Tripwires are a popular and profitable sales funnel strategy that offer people a limited-time small offer after they sign up to your email list. Here’s how to create a tripwire offer.
Table of Contents
How to Create a Tripwire Offer
What is a Tripwire Offer?
You may have heard of the term “tripwire” before. It’s a marketing strategy that offers an irresistible offer to potential customers right after they sign up for your email list. This is done with the intention of continuing the relationship with them once they’re on your email list and nurturing them into long-term buyers.
A tripwire offer usually refers to a low-priced offer (in the range of $7-19) that you offer someone on a limited time sales page after they sign up for your email list. A tripwire shouldn’t be a high-priced offer, because someone is landing on this page *right* after they signed up to your email list.
A tripwire is also a little different than those $27-$47 products you see all over Facebook. 🙂 (Those are usually called SLO offers, or self-liquidating offers).
Benefits of Using a Tripwire Offer
The purpose and benefit of a tripwire can be twofold:
1. It can help recoup some of your advertising spend right off the bat and
2. The bigger goal is to provide people an offer that’s so valuable at such a no-brainer price that people want to sign up and then are super impressed and want to continue working with you further.
Tripwire Offer Examples
Your tripwire should be related to the free offer that your email subscribers are signing up for (but it doesn’t have to be exactly the same). Perhaps your freebie offers one piece of the puzzle, and then the tripwire offers another.
For example, someone signs up for your free Instagram training in exchange for their email address, and the next page they land on is a tripwire page that offers them an Instagram hashtag spreadsheet for only $9 for the next 20 minutes.
Another example, your lead magnet is a blog post publishing checklist and your tripwire is a $7 video recording of your blog post writing workflow.
The actual offer for a tripwire is going to be very similar to a regular lead magnet or content upgrade, but it should be valuable enough that people are willing to pay money for it on the spot. In other words, it should be a no-brainer deal.
How to Actually Create a Tripwire: the Tech You Need
The two main pieces of software you need to make a tripwire are an email marketing service and landing page software.
If you’re using a landing page creator like Elementor, they have built-in countdown timers (important to create true urgency for your offer), or you can also find countdown plugins for WordPress. I currently use Flodesk for email marketing and Elementor for page design.
For my tripwire, basically I have an opt-in page where someone signs up to my email list for a freebie, and then I have the thank you page for my email service set as the secret tripwire page.
I use the premium version of Elementor to add a genuine countdown timer that will permanently redirect the page after the 15 or 20 minute timer is up. Then the page redirects to a generic thank you page, and the limited time offer is no longer available.