AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am extra thrilled that you showed up here today because today’s topic is very, very important to your online marketing success.
We are focusing on adding urgency into your promotions by using bonuses and deadlines. Speaking of bonuses, we’re going to put a spotlight on what types of bonuses are best to add to a promotion and when you should add them. I’m also going to share with you a big mistake that I recently made in the roll out of my brand new program, Webinars That Convert.
Let’s just say, since I made this mistake, you do not have to make it. You’re just going to learn from it. I’ll share that with you soon. I’m also going to share with you the #1 urgency tool that I absolutely cannot live without during any of my special promotions or launches. That’s coming up as well.
If you’re wondering if this episode is right for you, here’s how to decide. If you already have an online training program that you’re promoting online or if you are currently creating an online training program that you want to launch online then this episode is just for you. You are in the right place if you can relate to either of those scenarios.
Before we dive into urgency and deadlines and bonuses, a quick word about our sponsor. Before we dive in I want to thank our sponsor today, 99Designs. I am such a huge fan of this company because they can take care of all of your graphic needs. We are talking logos, social media cover images, website graphics, and so much more. So visit www.99Designs.com/amy and get a $99 upgrade for free.
Moving in to today’s topic, first I want to share with you the freebie that I’ve created for this episode. As you may already know, with each episode I create I have a really cool valuable freebie that will help you take action with what you learned today.
Today’s freebie is extra special. Do I say that each time? I really mean it this time. It’s extra special because while I was preparing for this little mini training I’m about to give you I thought that if I asked some of my favorite online marketers to name one of their most valuable bonuses they’ve ever offered during a promotion, what it would be?
Here’s the great news, tons of A-list marketers actually responded and they dished on the details about their bonuses. So I have a special freebie where Melanie Duncan, Nikki Elledge Brown, Michael Hyatt, Pat Flynn, Derek Halpern, and so many more gave us some details on their most valuable bonuses they’ve ever offered.
Then I reached beyond my normal sphere of friends and added some insights from some new friends that are not in the niche of teaching marketing to entrepreneurs like many of my friends are. So I wanted to mix things up a bit. Sarah Jenks, who focuses on body image and self love, shares her favorite promo bonus and Denise Duffield-Thomas, who is a money mindset mentor, shares one of her most valuable bonuses as well.
That’s just naming a few. You definitely want to get your hands on this brand new freebie. To get it all you need to do is go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/ 79download or you can text the phrase 79download to 33444 and I will send it to you right away.
Let’s jump into the training.
First, we’re talking about urgency. I want to make sure we are all on the same page around this topic. Every time you promote something you want to make sure there is urgency built in. You want to make sure that people know they need to act now. We all know it’s human nature to take our time and to kind of stay on the fence as long as we can until we are pushed one way or the other.
You want to make sure your audience knows it is Go time. In this training I am typically talking about a promotion where it has a start date and an end date. Even if you have something automated going on, for each person that goes through your funnel they should feel there is a start and an end.
If I had an automated funnel that started with a webinar, the start date would be when they signed up for the webinar. The end date for that promo for them specifically would be when I sent the final promo email after the webinar. You should have a start and end date to all promos that you are running, even when they are automated.
With that, when you are running a promo, you definitely want some urgency. You want people to act now. You don’t want them to wait. You want them to know that now is the time. One of the best ways to do that is by adding bonuses and also by adding a deadline they really know is real and time is ticking. I’ll show you how to do that as well.
To set the stage for this mini training, here’s how I see an online offer unfolding. First you have the core program offer. That’s usually comprised of your modules. Sometimes inside a module you will have multiple lessons. For my Webinars That Convert course I have five modules and in each module there are about four lessons and sometimes there might be five.
I have multiple lessons inside each module. That tends to be your core program offer. You might have three modules and in each module just one less. No worries, everyone is different. But you definitely need to understand what your core program offer is. That includes cheat sheets and maybe video downloads and audio and transcripts, whatever it is you’re including.
In addition to your core offer you will want to add a few bonuses to sweeten the pot. It’s not a must but it is a really good thing to have, especially when you’ve got some competition out there. Bonuses can sometimes make or break the offer in terms of whether it pushes people just a little bit further to say, “Yes, I want this.”
