The Tripwire Offer – An Effective Sales Funnel Strategy [2025]

When you’re selling high-ticket items, you know most people won’t buy them right away. They take their time, weighing the cost and value before deciding.

You might already use free webinars or lead magnets to attract buyers — great! But there’s a strategy that can take your results to the next level: The Tripwire Offer.

A tripwire offer is a simple yet effective way to turn leads into buyers fast, making it easier for you to build trust and increase sales.

In fact, tripwire pages typically convert at 1.5% to 3%

By the end, you’ll know exactly how to create a high-converting funnel that helps you close more deals for your premium products.

So, let’s get started,

What is Tripwire Funnels

A Tripwire Funnel is a sales funnel designed to convert leads into paying customers by offering a low-cost, high-value product up front.

This small purchase builds trust and increases the probability of higher-ticket sales later.

Tripwire Marketing Example

Let’s look at an example that might resonate with you as an online business coach:

Why Tripwire Offer Works Effectively

Now that you have an overview of tripwire offers, let’s dive into why this strategy works so well and how it can help you boost conversions and grow your business.

• Turns Leads into Buyers Fast: A tripwire sales funnel helps convert potential customers quickly by offering a low-cost product they can’t resist.
• Warms Up New Customers: Instead of jumping straight to high-ticket products, a reduced-price offer builds trust and makes the next sale easier.
• Proven Funnel Strategy: Many top marketers, like Jason Zook, use tripwire training to guide leads through an overall conversion funnel strategy that increases higher-ticket core offers.
• Increases Sales with Mini Offers: A mini digital product, like a 49 business essentials bundle or an ultimate swipe file, can bring in tripwire customers who are ready for more.
• Self-Liquidating Offer for Profit: A self-liquidating offer covers your ad costs while moving people into your email drip campaigns for more sales.
• Works with Any Business Model: Whether you sell 1:1 services, a vault of resources, or software like Crazy Egg, a tripwire item is a top-of-funnel strategy that drives long-term revenue.
• Perfect Add-On to a Free Lead Magnet: Pairing a free lead magnet with a tripwire offer helps you secure that crucial first sale and build a stronger relationship with buyers.

How to Plan The Right Tripwire Funnel Offer

Now that you know why tripwires work, your first step is to plan & create the right Tripwire offer and decide when to offer it.

Let’s walk you through some of the proven Tripwire offer strategies so that you can choose the right one for your business.

i. Split The Core Offer for Tripwire

This is a technique where you split your core offer product and break it into 2 or 3 parts.

In this regard, you can offer one of these parts at a low cost as Tripwire offers, and then funnel them into the bigger portions at a much higher cost.

How to Plan The Right Tripwire Funnel Offer

Now that you know why tripwires work, your first step is to plan & create the right Tripwire offer and decide when to offer it.

Let’s walk you through some of the proven Tripwire offer strategies so that you can choose the right one for your business.

i. Split The Core Offer for Tripwire

This is a technique where you split your core offer product and break it into 2 or 3 parts.

In this regard, you can offer one of these parts at a low cost as Tripwire offers, and then funnel them into the bigger portions at a much higher cost.

Following are some cases where you can use the split offer approach in the tripwire marketing funnel.

1. Multiple Online Courses

2. Paid Workshops and Webinars

3. One-to-one Coaching into Complete Service

ii. Low-cost Trial as Tripwire Offers

If you are selling a high-ticket product or service, then a trial would be more convincing. But most people make the mistake of offering free trials.

You can rather offer a trial for a small fee, let’s say $5 on a 15-day trial. This little investment will mean the buyer will surely test out your product or service.

And after a first-hand experience, there is a higher chance of a conversion.

Following are some examples of implementing a paid trial as a Tripwire offer.

1. Trial on a Software Subscription

Let’s say you offer a software subscription, maybe a WordPress plugin or another tool. While free trials are common, a paid trial can be even more effective for the right product.

Take Ahrefs as an example. They offered a 7-day trial for $7 as a tripwire offer, and it worked wonders.

After the trial, they followed up with a monthly subscription offer. Many who took the trial ended up subscribing because the tool proved its value.

You can apply this approach if you’re confident in the results your software provides.

By offering a low-cost trial, you can prove the value to your customers and guide them towards the full subscription turning a small investment into a long-term customer. It is a great strategy to promote WordPress plugins.

2. Gym Service Trial

If you own a Gym, you can offer a low-cost trial membership for a month.

And if the client is satisfied, you can then offer a 6-month membership with a personal trainer. So, this will not be a funnel for instant conversion.

The initial discount will help you collect potential clients and you can then follow up with a sales funnel for your core offer and start reaching out to them via email and SMS campaigns.

iii. ‘Free product – Just Pay For Shipping’ as Tripwire

This is an ingenious tactic that has worked really well for a while now. People love free stuff whether it is for business purposes or for everyday life.

