the right price, high value, and relation to the core offer, no splintering will ever work.

Although it’s hard to say that the basic knowledge of tripwire marketing is enough to secure profitable business. To actually choose the right components of the offer, you have to understand a bit more than just tripwires. Our digital marketing specialists will then be glad to help you to reach the most efficient of the tripwires.