When planning sales campaigns, one of the best persuasive ways to trigger more sales is to use FOMO, i.e., Fear Of Missing Out. And today you will learn about a special FOMO tactic that, if executed right, can bring incredible results for your sales funnels.
The One Time Offer (OTO)
A one-time offer is a brilliant sales tactic that relies on a great persuasive copy to make buyers spend more on the spot. And in this guide, you will learn how you can use OTOs to take your sales funnels to the next level.
After reading this guide, you will learn,
– The Concept Of One Time Offer
– What are effective ways to use one-time offers
Eventually, you will be able to run successful funnels and land more sales using one-time offers.
**Plus, you will get a bonus section on how you can use one-time offers in your WooCommerce store.
So let’s begin.
The Concept Of One Time Offer
When shopping online, have you ever come across a surprise offer that says
“Buy this product now at a 50% discount! Offer available for today only!”
It was probably hard to resist if the offer was on a product you needed or would find useful.
This is a classic case of a one-time offer.
A One Time Offer (OTO) is a special offer you make that your buyer can avail only once within a brief period of time.
An OTO can be a special one time discount, a coupon, or even a bundle with a special discounted price.
It’s basically an offer that your buyers cannot normally get on your site but have a chance to get at that particular moment. At this point, the buyer has to make a decision or he/she may not get this offer again.
However, simply limiting a time and offering a discount doesn’t make it an OTO. One crucial element of an OTO is choosing the right offer for the right buyer.
For example, if someone is at your store to purchase a Lipstick, offering her a pair of sandals won’t make much sense, even if you offer a great discount. The conversion rate will be terrible.
Rather, you can offer a product from the same category, such as a couple of Blush-on, which are more likely to sell along with Lipsticks.
Another great example could be offering a one-time discount coupon to prospects on their first purchase.
However, in most cases, OTOs are made either as order bumps on the checkout page, or as post-purchase upsells.
Effective Ways To Use One-Time Offers In Your Sales Funnel
There could be many ways to use one-time offers in your sales funnels. Let us look at a few creative ways you can use OTOs to drive more sales.
1. A Limited Time Order Bump With A Discount
We have all heard of limited-time discounts, but what if this offer appears right on the checkout page?
The way this works is when a buyer goes to the checkout page, make him a special discounted offer that will be available only for that day, as an order bump.
This is a special trick you can use to drive sales on certain days of every month.
The challenge here is to determine,
- Who should get this offer?
- What product should be offered?
- And when to make this offer?
This seems quite difficult, but rather, it’s quite simple. You simply narrow down your targets.
In your WooCommerce store, monitor your sales performance to determine what products sell more, and what categories are most popular among your buyers.
Once you know this, set up a funnel to target the people who purchase from your most popular category. In that funnel, offer a related product as an order bump, or you could simply offer the highest-sold product from that category at a discounted price.
For example, let’s say people mostly purchase t-shirts in your online clothing store. So create a funnel just for the ‘T-shirts’ so that whoever is willing to purchase a t-shirt, will enter this funnel. There, set up an order bump offer on your most popular t-shirt in store, let’s say, on a 10% discount.
Next, activate this funnel on a specific day of the month and promote to your buyers that anyone who purchases t-shirts on that day will get a special offer during checkout.
Prior to this, maybe 1 week earlier, promote that this special offer is coming on a specific date. You may use Banners on your home page, send emails to your users, and even post on social media.
This early promotion will drive instant traffic on the day of the offer.
You could run a similar deal funnel every month on different categories that you think normally sell more in that month. (Monitoring the performance from last year would give a good idea of this.)
2. Upsell offer on more quantity
A quantity-based offer is pretty common in the eCommerce industry and it works like a charm.
If you can make a good discount offer on purchasing more quantities of a product, people are likely to purchase it.
For example, if someone is about to purchase 2 chocolate bars from your shop, you may make an offer to buy 10 instead at a 10% discount. If each of those chocolate bars costs $10, then upon accepting this offer, you will earn $90 instead of just $20.