Offering a free product always draws attention, but if you offer it as a lead magnet, then most people will take it but not bother using it anytime soon.

Rather, you can offer to give your product for free, but ask the buyer to cover the shipping fees.

Now, this product is rather the first part of your whole funnel.

People who take the offer will get educated about your core product and then, you can run sales campaigns to bring these buyers into your core sales funnel and sell your high-ticket service.

Let us look at some of its use cases.

1. Send a Free Book to Sell More Books

You’ve probably seen writers offering a book for free if you just cover the shipping fees. What you may not realize is that this tactic serves three key purposes:

1. It helps build the writer’s brand.
2. The reader might refer the book to their friends.
3. The reader could become interested in reading more books by the same writer.

The third purpose is where you can really benefit, especially if you’re creating a sales funnel for books.

This approach builds trust and opens the door to higher-value sales down the line.

2. Offer a Valuable Document to Promote Your Service

This might be an older technique, but it still works incredibly well today. Take ClickFunnels as an example.

They offer to send their Funnel Hackers Cookbook for free, with just the shipping fee to cover. Sounds like a great deal, right? And it is because the book is packed with valuable insights.

But let’s look at the bigger picture. The book is so well-written that it builds a connection with Russell Brunson, turning readers into fans.

Plus, throughout the book, there are subtle calls to action that promote ClickFunnels. After reading it, many people are drawn to try the tool for themselves.

This strategy can work wonders for you too, whether you’re an online coach, psychiatrist, or counselor.

Offering valuable content for a small fee (like shipping) can attract the right audience and lead them to explore your main services.

iv. Heavily discounted Initial Offer

This is a common Tripwire marketing strategy where you offer many correlated services but start with a low-priced offer on the initial service.

It is a common approach by most service providers, such as home cleaners, dentists, web development agencies, funnel builders, and many more.

Let us look at some of the cases where this is used.

1. A Low-cost Cleaning Inspection

HVAC service providers offer $2 – $5 cleaning and inspection service as a tripwire offer.

Once they’ve seen the value of your inspection, it’s easier to offer them your core repair services, which are usually higher in price.

After the initial inspection, most customers will be more willing to take you up on those bigger services.

2. Dental Whitening to Get Started

Most dental clinics offer a low-cost teeth whitening service is a great way to attract new patients to your dental practice.

It allows potential clients to experience your services without the commitment of a full checkup or long-term plan.

Once they see the results, they’ll be more likely to return for other treatments, turning them into long-term patients.

This strategy builds trust and makes it easier for new customers to invest in more comprehensive services.

3. Discounted Template into Complete Service

As a web designer, you can use discounted templates as a way to attract new clients and introduce them to your services.

By offering a discounted or budget-friendly template, you’re providing potential clients with an affordable entry point into the world of web design.

This is particularly appealing to startups or small businesses who may not have the budget for a fully customized website right away but still want a professional online presence.

Important Factors to Make Your Tripwire Offer Successful

The above strategies are all proven approaches when using the tripwire offer.

And the use cases mentioned for each strategy probably gave you a good idea about which approach is more suitable for your business.

Now, you do understand that the Tripwire offer should be related to the core offer. But there are more things you need to consider when using this strategy in your sales funnel.

i. Ensure Low Cost But High Perceived Value

The magic of a tripwire offer lies in its low cost. If it’s priced too high, people can hesitate to take the plunge.

However, it’s equally important to communicate the value of the offer from the start so potential buyers feel confident in making the purchase.

A low-cost offer that doesn’t seem valuable will be seen as a waste of money. Even at a reduced price, you must highlight the value so customers feel they’re getting more than what they’re paying for.

Likewise, your product/service needs to deliver the value you promised.

Your buyer will only be convinced to take your high-ticket service if they feel your service can truly make a difference.

They will judge your value based on their satisfaction with the initial offered service/product.

ii. Keep The Tripwire Product Incomplete intentionally

As much as you want to deliver the highest value with your tripwire offer, you have to keep some strings attached to be able to convert these buyers to your core product.

So, you need to keep your tripwire product incomplete so that it encourages people to purchase your core offer.

Set up your tripwire offer in a way so that the buyer is left wanting more. The initial product or service should be a small portion of the core product, and somewhat dependent.

Later you can offer the core product by highlighting the missing Legos that your clients won’t get in the tripwire offer.

This will create a curiosity among the readers to look into the Advanced course.

You can then attempt to run a sales funnel campaign to try and convince them to take the Advanced course

iii. Craft a Ready-to-deploy Tripwire Product

Your tripwire product should be extremely easy to use and ready to deploy, which will solve a small but specific problem for your clients.

iv. Keep Limited Slots for Your Tripwire offer

Yes, we love unlimited leads. But to sell tripwire offers faster, it is wise to embrace the concept of Scarcity.

