The Components Of A Great Offer
Whatever you’re selling, if you’re wanting to give your offering the best chance at being the #1 option for a segment of customers, then there are several components you should think about within your offer.
These include:
1. Your deliverables
2. The benefits
3. Price and payment terms
4. Bonuses / extras
5. Risk reversal / guarantees
6. The reason to respond right now
7. The call to action
You don’t have to include every single element in your offer, but the aim is to use as many as possible to create an offering that makes absolute sense to the customer and encourages them to take action straight away. You don’t have to explicitly state each element either, often luxury brands will imply rather than state, but they’re still present. Over the next 7 posts, we’ll detail the specifics of each element and how to utilize each in crafting the best offering in your market.
1. Your deliverables
The deliverables are what people get when they buy. For eCommerce, this is the product shipped to their door. For services, like a plumber, for example, it’s the work you do for your customer. For a coach, this is whether it’s group coaching, 1 on 1, or a course. Whether it’s something they can do in their own time or whether it’s live with an intake and set dates/times etc.
For the most part, the deliverable is not the reason people buy. But to get the benefits, they first need to purchase and receive the deliverable.
Sounds confusing? It’s simple when you dig deeper into the psychological reasons behind why people buy. There are two primary motivations or needs a customer is seeking to satisfy to make a buying decision:
1/ avoid or remove pain
2/ gain pleasure
Think about it like this: someone looking to book an around the world trip through a travel agency wants to gain pleasure – a trip overseas is fun and exciting. Someone who calls an emergency electrician to repair a blown fusebox wants to remove pain.
When your deliverable are unique, they will either help you provide unique benefits, or if you provide the same benefits as someone else (the same outcome) they may just prefer your deliverable style.
Copywriters will often ask ‘what is the unique mechanism?’ and what they mean is what is unique about your deliverables, the way you do it compared to others. And this can be a crucial part of your ad copy to communicate to customers how the way you achieve the outcome is different and better, even if you and your competitors are promising the same outcome.
2. The benefits
Benefits are the reason people buy. More specifically, the only reason someone buys anything is because they perceive the benefits from a purchase are worth more to them than what they have to pay.
It’s a value transaction.
Where most people fall over is they only realize the tangible and immediate benefit, totally underestimating the intangible and highly emotional benefit three layers deeper. As humans, our buying decisions are based on emotion and then justified with logic.
Your job is to hunt for the emotional needs and desired results of your target market and then link the benefits of your product or service to these needs. You want to show your customer how you can give them what they want and how it will impact their life in a positive way.
You can do this with ANY product or service. First, start by turning features into benefits and then dig deeper to find those emotional hot spots.
Let’s start with an easy example – a Porsche 911 turbo.
A big drawcard for the Porsche turbo is the 6 cylinder turbo engine – that’s a feature. You can easily flip this into a benefit like so: You’ll feel the rush of power tingle all your senses as you push your foot to the floor and the turbo engine springs to life and rushes from 0 to 100 in less than 5 seconds. The benefit being the Porsche is fast.
Dig deeper and there are highly emotional benefits you can tie in here, too. The prestige of owning a sports car, the stares the driver will receive around his local suburb as he cruises around in his new Porsche. Emotions like pride can be huge triggers for your customers.
Your benefits should attempt to lead back to one of the 7 deadly sins that have the most power over a consumer:
- Pride
- Envy
- Gluttony
- Lust
- Wrath
- Greed
- Sloth
3. Price and payment terms
Price and the payment terms are an extremely important element in your offer. Not only to the customer but also to your profitability and to your scalability.
You can’t scale a business quickly if it takes you forever to get paid, therefore increasing the wait time for you to get the funds from 1 customer to go out and get another 2 or 3.
Price is sometimes a judgement call, but there is definitely a science to it. Once you have data on how many people reacted at one price, it’s possible to calculate with good accuracy how many would have reacted if it were a different price.
And what is sometimes surprising in doing this, is that it’s more profitable to be perched at a lower price, if it increases your conversion rates and results in more sales from the same traffic.
It’s also possible to use this science as a way to say; if 100 people bought my product that costs $100, there is definitely 1 or 2 of those people that are able and willing to buy something worth $1,000 if I had a product that was valuable to them.
So, there is some science and predictability to pricing using tools that are helpful.