I have had people buy my programs just for the bonuses before. So if they are really good they can kind of stand on their own and help your sales immensely. You’ve got your core offer and then you offer some bonuses. I call these standard bonuses that everybody gets.
To add in urgency, this is where you have some opportunities. We can actually play with bonuses during urgency as well. I first want you to understand the distinction between standard bonuses that everybody gets (they are likely listed on your sales page) and then during your promo you are going to start adding in some urgency (now is the time to buy). That is where other bonuses can show up.
I’m going to give you a list of ways to add bonuses and ways to increase your urgency. You do not need to do them all. You can mix and match them based on what feels best for your offer. Let me give you a list and then I’m going to get into each of these for you.
First let’s talk about bonus opportunities. You have the timely bonus that you can put in an email or use in ads or use on social media. I’ll explain what that is. Then you have the fast-action bonus. That’s a little bit different than a timely bonus. You also have the bonus that sweetens the pot. Those are the three different bonuses we are going to talk about.
- Timely bonus
- Fast action bonus
- Bonus that sweetens the pot
Then there are other ways to create urgency with early-bird pricing, membership actually closing (people cannot join after a certain date), bonuses going away completely after a certain date, and limited spots available. These are other ways to add urgency. Again, you get to mix and match. Once I talk about each of them you will see which one is best for you.
To bring this to life, since I just ended a big launch, I always like to use those real-life examples in my trainings. With Webinars That Convert, let me show you what it looked like. The core program was five modules and then four lessons in each module. You get the transcript, the slide deck, the audio file, and usually a few cheat sheets as well. That’s the core offer.
I then added two bonuses to that core offer and called them the standard bonuses, everybody got them. The first bonus is access into my private Facebook group where I am very active. They get some one-on-one time with me as I answer questions inside the Facebook group. The second bonus was a special guide called Ten Irresistible Webinar Topics That Are Sure To Boost Signups And Sales.
Why did I add these as standard bonuses? I’m hoping my explanation of that will help you decide what your standard bonuses might be. The first thing is this is a $1,000 program. I feel that with a higher priced program people should get more access to me. They should also be able to have a community where they get support as well.
I knew this program was going to be a program where people need to be fed a little extra support. There are a lot of moving parts. So a private Facebook group made perfect sense for that. I then created that special guide, Ten Irresistible Webinar Topics, because one of the first things they need to do is choose a webinar topic.
Although I explain how to do that in the program, I knew many of them would get stuck in this place so I wanted to give them a bunch of examples of webinar titles and formulas for webinar titles so that they could move quickly through that first phase. That’s why I included it as a bonus.
I also knew that many people struggled in this area, so when they saw that bonus they would see it as very, very valuable. That’s why I chose those two bonuses.
On my live webinar I offered a fast-action bonus that we will talk about in a moment. A fast-action bonus, in a nutshell, is usually offered during a webinar or maybe a live Q&A session, something that’s usually live. I always say, “If you purchase my program while we are live here on this webinar (live Q&A call) you get the fast-action bonus.”
My fast-action bonus is called the Fill-Up Formula. The Fill-Up Formula is a way for people to start building their email list before they are ready to promote their webinar. This is where I made my mistake and I will come back to it in a moment. When we get into fast-action bonuses more in depth, I will tell you where my big mistake was. But at the time I promoted this that’s what the fast-action bonus was.
I also offered a limited-time bonus. The limited-time bonus came after the webinar and for 48 hours during my two-week promotion (just 48 hours) there was a special bonus I added. It was a special technique to give you more confidence on a webinar. This technique that I taught with my business coach, Todd Herman, was a 48-hour bonus.
If you bought my course during that 48 hours you got the bonus. If you had already purchased my program you also got it. But anybody else who purchased the program after that 48-hour special promo didn’t get the bonus. We’ll talk about that more. Again, I just wanted to show you what mine looked like so you see it come alive.
My final urgency play was that I was closing the doors. At the time of this recording you cannot purchase Webinars That Convert. You can get on a wait list and we will open again soon. But right now it is totally closed. So that was a huge piece of the urgency puzzle and we will talk about that as well.
That’s basically what mine looked like inside my program. So many times people like me to give real-life examples so I decided I would just spell it out for you so you would see it in action. But now let’s break it apart just a bit so you can make it actionable in your business as well. Sound good?