Announce that this offer is for a specific number of people only, let’s say 50. That way, many will sign up simply because they do not want to miss a potentially high-valued product at a low cost.

This will create a ‘fear of missing out’ scenario and will help to reach your target leads much faster.

See this example, here it’s mentioned that only 4 seats left for yoga training enrollment.

v. Use The Urgency Psychology in Your Offer

The Tripwire offer itself seems too good to be true, and if it’s available all the time, that is another red flag. It’s crucial not to make your buyers think negatively of your offer.

So what you can do is, you can keep the Tripwire offer accessible for a limited period only.

Smart sellers don’t stick to only one tripwire for years because over time, this becomes monotonous, and there’s nothing new to offer to attract new clients.

Creating urgency with a limited-time tripwire funnel will help potential clients make a faster decision as to whether they really need it. There are other factors involved in increasing your tripwire conversion.

These are basic things that you need to work on whether you run a sales funnel or not.

How To Create A Tripwire Sales Funnel Within WordPress

Here are some successful Tripwire funnel flows that you can implement right away. Depending on your business type, you may test multiple tripwire flows before choosing the highest-converting one.

A funnel is not limited to just one strategy. You can combine multiple strategies to get make it more successful.

As you can see in the scenarios above, you can use order bumps, upsells and downsell offers to plan your tripwire sales funnel more efficiently and get better results.

Now, the scenarios above may seem complicated, but don’t worry. It’s actually quite simple. You will find several funnel builders that can help you build Tripwire sales funnels in WordPress easily.

And one of the best funnel builders you can use to do so is WPFunnels.

WPFunnels will let you plan the funnel steps visually on a drag and drop canvas, and then you can set up your funnel steps with the offer products, and persuasive copies to turn it into a sales funnel that converts.

Now, it can often get confusing how to distribute your products among the order bumps or upsell. The visual canvas will make it easier to plan the offers for your funnel.

Step-by-Step Guide To Create A Tripwire Offer Funnel Using WPFunnels

For this guide, we will create the following funnel –

So in WPFunnels, you will need to create a funnel with four steps:

• Landing
• Checkout
• Upsell
• Thank You

However, you will also need an Automation tool for this.

Normally, you would want to send a copy of the lead magnet via email when someone signs up. Plus, you would want to follow up with the people that do not accept your offer.

For this purpose, we will use FluentCRM along with WPFunnels.

Now, let’s go ahead and create the Tripwire Sales Funnel for the Personal Life Coaching Service.

Step-1: Create A 4-step Funnel

1. With WPFunnels, import a pre-made funnel template or create a funnel from scratch. [Guide]
   
   For this case, you may import the Life Coach funnel. Once you import it, remove the Downsell step and you will have the four steps funnel required.

Step-2: Offer Your Lead Magnet On Landing

1. Edit the Landing Step and design the page to promote your Lead Magnet. But do keep hooks for the core offer at a lower section on the landing page.

2. On this page, use the WPFunnels Opt-in form to collect leads for people who want your checklist. [Guide]

3. Set up an integration so that when someone signs up, their data will be sent to FluentCRM and added to a certain list and tag. [Guide]

*You may choose to use other automation tools such as MailChimp, ActiveCampign, ConstantContact, or other supported tools with WPFunnels, other than FluentCRM.

4. Then, you can set up email automation in FluentCRM to send out the lead magnet.

Step-3: Set Up The Tripwire Offer

1. Once the Landing Page is ready, go back to the funnel canvas and assign your Tripwire product as the main offer in the Checkout settings drawer. [Guide]

2. Next, edit the checkout step and update the hero section content with your Tripwire offer copy.

3. Allow the prospect to signup immediately via the checkout form.
   **Make sure to edit the checkout fields to keep only the ones you need.

The Tripwire offer copy should be carefully devised to highlight the benefits of this offer, and why they should get it, plus a hook to whats next.

4. Anyone who signups up for this offer, set up an automation to send their data to FluentCRM with a unique tag.
   
   **This tag will help you determine the people who have accepted the lead magnet but didn’t go for the Tripwire offer. So in FluentCRM, you can run email automation to target people without this tag, and run an email funnel to promote either your Tripwire offer or your Core offer.

Step-4: Offer A Post-Purchase Upsell With Your Core Offer

1. Now that you have the Tripwire offer ready, assign your Core service as the Upsell offer. [Guide]

2. Offer a small discount on your offer to make the buyer feel important. In this case, you will give a 20% off on the $1000 service. You can easily offer this discount on the Upsell settings drawer. [Guide]

3. Then edit the Upsell page and devise a persuasive sales copy for your core service.
   
   **Make sure to highlight what they will get, how this will change their lives, and your past notable accolades.

4. Later on, set up an integration to send the buyers’ data to FluentCRM with a unique tag for those who accept the Upsell offer.

