E-commerce is growing daily, and so is the competition to get sales and customers.
A tripwire funnel is an excellent technique for many reasons, but one of our favorites is to create a self-liquidating offer(SOL).
This means you can acquire customers at breakeven and then upsell customers on the backend. The key to a great tripwire is to create an irresistible offer that is a no-brainer to customers and price low enough to qualify as an impulse buy.
If you use this strategy, you'll have a much better chance of upselling a new customer once they've entered your sales funnel.
That being said, let’s dive in and explore more about tripwire funnels and a few examples.
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What is a Tripwire Funnel?
A tripwire, in the simplest terms, is a high-value product or service offered at a significantly reduced price, making it an irresistible offer.
Due to the low risk and low commitment involved, the barrier to entry is reduced.
A tripwire serves a twofold purpose.
- The primary objective is to rapidly expand your customer base by transforming first-time visitors into paying customers.
- The second objective is to find potential customers who are qualified and thus more likely to buy and hence easier to sell to.
A customer's purchase of your tripwire offer opens the door for you to upsell them to additional products and services, eventually leading them to your core (or high ticket) offering.
Since it's simpler to sell to someone already familiar with your brand and product than to someone who has never heard of you before, this strategy is effective.
Why Should You Create a Tripwire Funnel and Offer?
A tripwire funnel or marketing strategy has proved to be an excellent way of increasing your customers and getting more sales and brand engagement.
But a tripwire funnel guarantees you the success of your offerings. Mainly, it’ll help you with the following things.
- Add more people to your email list.
- Increase your sales.
- Increase your brand awareness.
- It is a self-liquidating offer.
A tripwire offer is a great way to build customer trust and upsell them to buy the large or primary product.
Main Components of a Tripwire Funnel
Implementing a tripwire doesn't guarantee success. Tripwire offers need 5 factors to be successful.
These factors are:
1. Low Priced
You should keep the price of your tripwire product low. If your core product is $500, then you need to keep the tripwire’s price $10-$50.
Don’t worry, you won’t be at a loss by doing so. Let me explain this with an example.
Imagine you have 2 products:
- Low-ticket item at $50
- High-ticket offer at $500
Your ads successfully get around 200 users on your tripwire offer, out of which 40% take your tripwire offer.
Out of those 30% users, 10% of users purchase your high-ticket offer making you a ton of profit.
These are just exemplary numbers, and your campaign may attract more customers. So it is recommended to price your tripwire between $10-$50. You can also keep it as low as $1.
Don’t offer it for free because it would be lead magnet funnels, and it won’t tell you if the users are willing to pay for the service because they previously had the free trial.
So instead of making it a free offer, you can keep the tripwire price at $1 for a trial.
2. High Quality
The tripwire product you provide to your customers needs to be of high quality to develop your customers' trust and encourage them to maintain their business relationship with you.
Think of this product as a smaller version of your primary offering that you have available. People will only be interested in purchasing your primary offer, or your upsells if the sample you provided is of good quality and leads to the next logical step.
Because of this, it is essential that the product you provide is of the highest possible quality and provides an exceptionally high level of value to your customers.
But you also need to ensure that you are not offering the full course or service as a tripwire because if users can get the entire course at a low price, they won’t purchase the high-ticket product.
You should balance it in a way that users get a taste of your product or service, which encourages them to purchase the main one.
3. Related to Your Core Offer or High Ticket Product
You need to ensure that the tripwire product you are offering must be related to your core offer or a high-ticket product that you want users to purchase.
It is useless if your tripwire isn’t related to the core offer. Because imagine you are selling a WordPress development video as a tripwire, but you are upselling the cooking course or marketing course with it.
It doesn’t make any sense. Right?
So, it is essential that the tripwire product must be related to the next part of the high-ticket product.
4. Promise an Attainable Goal
Ensure that the people who take advantage of your tripwire offer can attain their goals within a reasonable amount of time. For instance, if you tell your customers, "Create Your First T-Shirt Graphic in 7 days," that objective needs to be reasonable enough for them to achieve it.
5. Upsell the Core Offering
Don’t forget to upsell your core offering. When a user purchases your tripwire offer, you need to ensure that they see your core offer on thank you page after purchasing it.
You can also create an email campaign to upsell the high-ticket product.