*Make sure you do not offer a discount that’s cutting off your profit completely.
This sounds great, but the question is, how you should offer this?
One common approach is to run the same promotion sitewide so that buying any product of a certain quantity will earn them a discount on the total. But, this approach is not ideal because different products earn you a different amount of profit.
Rather, the best approach here would be, to make a one-time offer after checkout as an upsell, on specific products.
It’s always good to narrow down your market when making any promotional offer and adding a FOMO makes it even better for higher conversion.
What you can do here is, choose a few categories in your store that are more likely to sell in higher quantities.
For example, people are more like to buy more amount of food items, clothes, jewelry, etc. However, they would be reluctant to buy multiple electronic devices, phone accessories, expensive products, etc.
Once you have decided on the category, set up a funnel where once a buyer purchases a product from that category, right after checkout, instantly make an upsell offer to get more number of that product at a discount. And make sure to include in the copy that this offer can be claimed just that one time.
This will add an element of surprise, and the buyer will be hooked on this offer since he won’t get it again.
If have managed to choose the right category, then a good discount will trigger most buyers to take the offer.
3. Upsell offer on a higher value product
You probably have a certain product from two brands or of two qualities where one costs more than the other. And obviously, want more people to buy the one that will earn you more money.
But what if the cheaper one is selling more? That is where you can use this tactic.
The idea is that when a buyer purchases a product, make an upsell offer right after checkout to rather go for a better alternative, at a discount.
For example, let’s say a buyer chooses a locally branded smartwatch worth $100. After going through checkout, he instantly gets an offer on a smartwatch from a popular brand. And let’s say, normally it costs $300, but right now, the buyer can get it at $240 (at 20% off).
At this point, the buyer knows that you won’t be able to get that watch at a better price when shopping regularly. So if this offer is within his budget, he will end up taking the offer.
This tactic works really well on products that people want to use for a long time such as home decor, electronics, etc.
4. OTO Email Campaigns
Most people only focus on running one-time offer campaigns on the website. But you can also run OTO campaigns only via email.
Here, what you do is, prepare a one-time offer funnel on your site that your buyers normally won’t have access to. Then, email your buyers to get this offer within the next week.
Whoever is interested, will be able to view the offer via clicking on the link in the email. And after one week, you simply disable the funnel.
For example, let’s say you sell digital marketing courses. Prepare a funnel where you will offer access to all of your courses at a 40% discount. But make sure this funnel is not visible anywhere on your site.
Next, launch an email campaign where you will highlight the savings and the deadline of the offer.
This will help to instantly trigger several enrollments right away.
People love such surprising offers and emails make them feel personalized since the offer is not public.
This tactic works really well for online course creators, and often online software.
5. Bundle as OTO Upsell
This is probably a common strategy, but bundles really work.
If you can bundle up the right products, it can drive more sales than when you sell each of them separately.
Many think a bundle offer works well only because of the discount. But in reality, there is more to it.
You see, a buyer often has no time to browse through and look for all the products he needs. So he purchases one product at a time whenever he remembers he needs it.
This doesn’t mean he will not buy the other products later. It’s just that, he didn’t think of the other products at that particular moment.
That is where a bundle comes in. While purchasing a product he needs, if he gets an offer on a bundle that includes his product, plus a few other related products that he will eventually need, it often triggers the buyer to take the offer.
For example, if a buyer purchased a lipstick, you can instantly make an upsell offer with a bundle of make-up products which includes the same lipstick, blush-on, primer, eyeliner, and face powder. And altogether, let’s say, you gave a 15% discount.
Since the buyer is concerned about beauty, she may consider taking this. And if she hasn’t already purchased a couple of the products included in this bundle and the offer is within her budget, then it’s a sure sale.
Bundle offers also work well during special occasions.
Bonus: Quick Guide To Creating A One-Time Offer Funnel For Your WooCommerce Store
Normally, when you plan sales funnels in WooCommerce, you probably think of using one of the mainframe funnel builder plugins that let you create upsell offers for specific products.