Step-5: Thank Your Client And Guide Him With The Next Step

On the canvas, edit the Thank You Step and design this page with instructions on what’s next. [Guide]

And that’s it. Your Tripwire funnel is ready.

Step-6: Create A Second Funnel With 3 Steps

1. In WPFunnels, you can import the Life Coach Free template to get the 3-steps: Landing, Checkout, and Thank You.

2. Here, first assign the core product, i.e., Personal Life Coaching service, as the main product at the checkout.

3. Next, edit the Landing page and write a persuasive sales copy to promote your service. You may also highlight any discount that you have offered for this service. In this case, a 20% discount to save $200.

4. Once the landing page is ready, edit the checkout page and optimize it to match your core product.

5. Then, edit the Thank You Page and provide information on the next form of contact or details about getting on a call.

Step-7: Set Automation To Bring In Buyers From Your Tripwire Lead List

1. Now, in FluentCRM, set up an automation for people who has a tag for Tripwire acceptance, but not for Upsell acceptance. [Guide]

2. Make sure to include the link to this second funnel in the CTA of the automation email

And that’s it. Your funnels are ready and you can start your sales funnel campaign.

**P.S. Only promote the 1st funnel. Use the second funnel only to convert the ones that did not convert in the Upsell in your first funnel.

3 Proven Tripwire Examples to Get Inspired

As you approach the implementation of your own tripwire strategy, let’s look into some real-world tripwire examples that stand out in their effectiveness and innovation.

These cases not only show the diversity of tripwire approaches but also illustrate how creatively they can be adapted to different business models.

1. Blue Apron: Meal Kit Discount Offer

Blue Apron draws in food enthusiasts by offering the first meal for free, showcasing the convenience and quality of their meal kits.

After the initial free meal, they present a tripwire offer that includes a 50% discount on all meal plans for the first month.

This pricing strategy encourages new users to continue with the service at a reduced rate, allowing them to experience the full benefits of regular meal kit deliveries before committing to the standard pricing.

2. Exceed Nutrition: Offer Wall Style 2-Step Tripwire Funnel

Exceed Nutrition introduces a unique twist by using an offer wall after their lead magnet, which presents a free vegan recipe pack. This method showcases multiple tripwire offers, allowing customers to select which product best suits their needs.

By doing so, Exceed Nutrition not only caters to a broader audience but also enhances the chances of matching the right offer to the right customer, thus boosting the potential for sales.

3. Canva: Low-Cost Design Tool Offer

Canva attracts users with its vast array of free design templates, suitable for all types of digital content creation.

After engaging users with these templates, Canva introduces a tripwire offer for their Pro version at just $1 for the first month.

This approach effectively showcases the enhanced features and tools available in the Pro version, encouraging users to upgrade by demonstrating clear value at a low initial cost.

These examples showcase how businesses can effectively utilize tripwires to enhance customer engagement, increase sales, and smoothly transition leads into loyal customers through strategic, value-oriented offers.

Conclusion

The Tripwire offer is a game-changing strategy that can help you convert leads into paying customers quickly.

By offering a low-cost product that delivers clear value, you can build trust and lead prospects towards your higher-ticket services.

The key is to keep the offer valuable and relevant to your core product, ensuring your customers feel they’re getting more than they paid for.

Ready to implement this strategy? WPFunnels makes it easy to create and manage your Tripwire sales funnels directly from your WordPress site.

** FAQs **

How Do I Know If a Tripwire Offer Will Work for My Business?

• To figure out if a Tripwire offer will work for you, start by testing different low-cost products or services that relate to your main offer. Pay attention to how well your audience responds and how many of them transition to your higher-ticket items. If you see positive results, keep refining the offer.

How Do I Set the Right Price for My Tripwire Offer?

• The key is to keep it low enough to reduce hesitation but valuable enough to entice customers. A good rule of thumb is to price it at 10-20% of your core offering. This creates enough value for the customer to take action without feeling like they’re overspending.

Can I Use Multiple Tripwire Offers at the Same Time?

• Yes, but it’s important to not overwhelm your audience. Test different Tripwire offers and analyze which ones generate the best conversion rates. You can use these insights to refine your strategy and optimize your sales funnel for maximum results.

How Can I Automate My Tripwire Funnel?

• You can automate your Tripwire funnel using tools like WPFunnels. This will help you create a seamless flow from your Tripwire offer to your core services, all while tracking your leads and conversions automatically. Automation saves time and ensures your funnel works even when you’re not around.

How Does Tripwire in Marketing Help Boost Conversions?

• Tripwire in marketing works by introducing potential customers to your brand. Once they’ve made that initial purchase, it becomes easier to upsell them on higher-ticket products or services. This approach helps build trust, establishes a relationship, and increases the likelihood of converting them into long-term clients.