This week, we’re going over some of my favorite and most profitable online sales and marketing strategies. These are techniques I’ve learned and implemented from well-known marketing personalities (or “gurus” if you prefer) over the past 16 years.
At a high level, these are the strategies that have made me the most money with the least effort, making them fun to implement!
Strategy #2: Make your offers irresistible with Eugene Schwartz’s “Sell Dollars At A Discount”
If you want to start or grow an online business, you’re going to need offers. An offer is simply a product or a small collection of products, courses, or services you provide.
And if you want to sell a lot of your offers, it makes sense that you’d want to make them “irresistible” to a prospect.
You’ve likely heard that phrase before: “Make your offers irresistible.”
Well, what exactly does that mean?
Here’s one way you can make your offers irresistible: you can describe your offer in a way that makes it sound like you’re “selling dollars at a discount.”
This “selling dollars at a discount” concept is attributed to Eugene Schwartz although he never really said it in those words. In Breakthrough Advertising, Schwartz originally emphasized that a copywriter should intensify a prospect’s desire for a product by telling them how the product delivers value above and beyond its cost.
And I’ve heard about a dozen different marketers using this phrase to encapsulate that concept: “Sell dollars at a discount.”
For me, this concept has been a game changer in how I write about the price of my offers.
Let’s quickly break down “selling dollars at a discount”:
If I had a $10 bill in my hand and told you that you could buy it with a $5 bill, would you do it? Of course, you would.
The extra value is tangible and immediately convertible. You could turn around and sell that $10 bill for $10 and make a $5 profit.
That’s easy to understand. But the problem most business owners selling digital products have when they’re writing copy about their product is that they fail to describe the price in this way. And it’s really as simple as it sounds.
What most people will do is say, “Hey, this offer normally costs $10. But today, you can get it for $5.”
The problem is that it’s not a $10 bill they’re buying for $5. It’s digital, and the $10 value isn’t tangible or real in someone’s mind. It’s just a price that’s been thrown out there. There’s no real value attached to that price, or that value hasn’t been described.
So it still feels like you’re just paying $5 for something that costs $5.
The fix is very simple and straightforward: All you have to do is make sure that you describe that higher value to your prospects.
“If you buy my offer you could start making $5,000/month. All you have to do is pay me $500 one time.”
If I’m offering my services (and I’ve done this, this year) here’s how I’d describe my fees: “You pay me $50k and I’ll write you a sales letter that will make you at least $1mm over its lifetime.”
There are many applications of this.
Let’s talk about one more where you’re not selling an offer that helps people make or save money directly.
What you want to do is figure out what your customers would normally pay a lot of money for. What’s their desired end result?
To lose weight? Have no pain? How much money would they expect to pay for their dream result?
Now you figure out how to make your offer provide that same result.
Then you can say, “Normally you’d have to pay a trainer $500+/month or $6k a year to get these results. This is just $297 one-time.”
(KEY: This must be what they actually expect to pay and what they’d easily accept as true.)
On a deeper level, here’s something I learned from another guru, Jason Fladlien: I want to describe the value of my offers (and provide that same value inside my offers) compared to the price I charge in a way that makes my customers feel like they’re (ethically) taking advantage of me.
That’s what “selling dollars at a discount” truly means.
I hope that was helpful.
The next strategy will be related to email marketing—and it’ll take me about 60 seconds to describe. Yet it worked like crazy every time I used it in the past.
Talk to you tomorrow!
– Derek
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