Remember, I talked about four types of bonuses: The standard bonus; a bonus you would add to the offer. Everybody gets it. There’s no timeline. It’s usually on the sales page. You might do one or two standard bonuses. It’s kind of like it’s part of the offer. Then there are three other types of bonuses.
The first one is a timely bonus. Here’s how I like to use this: During your promotion, let’s say it’s two weeks long, you’re going to pick a time, maybe right in the middle, but you can play around with this, where for 48 hours (or maybe 72 hours or maybe 24, you get to decide) you will tell people in your email marketing for your promo that for 48 hours you have a special bonus.
You will do a really good job of quickly explaining what the bonus is, why it’s valuable, what’s in it for them. You paint the picture and tell them on what date and what time the bonus will go away. Again, I’m doing this in the middle of my promotion. The promotion isn’t going away, just the timely bonus.
You send an email telling people about the bonus and then you get to send the next email telling them it is going away, whether it be in a few hours or tonight or whatever that might be. If I did a 48-hour bonus and I released it on a Tuesday, Tuesday morning I would tell them about the special bonus and that they could get it for the next 48 hours. I would tell them all they needed to do is sign up for Webinars That Convert and tell them what the bonus is. That email would go out on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, I would send an email telling them they have 24 hours left and that the doors close tonight at 11:59 p.m. I would then tell them after that they can no longer get the bonus. There is a lot of urgency there because people need to act right away if they want the bonus. You can put it in an ad and you can put it on social media. You have to figure out what works best for you and if it makes sense. But it doesn’t just have to stick with email marketing.
Because I do webinars, I’m typically emailing the 48-hour bonus to those that registered for my webinar. But I also might run an ad to those that signed up for my webinar. I might go beyond email and do some advertising as well with the 48-hour bonus.
Let me tell you, it works really, really well. It’s got to be a really good, juicy bonus. It’s got to address a pain point or something people really want. And, you need to make sure you’re very clear when it expires.
Just to reiterate, anybody who already signed up for your program before that promo went out should get that bonus. If my promotion is two weeks and I give the 48-hour bonus right in the middle, anyone who bought the week prior should get that special bonus as well. Just make that really clear.
I don’t put the timely bonus on the sales page and I say that in the email. I give them an FYI that they will not see the bonus on the sales page, it’s extra special, and that it is going away soon. I really spell it out. But that was a huge jump during my Webinars That Convert promo. That was a really big day for us because there was some urgency.
If you are going to do something like this you need a way to tag the people that buy during a period of time. Everybody that had already bought and everybody that bought until that deadline got a special tag. I use Infusionsoft so it is fairly easy for me to tag those people. I also sync that up to WishList.
WishList is my membership site. This is a little bit more advanced. You can do it a little bit more manually if you’d like so that you don’t have to get so techy with it. But, basically how it worked for me, we applied a tag inside Infusionsoft and then we actually integrated it with WishList and said that anyone with “this” tag should see the bonus. It was loaded in WishList but you had to have access to certain level to actually get the special bonus.
That’s how we do it. There are other ways to do it depending on which membership site you are using and what email marketing you are using. You do have to figure that out but we are talking about a huge boost in sales if you do it right so it is worth figuring out the technology around that. Or you can talk to a programmer and ask them if they can help you figure it out. I did not do that all on my own. I hired a programmer to figure that one out.
The next type of bonus to create some urgency is the fast-action bonus. This one is different because it is a bonus that I usually give away during a live situation. For me, it’s when I’m live on a webinar. If you purchase my program live on a webinar you usually get a special bonus. I’ve been doing these fast-action bonuses for a long time. So if you purchase live you get XYZ.
The only way to get it is if you purchase live. So we make sure that anyone purchasing during a certain period of time gets a special tag and when they join my program inside the member’s area this special bonus is already waiting for them.
Let me tell you where I messed up inside Webinars That Convert. My fast-action bonus was something called the Fill-Up Formula. The Fill-Up Formula is really, really good. That’s why I chose it as a fast-action bonus. You want these bonuses to knock people’s socks off. You really want to understand what they need, what they want, and then I usually create bonuses from scratch. We’ll talk about that a little later, whether you can use something you already have.
