Self-liquidating offers are a powerful marketing strategy that can help entrepreneurs generate new leads and turn them into customers. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to use a self liquidating offer (or SLO funnels) in your business so you can start generating more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.
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How to Grow Your Business with a Self Liquidating Offer (also known as SLO Funnels)
What Are Self-Liquidating Offers?
As an entrepreneur, you may have seen those $27 or $37 offers all over Facebook and wondering what they’re all about…
A self-liquidating offer is a low-priced digital product (usually in the $27-47 range) that uses paid advertising to attract a cold audience of buyers and fill your email list with buyers rather than freebie-seekers.
They were originally created and popularized by marketers like Allie Bjerk and Julie Stoian.
The point of an SLO funnel isn’t necessarily to make a huge profit with the ads, but to break even on your ad spend and then have a higher ticket offer that people can purchase later on in your sales funnel, because getting someone to purchase something straight from an ad is usually very expensive.
Related Post: How to Create a Tripwire Offer
What Kinds of Businesses Should Create an SLO Funnel?
As the marketer Emily Hirsh says, an SLO funnel can be “an amazing lead generation tool that can offset your ad spend and be profitable when tied into your other offers and overall marketing strategy.”
This can be a great strategy for high-ticket coaches or digital course creators to get highly qualified leads and BUYERS on their email list instead of building a list of thousands of freebies seekers and only converting a small percentage. ?
However, the caveat here is that the most likely running ads straight to a low-priced product will NOT be enough to sustain an entire business without some kind of upsell or higher priced offer somewhere in your business. Also, this works a lot better for digital products rather than physical ones (and you would not want to offer a service for an SLO funnel, because it’s just not high enough of a price to make it worth the cost).
I’ve personally run ads for an SLO funnel on Facebook and at times the sales generated from the ads broke even or were slightly profitable on the ad spend, but I was doing it for my main offer and I quickly realized that I was not going to grow my business with only a $27 offer and nothing else.
How to Create a Self Liquidating Offer for Your Business
So, what should you create for your SLO offer?
You want to create something that isn’t cannibalizing your main offer, but is like a complementary set of tools, templates, or some kind of done-for-you digital product (again, NOT a service).
In the ideal situation, your low priced offer gets warm leads in the door, and then you have a high ticket one-on-one offer for a service or coaching OR a high ticket digital course available after you’ve further nurtured the relationship.
Rather than someone directly signing up for a $1,000 coaching package or digital course without knowing much about you, they could instead purchase a small $37 offer, get a better feel for your teaching style or the vibe of your work, and then sign up for your high end offer once you’ve built up the know, like, and trust factor.
It’s also important that you create a unique offer of tools, templates, trainings, or resources for your SLO offer instead of just repurposing things from your bigger offer, because some of your customers may end up buying your high ticket offer later on, and they’ve already paid once.
You can use a number of different tools and tech options for creating sales funnels (and is waaayyyy more involved than this post can get into). You will need a few basic tools like your website, a shopping cart or payment processor, and landing page or sales funnel software to create the sales page and delivery page.
Also, SLO funnels aren’t really meant to grow with organic traffic, so you’ll also be setting up paid advertising, usually through Facebook.
If you’ve already seen any of these ads on Facebook before, you may have noticed that they tend to have a certain “look” with displaying the different parts of the offer that you’ll receive. Showcasing screenshots from your product is actually a great way to make a digital product more tangible and boost your sales.
If you need some help with creating images for your SLO ads, you’re in luck! I’ve already made some Canva templates for this. 🙂
Click here for Canva templates to advertise your SLO funnel!
For additional Canva templates and stock photos to help you build your funnel, be sure to check out our membership!
Final Thoughts About Self Liquidating Offers
Although they’re not right for every business, self-liquidating offers can be a great way to grow your online business if it fits in with your overall marketing strategy or customer journey. They’re especially useful not as a standalone tool, but as a way to build a warm email list full of buyers who know, like, and trust you and are more likely to buy a higher ticket offer from you in the future.
Good luck!