When (Almost) $8 Million Was The Difference
Secrets of an offer - the two parties and the three factors
I want you to imagine $7,972,456. That’s how far ahead of second place when we broke the record for an affiliate in a product launch. We sold $9,894,008 in 8 days of someone else’s product.
This was a product we had promoted on four previous occasions. We took first all four times then, too.
By the 6th time we promoted the product, we weren’t even on the leaderboard. They retired us and just gave us the first-place cash prize, a cool $100,000.
The #1 reason we had these results is because we nailed the offer.
An offer has two parties - a buyer and a seller. Both focus on maximum perceived value. The buyer wants to get as much value for the least money, time, and energy. The seller wants to give the most value for the least cost, time, and energy.
Seems simple. It isn’t.
First, why perceived vs actual value?
Actual value can only be measured after you buy the thing. The best part about actual value is that it enhances the perceived value of the next thing you sell. The buyer thinks - I had a good experience in my last purchase, so this one will likely also be good.
Perceived value means it’s not enough to have a Mona Lisa. It has to be in a nice frame in a museum with the proper lighting. A Mona Lisa with duct tape for a frame doesn’t hit the same.
I may well have better YouTube content than these personalities in my space that have millions of views. But to a stranger who compares my videos with hundreds of views to others with millions of views, I lose the click even though I’m objectively more successful.
Actual value is hard to assess. Perceived value is easy - it’s the cover of the book. The views on the video. The packaging. The visuals.
Your goal is to have the most attractive packaging on the box and the most effective product in that box.
Value is subjective and weighed against money, time, and energy. If you’re worth $1000, a $10 product is 1% of your net worth. If you’re worth a million, a $1,000 product is 0.1% of your net worth. Same price, different cost. Most people want expensive things, but not everyone can afford them. Almost no one wants cheap, though.
Your goal isn’t to have the lowest price. Your goal is to have the highest value vs. price. And time isn’t money. It’s more important than money.
Just like money is relative, so is time. Some people will happily pay 4x as much to get it twice as soon. Even if it’s the same product. Take free information. If all the info was out there for free that could solve your problem, why would you ever buy a solution? Let’s say it takes 10 hours to find it for free. Or you could spend 10 minutes and $10 to get it. Which do you prefer?
Money is less important than time when it comes to value.
Time is less important than energy.
Energy is the emotional, psychological, and spiritual cost. What if you buy it and it doesn’t work? What if you look like a fool when you use it? How could it do you harm?
The biggest energy cost is fear. Risk is at the heart of fear. The best offers I ever made attacked the risk. When Amazon ads first came out, it wasn’t enough to teach people how to run ads better than their competition. The real secret was in showing them how to run ads near risk-free.
I would make a guarantee - follow the system I came up with, and if you don’t see a 2x return on your ad spend, I’d cover your ads up to $1,000. We would have to pay some customers. But we increased our conversion rate enough to more than cover such a cost. We got more people to run ads and be successful because we worked on reducing failure.
Sourcing products from China was another scary, new thing we taught people just starting on Amazon. So, we shouldered some of the risk and built a concierge team to do much of the heavy lifting. It cost us money, but that was okay because we sold a $3,500 product. We could eat into the margins because it made our offer so good no one could compete. Other affiliates would almost sell the customer. The customer would then research and find us, and we could close the deal.
I made slightly less net per customer but got a ton more customers. The price was higher, yet the value was way higher. And with each bonus, we reduced time and energy costs.
I think of a marketing campaign as a chef making a meal. The ingredients are the components that make up your offer. Start and procure the best ingredients. Then, as a chef, it’s your job to put them together in the ways that make the best meals. In our case, we used webinars to “cook,” and we had the best “ingredients” (bonuses) to crush the offer.
If you were to quantify the guarantee, just in general, how much extra sales do you think you would have made because of the guarantee?