For me, I’m typically creating something from scratch. I knew a lot of people that joined my webinars course needed to build their email list. The bigger your email list, usually the better you will do at webinars. So the Fill-Up Formula helps you create content, helps with Facebook ads, helps do targeting so that you can start building your email list even before you’re ready to promote your webinar. It was an amazing bonus.
The problem was when I got into my Facebook group and started talking to people, so many people had questions about building their list. I kept telling them to check out the Fill-Up Formula because it’s the best bonus and where they should start.
I realized that not everybody had the bonus. But it was so essential to them getting success inside my program. I feel that everybody should start with the Fill-Up Formula and get that going in the background and then focus on the content I teach in the program. So I made a really big error by saying this was only available to those who bought live.
I ended up releasing the bonus to everybody but then adding a few more bonuses to kind of sweeten the pot that they didn’t know they were getting so that I didn’t get anyone that was frustrated with me. I think they understood this was an innocent mistake. I really want to make sure everybody is set up to win. I then added some live Q&As to the program to sweeten the pot a little bit more. I couldn’t help myself.
I made up for it but this is a lesson for you to learn so that you don’t make the same mistake. The lesson is that your bonuses should never be so good that they really need to be included in the program. The bonus should never actually be something that if somebody didn’t have it they wouldn’t be able to get the great success you’re promising.
My Fill-Up Formula, I realized, was a really important factor in the program. The bonus, if it’s a standard bonus, then it’s fine because it’s part of the program. I could have offered the Fill-Up Formula as a standard bonus and I think I will change that in the future. I then need to think of a different type of bonus for my fast-action bonus where it is really good if someone has it but they can still get great success without it.
That’s how you need to decide on these bonuses. The timely bonus and the fast-action bonus can’t be a necessity for them to be able to move through your program and do really good things and get really big results. Do you see what I mean about that?
Moving back a bit, a great example of that is the timely bonus. I offered a timely bonus where Todd Herman and I teach a technique to give you more confidence on your webinar. It’s not a necessity. You don’t have to learn this technique in order to do a great job on your webinar. But it sure would enhance things.
Think of it in terms of enhancement, optimizing, things that will just make it really good when you dive in. Those are the types of fast-action bonuses or timely bonuses that I want you to create.
The fourth bonus is the sweeten-the-pot bonus. Just to reiterate, we’ve got the standard bonus that goes on the sales page, we have a timely bonus that might be 24 or 48 hours, then we have the fast-action bonus that is best used when you are live on a webinar or a Q&A call. It is something where it is a live situation where while you are there if you order you get the special bonus.
The fourth one, the sweeten-the-pot bonus doesn’t have a timeline. Everybody gets it but it allows you to add something during your promotion and that means you get another reason to email. I feel like email marketing is such a huge part of the success of an online promotion. Finding really good reasons to email is part of the puzzle.
When you already introduced your program and have sent a few emails or made a few videos about it, you’ve put it on social media you’ve been running ads to the sales page, then four to five days into the promotion you add an extra bonus that nobody has yet heard about.
You tell them you have a special bonus, XYZ, and why it’s great and that when they sign up, or if they have already signed up, they get the bonus. You tell them to take action now because you just put the new bonus on the table. Then give them the link and tell them to sign up.
They could still wait until the very end of your promotion but there is a sense of urgency when something new has been introduced. If you don’t want to do the timely bonus or the fast-action bonus because you don’t like the techy side of it and trying to figure out who bought it is too complicated then start with the sweeten-the- post bonus. Just introduce it somewhere after a few days of your promotion starting or maybe a few days before the promotion ends.
You want to create a buzz. I kind of like to sweeten the pot a little bit closer to when I opened the cart versus when I close the cart. Right before I close the cart I like to talk a lot about the cart closing and we will get to that next.
There are your four types of bonuses and how each one of them works. Moving on to some other urgency opportunities, one of my favorites is early-bird pricing. I have talked about this in a few of my episodes so forgive me for those of you who are religious listeners (and thank you for that if you are).
Let me just paint the picture a little bit because the best way I can do that is through my Profit Lab program. With the Profit Lab program it’s a 21-day promotion. It’s pretty long. I do a lot of live webinars in the first two weeks. What I have done with the Profit Lab promotion is create two levels, the self-study level and the mastery level.