Now that we are aware of the main components of a tripwire funnel, let’s dive in and see how to create a tripwire funnel.
How to Create a Tripwire Funnel?
Now, let’s see how you can create your tripwire funnel.
1. Create Your Tripwire or Low-Ticket Offer
To create your tripwire funnel, you need to create a tripwire offer that is irresistible, inexpensive, and of high quality.
You’ll need to create a sales page using any page builder like Gutenburg or Elementor. The sales page should highlight your tripwire offer, and all the features users will be getting should be mentioned clearly.
Following is an example of a landing page for a tripwire offer. You can see that the pricing is mentioned clearly, and so are the available features.
2. Embed the Checkout Using AIO Checkout
Once you have created your sales page for the tripwire offer, you need to create a checkout and embed it on the sales page so customers can quickly purchase the tripwire offer.
To create a checkout, you can use the AIO Checkout plugin. It is an excellent all-in-one checkout plugin built to help users increase their conversion rates by creating responsive and eye-catchy checkout forms.
You can download the AIO Checkout plugin from the Woosuite store. It is free for now, and you can get it by submitting the form.
Following are a few guides that will help you to create a checkout.
- How To Create a WooCommerce Checkout like Shopify?
- How to Add a WooCommerce One-Click Buy Checkout
- How to Combine WooCommerce Cart and Checkout Page?
- How to Remove Email Field From WooCommerce Checkout?
Once you have created the checkout, you can embed it on your tripwire sales page using the shortcode. To get the shortcode, click the three dots before the checkout form name and click Get Shortcode to copy the shortcode.
After copying the shortcode, you can paste it on your sales page. Ensure that the checkout form is enabled else it won’t work.
3. Upsell Your High-Ticket Offer
Once you have embedded the checkout on your tripwire sales page, you need to edit the thank you page to upsell your high-ticket offer.
You need to use a plugin to edit the thank you page. You can create your custom thank you page using Elementor and upsell your primary product.
Not everyone who purchased the low-ticket offer will purchase the high-ticket product. You need to be patient to make your tripwire funnels successful.
You can even email tripwire offer purchasers to upsell your primary offers. This will definitely get you the results you are looking for.
Initially, you’ll feel you are at a loss because of tripwire offer sales. Still, eventually, it’ll succeed if everything is on point and the target audience is interested in your tripwire.
Analyze Your Tripwire Funnel
Once you have created your tripwire funnel, you need to keep track of a few metrics to ensure everything is going according to the plan.
Following are the metrics you should keep an eye on:
- Tripwire conversion rates
- Average Order Value (AOV)
- Cost per customer
- Upsell rate
You can also go for A/B testing by making a few design and price changes to find out what works best for you.
Examples of Tripwire Funnel and Marketing
Let’s look at a few site examples using the tripwire offers that will help you develop your tripwire strategy.
1. Disney Movie Club
Disney Movie Club is excellently using tripwire funnels. They offer 4 movies of your choice for $1 as a tripwire to encourage customers to purchase the membership.
Once you become a member (by using this offer), Disney requires you to make additional purchases of five movie titles at the standard price for the next two years. This requirement more than makes up for the low cost of this offer.
Again, this is a very insignificant number considering that anyone interested in Disney films will purchase more than five titles in more than two years.
2. Ahrefs
Ahref used to offer a $7 for 7 days trial with all the premium features. Later you would have to move on to one of their main subscription plans. You were also able to cancel it anytime you wanted.
Unfortunately, they are not offering this anymore.
Now they give a free trial to one of their features, such as tripwire, and then upsell the main offerings.
3. Challenge Fitness
The gym club offers a $10 membership trial for 10 days. They provide limited services with the trial, but the offerings are of high quality and tell users what they can achieve in 10 days using their service. You can also cancel it at any time.
Conclusion
That’s it for today’s article.
I hope this article helped you learn about tripwire funnels. I also mentioned the process of creating a tripwire funnel.
The funnel example I used is a simple funnel, but you can also create mid-ticket offerings to gain more trust of customers and conversions. This will ultimately help you make more money and boost your sales.
Not only this, but it will also give recognition to your brand. Remember, it is easier to sell to an audience familiar with your brand and service than to those who have never used or heard about your services. This is the main point of creating a tripwire funnel.
If you use this tactic, it will boost your sales.