How to create great offers.

In all your marketing, no matter what it is—ads, brochures, sell sheets, websites, whatever that first touch is, you should make your offer as fantastic as possible. You need to put together an offer that might not make any money on the first sale. Offer things like a “100 percent money back, no questions asked” guarantee, and take the risk out of doing business with you. In addition, this helps to gain the trust of the client, and it takes away all of the client’s objections to doing business with you if he or she is on the fence. Very few people will actually take you up on the offer of the return or their money back. But you need to do it.

Think about this logically for a second. I know offering a 100% Money Back Guarantee is a big step for a lot of you reading this But if I purchased something from you and I was very unhappy with it and wanted to return it, would you give me my money back? For most of you, the answer would be absolutely yes. So then, why don’t you just promote it? How often does it happen? If it happens a lot, you might want to reevaluate the situation and see if the services or products you’re selling are up to par. But if it doesn’t happen often, it’ll probably happen just as infrequently if you make it public, and it will make a great risk-reversal offer. I feel there’s only good that will come from it.

Your offer could also be a bundling of your products or services. It could also be a buy one get one free. Or buy one get the second half price. The offer must be something great that to turn your prospects into customers.

A great way to decide what to offer your customers is to do a competitive analysis and see with your competitors are offering. Then make your offer extremely better. It needs to be so good it takes all the effort out of choosing you.

You could also use your offer to generate a list of customers that you can repeatedly market to. You create an offer, direct them to a squeeze page where they buy your product and sign up for your email list. You can then automatically market to them and or set them up in a continuity program with recurring billing.

Don’t forget to try the “Limited time offer”. This works on many levels of the brain. By placing a time limit on the offer involves The rules of scarcity and loss. By limiting the time someone can get the offer invokes a feeling of missing out or loss and as humans we are always looking for ways to not lose.

If your product and or service has been purchased by many people also include that in your offer. “thousands have purchased this item”. This create social proof, a powerful addition to any offer.

Here are some quick offers:

• Buy one (or two) get one (or two) free.
• Buy this and get this (other product) free.
• Buy this and if you are not completely satisfied, return it within 30 days and get a 100% no questions asked refund. (Did that make your heart flutter?)
• Get $10.00 off of your purchase of $100.00 or more. (Dollar amount off is easier on the brain.)
• Bring a friend and they eat free.
• Free birthday cake with dinner purchase.
• Stay four days get the fifth day free.
• Free car with purchase. (Just seeing if you are paying attention.)

Once you decide on your offers you can present them as a packages. Displaying three choices of items or services in higher price increments, horizontally from left to right, usually helps sway the customer to choose the middle choice. You could also use decoy pricing (adding something that most will not want but will help them make a choice of one that looks like the better choice or value).

Whatever your offer make sure you don’t require you customer to jump through hoops to get it or like most car dealers have weird qualifiers like “you must be a college graduated and recently discharged from the military with a blood type A+ and be from Mars to get this price.”

The job of the offer is to get new customers that can be re-marketed to over and over so even if you are not making any money on the deal you are gaining a customer. If you do your marketing correctly and have a great product or service, you will make it back once the customer buys something else. Did you ever think that they might take you up on your offer and buy something else right away?

What types of offers worked best for your company? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email.

As always your comments are welcomed and appreciated.