The self-study level is the program and then you get access to a forum and you get the standard bonuses. In the mastery level you get the entire program with all of the standard bonuses and the forum. But you also get access to a private Facebook group where I show up every single day, Monday through Friday, for 60 days and answer every single question you have. I also review your social media sales funnel.
It’s really valuable. One level is $500 and the other is $1,000. I’ve got two levels. However, there is early-bird pricing and the mastery level goes away before the promotion ends. So we’ll talk about the mastery level going away in a moment. That is kind of a different urgency. But the early-bird pricing is $497 about five days before the cart closes.
I have a long promotion, 21 days. But about five days before the cart closes I increase the price to full price. Now it is $597. That allows me to talk about early-bird pricing on the webinar and it allows me to email a few times and tell them the price is going to go up by $100. I tell them it is going up tomorrow, the next 48 hours, or whatever it might be.
This allows me an opportunity to send a few more emails. That’s not all I say in the email. I remind them of the benefits of the program, maybe show them a case study. But talking about a price increase is huge. It’s my biggest day throughout the entire 21-day promotion, the night before the price increases by $100. That is crazy town, right?
One thing that helps with that is that my mastery program that is $1,000 has a cap on it. I usually allow 200 people because I’m going to be reviewing their social media sales funnels and answering all of their questions in a private Facebook group. I can’t have more than 200. Even 200 feels like a lot sometimes. I say that once we fill the mastery program (and we always do) it will go away.
Right around the time the price is going to increase I usually am at 180 members of mastery. I tell them I have 20 spots left for mastery and the price for self-study goes up by $100. I actually never increase the price of mastery because there is urgency and scarcity with that as well.
We will talk about the whole mastery strategy in just a moment. But what I wanted you to focus on right here is the early-bird pricing, the pricing going up. I tend to like the price to go up right before the cart is going to close. I think a few days before the cart closes is the best time to go full price.
You will see that sales will actually decline and then usually on the final cart-close day is when you will see some good action once you start getting the numbers of people to check out your offer.
We’ve got the early-bird pricing. The other type of urgency you can create is an actual membership closing, doors closing, cart close. I am talking about the type of cart close where you cannot join the program after this date. That is usually how I have done my big promotions. Profit Lab is not open right now. At the time of this recording Webinars That Convert is not open. I do think we will open it sooner than later again. But it’s not open right now.
When we do big promotions we like to open the cart and close the cart. Cart close means the program is closed and if you didn’t join you can’t get in. That’s literally the best type of urgency you can create. That’s going to help you see bigger numbers, when you totally close it down.
That’s a pro of doing cart close, you can’t join. The con of that is that we all like automation. We all like consistent revenue. That is why I have one program, The Profit Lab, that is really closed and really won’t open until 2016. Then I created Webinars That Convert as more of an automated program. But I launched it live the first time. I wanted to make sure everything was working properly, my audience was satisfied, they were actually able to go through the program, they were enjoying the process.
What I did was open the cart and close the cart. People can’t join. We are going to make sure everything is working properly and then I’ll put it on automation and then I’ll open it up to some affiliates. But I just wanted to get those first initial members really taken care of. That’s kind of how I did that but there is always something really magical about closing the cart completely.
When you do that, make sure you do it with integrity. You really do have to close the cart. If you are saying they can only buy the program until 11:59 p.m. on October 1, then at 11:59 p.m. your sales page should actually move to a wait list. I know it might sound mean but my team stays up until midnight California Time to make sure everything is redirected to a wait list. It is really important to me to be true to my word.
If you were part of the promotion and you went at 1 a.m. you should not have been able to get into the program. I am pretty sure it all worked properly this time. You kind of have to work out some kinks sometimes when you find an open link that you didn’t realize was there. That’s normal. But I think we covered all of our bases this time around.
That would be membership closing, one of the best types of urgency. But it is also not the easiest because launching is not particularly easy. I also really love the idea of consistent revenue for you.
Let’s talk about that. The third type of urgency opportunity beyond just bonuses is actually taking a bonus away when the cart closes. We are still talking about bonuses but remember I said I want you to have a promotion that has a start and end date?
Here is what it might look like if you don’t want to close the cart completely: You’re emailing your list or whoever it is you are emailing and you are telling them you have a special bonus, XYZ, and on October 1, at 11:59 p.m. the bonus goes away. You tell them that if they are really excited about the program and they want the bonus they have to purchase by this date.
