When planning sales campaigns, you have to find persuasive ways to trigger more sales by creating offers and discounts.
81% of Americans say finding a great offer or discount is on their mind throughout the entire purchase journey
One of the best strategies is to create FOMO (fear of missing out) to get faster sales and you can implement FOMO with a one time offer.
A one-time offer is a brilliant sales tactic that relies on a great persuasive copy to make buyers spend more on the spot.
In this guide, you will learn how you can use one time offer to take your sales funnels to the next level. Eventually, you will be able to run successful funnels and land more sales using one-time offers.
So let’s get started,
The Concept Of One Time Offer
When shopping online, have you ever stumbled upon a surprise offer that says, “Buy this product now at a 50% discount! Offer available for today only!”?
If the offer was on something you needed or found useful, it was probably tough to resist. This is a perfect example of a one-time offer (OTO).
A One-Time Offer (OTO) is a special deal you can only grab once within a short period. It could be a one-time discount, a coupon, or even a bundle at a special price.
It’s an offer you wouldn’t normally see on the site, available only at that particular moment. At this point, you have to make a quick decision because you won’t get this chance again.
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 the time and offering a discount doesn’t automatically make it an OTO. The key to a successful offer strategy is selecting the right offer for the right buyer.
For example, if you’re buying lipstick, being offered a pair of sandals—even at a great discount—won’t make much sense. The conversion rate would likely be poor.
Instead, you could offer a product from the same category, like a set of blush-ons, which are more likely to sell alongside the lipstick. Another great approach could be providing a one-time discount coupon to new customers on their first purchase.
Most one-time offers are typically presented either as order bumps on the checkout page or as post-purchase upsells. If you’re looking to simplify this process, consider using WPFunnels.
It helps you easily set up these offers, so you can focus on growing your sales with effective OTO pages and strategies.
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?
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.
Before this, maybe 1 week earlier, promote that this special offer is coming on a specific date. You can 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.
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 can 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.
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 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 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 can 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).
One Time Offer with Global Funnel Example
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 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.
The element of surprise here is the buyer has to make an instant decision. If he rejects the offer, he can not get the same offer again.
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.
Conclusion
To increase your sales, using one-time offers (OTOs) is a powerful way to create urgency and drive conversions. By presenting a one-time discount or limited-time offer only at the right moment, you can encourage customers to make quick decisions.
Whether you’re using a one-time sale as an order bump or offering a special upsell after checkout, tailoring your offer strategy to your buyers’ needs is key.
With an OTO page, you can highlight these offers effectively. To simplify the process, consider using WPFunnels.
It makes setting up one-time offers easy and automated, so you can focus on growing your business. Start integrating OTOs into your strategy today and watch your sales grow effortlessly.
** FAQs **
What is a Special Offer?
- A special offer is a unique deal that gives you extra value, like a discount or bonus, for a limited time. It’s designed to grab your attention and encourage you to take action quickly.
What is a Limited Time Offering?
- A limited-time offering is a promotion that’s only available for a short period. This creates urgency, making you feel like you need to act fast to take advantage of the deal.
How to Promote a Sale?
- To promote a sale effectively, you should highlight the benefits, use compelling visuals, and share it across multiple channels like email, social media, and your website. Make sure you emphasize why this sale is worth your attention.
How to Write a Limited-Time Offer?
- When writing a limited-time offer, you should clearly state the deal, emphasize the deadline, and explain the value you’ll receive. Use urgent language like “Don’t miss out” to encourage immediate action.
What products work best for One-Time Offers?
- Products that complement or enhance what you’re already buying work best for One-Time Offers. For example, if you’re purchasing a camera, offering a discount on a memory card can be an appealing addition.
