Is offering "Bonuses" helpful?

The Stillest Hour

Irresistible Offer Component #5: Bonuses – Add more value than your main offering.

I’m highly frustrated when I see companies offering bonuses – to be completely frank. They seem disingenuous, disconnected, fluffy and manipulative.

But first, what’s the point of offering a bonus with your product?

As in any transaction, the reason a prospect will buy from you is because they believe that what they are getting in the form of services is MORE valuable than what they are giving you in the form of $$$.

Now before this sounds dystopian – both sides come away from this transaction as winners. There isn’t a loser here. The goal of bonuses and marketing in general is not to fleece the customer into ‘just paying more’ but to rather better understand what the customer values – and give them that thing.

Then the more skilled we are at meeting the customer’s specific demands and demonstrating our value results in an exchange where both sides win.

The wrong way: Here is a bonus you don’t really need or value, but I am going to pretend you need and value it with a bunch of fancy language.

The right way: I’ve spent a lot of time and energy to understand what you really value and need – and am giving you a bonus of xyz with my product which has an extremely high value to you which is inexpensive for me to produce and deliver.

The goal is to give the prospect bonuses that exceed the value of your core product. If the bonuses exceed the value of your core offer then the perceive value of your offer rises dramatically.

How to deploy bonuses for maximum effect:

1. Break your main offering up into pieces – create a core offering and then offer the remaining components of your offer as bonuses. This particularly works well if you’ve been arguing from features and are switching over to outcomes.

2. Solve the customers #1 or #2 fear with a specific bonus. If you are a portrait photographer, you might offer posing coaching as a highly valuable bonus.

3. Make sure that the bonus has a value tied to real life and calculate that for the prospect. If you are offering some of your extra time – how much do you charge per hour actually? Or offer a testimonial to demonstrate the value.

4. Find out what new problems are created with your product – and then offer the solution to those problems as bonuses. If you are selling training on how to write cold emails – offer a bonus of the exact script you can use, once you actually get on the phone with a prospect.

5. Custom bonuses: Have a few bonuses on hand that you can deploy. Once you have some practice, you’ll know that your prospects generally will have a few different types of objections, fears or concerns. Deploy a customized bonus just for them which solves those concerns.

6. Give the bonuses a name – and focus on how you can make the prospects life easier or make the solution faster or with lower effort from the prospect.

7. Use your experience to create high-value low effort bonuses. If you buy this entrée, we’ll email you the recipe of exactly how the chef made it. We sell this on our website for $10. Also we’ll include, a 30 minute video tutorial on how to make it from the comfort of your own home taught by our chef himself. We sell this on our website for $29. Now the bonuses are more valuable than the entrée itself and they are free. All from a onetime effort that you can use over and over again.

8. Use your relationships with other businesses. Think about business that interrelate to your product offering. These businesses know that it’s difficult to acquire a customer. And so, they are often willing to discount their services if you make an introduction to your client, give their service away for free or even pay you for giving their service away for free.

9. Take a chiropractor – he would be able to offer several bonuses of a free massage and discounted orthotics from a variety of nearby companies along with the core offering.

10. Take a website designer – He would be able to partner with a company that runs traffic and offers their $197 course as a free bonus. The company who runs traffic know that their business model is predicated on selling courses and then upselling the course purchaser on a DFY service. They love the introduction, and you get to give away free value to your customers.