After that date you are using that date as your close cart. They can purchase after that date but they won’t get that bonus. There has to be a way that you take something back or you will never have them feeling as though the have to jump off the fence to make a decision.
It gets a little tricky with automation. You have to figure out what works best for you and what feels best for you. But I will say that you have to find a way to take something back by a certain date so that people feel they have to act now. Sometimes, if you don’t love the idea of saying something is going away and it is their last change, you can send them an email and tell them it is the final email you are sending them.
If they want your program and like the bonuses, this is their chance; and they will not hear from you again about the special bonus. You’re not saying the program is completely going away. You want to be clear about that. But you are telling them you will not promote it to them anymore. Here is the chance, if they want it they have a link and can go for it.
There is a tool out there, and we’ve just started to experiment with it, but it is called Click Funnels. It is more advanced, for sure. It’s not for my total beginners. But if you’ve been at this for a while and you’re looking to create urgency and you want some technology that helps you do it, Click Funnels might be the way to go. I’ll link to it in my show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/79. It is something to look into.
The final urgency opportunity beyond just bonuses is that limited spots available concept that I talked about earlier with my Profit Lab mastery. Let’s go back to that. I offered mastery with 200 spots available. I actually put that on my sales page and as the spots dwindled down we changed it on the sales page during the live promo.
When we had about ten spots left it was a great opportunity to email my list during the promo and tell them that only ten spots were left for mastery and that once it was full it would be totally closed, they could not get into it, and it would not be offered again for another six months.
Knowing when you are going to promote again is also a great urgency tactic if you can be really true to those dates. In addition to that, having a bonus or an opportunity that has a limited spot available concept tied to it is really good as well. As long as you are being true to that you are golden.
Of course, I’m just going to assume we are all working through integrity right now. You’ve got to find a way to really make the bonuses true to what you are saying they are. I love the idea of a limited spots available type of urgency that you can bake into your program.
There you have it. We went over the standard bonus, the timely bonus in your emails, the fast-action bonus that you might want to do on a webinar, the sweeten-the-pot bonus that everybody gets but you don’t announce it until a little bit into the promotion, the early-bird pricing, the membership closing (you can no longer join the program), the bonus going away (this is the last time you will receive an email about this urgency), and the limited spots available.
You do not need to do all types of bonuses but you can mix and match them. If you’ve never done any kind of special bonus you might want to choose just one for your next promotion.
In addition to the types of bonus strategies you can use, I also wanted to give you a tool that I just cannot live without when it comes to special promotions. I call it my Urgency Tool. Do you want to know what it is?
I love to create urgency inside of emails. Email marketing is my thing. Once I attract people to a webinar I followup that webinar with some really strategic email marketing to allow my new audience to understand why this program is so valuable and why they need it. I work really hard on those emails.
When we get close to a deadline that I’ve created, the 48-hour timely bonus, or if I have a price increase, or if I am closing the cart, sometimes I use it a few times during a longer promotion, I add in a working timer inside my emails. As you are reading my email the timer at the very top of the email is active. It is actually ticking away. Tick, tock, the seconds are running.
I will show you in the show notes what that looks like. I’m not actually going to show it to you running because that would be weird to program and I don’t even know how to do it. But I do know how to do it inside an email. It’s really easy. You would be surprised.
There are a lot of tools you can use. The one I like to use is Mail Motion. I’ll link to that tool in my show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/79.
To wrap up, I wanted to add a few more valuable nuggets just so you really understand how important this is and how to apply it to your business. First, as you are building the urgency into your promos remember that you don’t have to stick with email marketing. You might not be doing a webinar and you might be promoting on social media and through Facebook ads and Google ads and different things.
You can actually talk about bonuses in your ads on social media. You can do the 48- hour bonus that’s a limited time, the timely bonus. You can run an ad for that. Just know that you can go beyond just email. Another thing is that you do really need to understand how to tag or add people to a special list if you are doing things like fast- action bonuses or if you are doing a timely bonus and they have to buy during a certain time.
You do need a way to identify who those people are so that, as much as you can, you stay in integrity in the offer that you are putting out there. Sometimes it can be tricky. So if you’re not ready for that, that’s when I want you to just focus on sweetening the pot with an unexpected bonus during your promo. That’s a really good place to start if the technology has you a little bit freaked out.