However, we tend to think about pricing in 2 very simple ways:
• If your product or service is better, then it needs to be more expensive – otherwise people won’t believe it’s better
• If your product/service is seen as equivalent or similar in quality, then your price needs to be 50% cheaper if you’re going to steal market share quickly. And obviously, you need to be taking away aspects of the product to be able to deliver it at that price and be profitable, but often there are aspects that the customer won’t care about, as long as they can get it drastically cheaper.
Your payment terms also play a big role in the buying decision. If your offer is similar in every other way, but your terms are more favourable, customers will choose you.
4. Bonuses / extras
This component is where you stack the logic and enhance the value of your offer.
Think about infomercials. How does the presenter make the offer more irresistible? He hammers on benefits and piles on the bonuses. Every time he says ‘but wait…there’s more’ a new bonus emerges to the delight of the consumer, inching them closer to reaching for their credit card.
No, we don’t want you sounding like an infomercial, and you don’t need to go buy steak knives in bulk. But a bonus that’s linked to your main offer is a great way to nudge a potential customer off the fence and get them to buy. The offer you’ve stitched together was great at $199 but then you add 10 extra hours of training content and a bunch of templates for your customer – making the offer near-irresistible.
You don’t necessarily need to add more ‘stuff’. Bonuses and extras are not always about adding more things (but it’s a good place to start).
Also, the bonus doesn’t always need to be directed at the consumer. You could, for example, promote the fact that you donate a % of the sale to a charity.
And you don’t need to add a bonus to every purchase. Luxury brands use bonuses well as a brand loyalty tool for their top customers – flying them around the world to the unveiling of new collections or gifting experiences money cannot buy.
Whichever way you use extras and bonuses, it’s an important component to tip people over the line and make a purchasing decision. To the consumer, the offer seemed good to start with, now that there are bonuses involved the balance of value has tipped and it would be silly not to make this purchase.
What bonuses or extras could you add to ramp up the value of your offer?
5. Risk reversal / guarantees
The guarantee is a crucial part of offer creation. Many successful, profitable and famous businesses are built on a great guarantee.
Take car manufacturer Kia’s market leading 7-year warranty. Implemented at a time when most car manufacturers offered 2 or 3 years warranty, it’s a big factor in Kia’s success and market penetration.
Now, more and more competitors have begun to imitate Kia, with the CEO warning the Korean car maker may soon increase its warranty period to 10 years.
Domino’s Pizza promise of hot, delicious pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free has served them well. The pizza giant is now taking steps to create new offers for 15 or 20 minutes for a few dollars extra.
Have you noticed that the businesses that lead the way with an amazing guarantee are more than happy to double down on it? Because they’ve experienced the growth it can create. Tupperware’s lifetime guarantee was first implemented by the company more than 50 years ago and has helped to define the company as a household name.
A great guarantee should achieve a couple things:
- A great guarantee reverses risk from the consumer to the company (and by default turn an offer into a ‘no brainer’)
- Competitors should look at your guarantee and think to themselves ‘how the hell are they doing that!’
The impact a sound guarantee has on leads, conversion rates and sales will more than justify the few cases where it doesn’t work for you, and you lose out.
Word of warning…don’t use a weak guarantee or a confusing guarantee with lots of clauses. Your consumer is more educated than ever, and they’ll see straight through a weak guarantee. And if the guarantee just raises a bunch of questions from the consumer then it’s doing more harm than good.
6. The reason to respond right now
People will respond to your marketing if you give them a compelling reason to do so.
However, if you don’t give them a reason – then often they will plan to do it ‘later’, and often later means never.
If your copy doesn’t include specific and enticing reasons to responsd to your ad right now – you’re leaving money on the table. That’s why a well-crafted reason to respond is so important in any advertisement.
Either urgency (time limited) or scarcity (quantity limited) is the reason to act now and not leave it for ‘later’. Is there a special deal you’re promoting with a limited window to claim it? Perhaps, you’ve got a limited time bonus? Maybe stock of a product is limited, or you’ve got a cheaper price for a pre-order. All are reasons to respond quickly.
7. The call to action
Your goal with any marketing campaign is to ask your target market to take action. Whether it’s making a purchase on the spot, picking up the phone and calling or booking an appointment. The call-to-action (CTA) is a written directive that shows and encourages someone to take this desired action. A call to action can take many forms but the simplest example would be ‘buy now’.
Your marketing should always, ALWAYS include a strong call-to-action. And not just once but throughout your marketing copy to catch a consumer at different points in the buying decision process.
Once you’ve decided on your CTA, it’s important you only have one (or maybe 2). People get confused, and if you’re offering them 6 different pathways forward, you won’t get nearly as many people take the path as if you offered one clear path.