But that is not ideal. If you have a lot of products, how many will you single out and devise a funnel for them?
Rather, you can take a different approach using WPFunnels.
- Dynamic Upsell OTOs
When you say dynamic, it means it will change from time to time. But you won’t have to do any manual work here.
WPFunnels comes with this unique addon, Global Funnels, that allows you to bring buyers into a funnel based on conditions such as product category, tags, etc. Then, you can make dynamic offers as upsell based on the product the buyer purchased at the checkout (which could be any product).
Let me explain with an example.
Suppose, you sell clothes online within your WooCommerce store and you want to make an OTO funnel for t-shirts.
- First, create a funnel in WPFunnels and convert it to a global funnel.
- Now, set a condition, “Enter funnel if product category is a T-shirt.” So, if the buyer has a t-shirt in his cart, then he will enter the funnel when trying to checkout.
- Then set up an upsell offer and use a conditional offer, “Random product in the category” and set the category as T-shirt. So, whichever t-shirt the buyer purchases, he will get an upsell offer on another t-shirt.
- And finally, assign a discount, maybe 10%, so that the buyer gets to take the offered t-shirt at 10% off.
In this example, when a buyer is about to purchase a t-shirt, he will enter this special funnel. Once he completes the purchase, he will instantly get an upsell offer on another t-shirt from the store at a 10% discount.
Now, this is a one-time offer because the next time he tries to purchase another t-shirt, he will probably not get the upsell offer on the same t-shirt. Every time he purchases a t-shirt, he will be offered another random t-shirt at a discount.
The reason this will work really well is that you are not just making a random offer, rather you are making a relevant offer strategy to what the buyer is already purchasing. And the element of surprise here is the buyer has to make an instant decision. If he rejects the offer, he may not get the same offer again.
This is how easily you can use dynamic one-time offers in your WooCommerce store.
In the following few steps, I will show you how you can create this funnel using WPFunnels.
For this guide, I’ll show you how you can create a quick sales funnel with a dynamic one-time upsell offer.
So let’s begin.
Step 1: Create a 3-step Global Funnel for your WooCommerce Store
Have a quick overview of the Global Funnels for WooCommerce.
Step 2: Set up Condition to Initiate Global Funnel
1. Click on the Checkout step and select the Settings icon. It will open the Checkout step settings drawer.
2. Set up the Global Funnel condition this way: Global Funnel will initiate when prospects will have a product of the “T-shirt” category in their cart.
Step 3: Set up Dynamic Upsell Offer
1. Click on the Upsell step and select the Settings icon. It will open the Upsell step settings drawer.
2. As the one-time offer, choose “Random product in category” and then select the one-time offer product category.
Here, I am selecting the “T-shirt” category as the one-time upsell offer.
Here I’ve set a 10% discount on the regular price for this upsell.
Step 4: Allow Dynamic Data on the Offer Page
1. While editing your Upsell step page with your preferred page builder, select the Offer Button then allow “Show Product Price” and “Show Product Data”.
As everytime your one time offer will be a random product from the “Tshirt” category, allowing the dynamic data will fetch the product image, product data and price automatically.
2. Don’t forget to add an attention-grabbing headline above.
Step 5: Launch Your Funnel After Designing The Pages
Now go ahead and design your Checkout & Thank You page with your preferred page builder. Then launch your funnel.
Final Thoughts
One-time offer works in almost any industry and if used at the right time for the right product, it can take your sales process to a whole new level and increase your revenue.
Whether you run an eCommerce store, sell courses, provide online coaching, sell supplements, or run any sort of online business, planning smart one-time offers can help to convert a lot of potential prospects into paying customers real quickly.
And in WordPress, WPFunnels can help you set up an amazing sales funnel with one-time offers.
Now it’s your turn to decide on which type of OTOs you want to offer and when.
So what are you waiting for?
Start creating your Sales Funnels with one-time offers using WPFunnels!