My final little nugget for you is to plan your entire offer in advance. This is something I’ve learned the hard way and have added things at the last minute. It’s confusing and it creates stress for you and your team.
I would love to see you actually get clear on your core program offer, your standard bonuses that will be on the sales page, and then your urgency strategy. Your urgency strategy might be a mix and match of some of the suggestions I made here. But really make it clear. Make it clear to yourself, make it clear to your team, and then start building that out.
If you are trying to add things during a live promotion, holy cow, that is so stressful. I’ve been there. I do not suggest it. As much as you can get ahead of this, the better.
One more thing, last week in Episode #78 we talked about adding upsells to your promotion. I want to make sure it’s clear that bonuses and upsells are very different. Just in case you missed it, make sure to check out http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/78. It’s a really good I know, I’m biased. But, it allows you to add more revenue to your next promotion by adding an upsell.
I wanted to make sure you were clear about the difference between an upsell, if you listened last week, and a bonus. An upsell is something that you actually offer for people to buy after they purchased your program. It’s the next thing. It’s an upsell. That’s why they call it that.
It’s usually something that will allow your audience to get through your program in a faster way or an easier way or a more streamlined or optimized way. I talk all about examples of upsells in Episode #78.
A bonus is different. You have more leniency with a bonus. You could offer something you’ve already created. Maybe you have a mini program you sell and you want to add it as a bonus. Or, maybe you did a really cool interview with somebody and you’ve never released it and you know it’s extremely valuable and your audience will love it. That can be a bonus.
It’s really all in the packaging. If you explain to people why a bonus is valuable they will see the value with you. You really have a lot of options with bonuses, cheat sheets, guides, checklists, and blueprints as well as maybe a free video that you created on a certain topic you know will be a hot topic for them or a program you already created that you want to add to the mix.
I always say an upsell shouldn’t be more information but a bonus can be more information. It can also be a private Facebook group or a special Q&A call. There are so many different options. Speaking of so many different options, remember, I have that special freebie for you. If you want some ideas for bonuses for your next online training program, what better way than to go to some of the best marketers out there to find out what they’ve created for their own online training programs, bonuses they have offered in the past.
As I mentioned earlier, if you go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/79download or text 79download to 33444 you can get the freebie for this episode. I have asked Melanie Duncan, Michael Hyatt, Nikki Elledge Brown, Derek Halpern, and some other people outside of the marketing sphere like Sarah Jenks and Denise Duffield-Thomas what their favorite bonuses are that they have ever offered.
They give you all of the details. It’s really cool and really insightful to see their program and the bonuses they offered. I love to see real-life examples and I really appreciate those that contributed to this freebie because it’s good stuff. Again, go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/79download.
To wrap things up, here are some questions you can ask yourself in order to create urgency with your next promotion: What is my core program offer, the modules and lessons? What is that going to look like? What are my standard bonuses (the bonuses that everybody will get)? Then ask yourself if you want to create a fast-action bonus or a timely bonus or early-bird pricing.
If you are going to do early-bird pricing, get really clear on the full pricing as well because it’s really powerful (I used to not do this but I figured it out) to say the price is going to increase by X tomorrow. My formula was when it increased about $100 that was when people felt it was a good enough deal to act NOW. You will want to play with what will work best for your audience as well.
Finally, make sure you are really clear, this is the start of the promotion and the end of the promotion. That way when you have those dates in mind it’s easier to create urgency where you feel it fits best. Hopefully you found this valuable.
Before we wrap up I want to share a quick word about our sponsor.
Finally, I want to thank our sponsor, 99Designs. You know when you market online it is really difficult to stand out from all of that online noise clutter. How do you do it? I think you do it through impeccable branding. That includes your logo, your social media cover images, your website, and everything in between. At 99Designs you can get anything designed in just a week for a startup-friendly price.
To give you a little something extra, when you go to www.99designs.com/amy you will get a $99 upgrade for free. That upgrade makes your design contest stand out from all of the others and bumps you to the top of the list so more designers can see your contest. So make sure to check out www.99designs.com/amy.
Hopefully those questions will help you as you create urgency for your next promotion. Thanks again for tuning in. I look forward to connecting with you again next week. Bye for now.
