Funnels can often seem a bit intimidating and it’s understandable. When looking at how most people create sales funnels you’re led to believe that you need a PhD in Astrophysics to ensure everything goes right.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. There is a really simple funnel that anyone can put together that can skyrocket the income for your business.
It’s called the Tripwire Funnel and we recommend everyone start with one especially if your goal is making money online.
What Is a Tripwire Funnel?
A tripwire funnel is a funnel that immediately presents the reader with an offer after they sign up for your mailing list.
The offer usually comes at a discount and is only available for a limited time. Chances are that you’ve come across a couple in your life.
But do they really work?
Do Tripwire Funnels Work?
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is that they work with the right offer, messaging, and audience. This is where many people get tripped up when they try to create a Tripwire Funnel.
In a perfect world, you’d set everything up, and everyone who went to sign up for your mailing list would then see your tripwire offer and buy it. But it doesn’t happen like that.
In fact, most people won’t buy, and for good reason. It doesn’t matter how great your offer is, the problem is that you’re just starting this relationship with a person and right off the bat you’re asking them to give you money.
Why would they do that?
But if that’s the case then why do people do them?
The Customer Journey Is Complex
It all has to do with the customer journey. To understand the customer journey let’s use an example.
Two people hit the grocery store. They both have all of the same characteristics. In this case, they love chocolate.
One buys a candy bar at checkout while the other doesn’t. Why is that?
The one who bought the candy bar was absolutely starving. They needed something to eat right now. They had a problem and were looking for a solution.
The one who didn’t purchase the candy bar wasn’t hungry at all so the thought of buying a candy bar never crossed their mind. It was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.
And this is what happens with tripwires.
- The problem that the tripwire solves might not be the problem the reader thinks they have.
- The reader doesn’t even know that the problem exists so buying the solutions makes no sense.
When people buy a tripwire it’s usually because the offer solves the right problem at the right time for the person. And that’s the difference between a successful tripwire funnel and one that isn’t.
The Most Important Thing Is Your Audience
Have you ever played charades? It’s that game where you can’t speak and can only make signals with your hands. People are supposed to guess what you’re trying to say.
The better the signals, the easier the guess.
The same applies to a tripwire funnel. The better the audience, the higher it will convert. If you continue to send the wrong people into your tripwire funnel then it doesn’t matter how low the price is or how amazing the offer looks.
The wrong people will never buy so before you even consider creating your tripwire funnel you need to think about the people who would be perfect for it.
We can use this blog post as an example even though it’s not a tripwire. If you’re just learning about building an online business then this blog post can be helpful but it’s also something you probably aren’t ready for.
That means you’ll probably scan it and not pay much attention to it toward the end. That’s not good, but it also means that if we try to get you to the blog we are wasting both of our times.
What we should do is focus on the person who has a digital product to sell and is ready to find a funnel that will work for them. That person will pay attention to what is in this post and get the most out of it.
So now that you understand the importance of choosing the right audience, how do you set up a Tripwire Funnel?
How to Set Up a Tripwire Funnel in 5 Easy Steps
Before you wonder what software and tools you need to use understand that what we are going to show you is the tool-agnostic way to do a tripwire funnel. The reason is that there are a lot of great tools out there that can help with this.
We’ll give you our recommendations after this, but you can make this work with almost any email service provider that you choose.
Step 1. Create a Lead Magnet
A tripwire only works if you have a lead magnet and more importantly, it only works if the lead magnet connects to the offer in some way.
For example, one of our students Rachel Fairchild runs a great tripwire funnel where she offers a freezer meal guide checklist for free and the offer is a full freezer meal guide with recipes.
Too often we will see people attempt tripwire funnels where the lead magnet and offer don’t align and it doesn’t make sense for the buyer.
The offer is usually an extended version of the lead magnet or a shortcut to make things faster for the person.
If you’re looking for ideas for your lead magnet be sure to check out our guide on lead magnets.
Tools We Use for Lead Magnets
- Canva if we need to create checklists, planners, or templates
- Google Docs if we are creating an ebook (psst check out how we do an ebook sales funnel here).
- ConvertKit for email setup
Step 2. Create a Landing Page
The next step is to create a landing page so people can sign up for your lead magnet. Your landing page doesn’t have to be complicated.
Simply tell people exactly what they are signing up for by letting them know the outcome that the lead magnet will help them achieve. Even better if you could include some type of image for the lead magnet.
Here is the landing page for one of our lead magnets the Odd Noodle Playbook. As you can see it’s nothing special.
Tools We Use for Landing Pages
- For something quick, we will use the templates in ConvertKit
- When we want to go more custom and direct traffic to our site we will create our pages in WordPress
- ConvertBox for the sign-up form
Step 3. Create a Sales Page
After someone signs up to get your lead magnet they’ll be presented with a sales page to your tripwire. There are a couple of strategies you can go with here.
If you feel that the offer is so good it sells itself then do a good job of showcasing the offer and testimonials. If you feel there might be a bit more education needed for the offer to sell don’t hesitate to include a lot of copy or a video.
The key here is to experiment. If you’re expecting your tripwire to work right off the bat you’re in for a rude awakening. We most definitely hope it does, but if it doesn’t it isn’t the end of the world.
That’s what we do when we build online businesses. We live in a world where we do nothing but experiment.
Some info that you want to be sure to include on your sales page is:
- What’s inside the offer
- Why they’d want the offer now
- Why it’s different from other things out there
- Who is it for
- What do they need to know to make it work and how long until it works
- What’s the outcome they can expect
- Testimonials if you have them
Tools We Use for Sales Pages
- We create all of our sales pages in WordPress (you can also use ConvertKit to do this)
- We use ThriveCart for our checkout
(Optional) Adding a Countdown Timer
This is an optional step but if you want to increase the urgency on your tripwire sales page then you can add a countdown timer to it. Once the countdown runs out it should redirect to the regular sales page where they can get the tripwire offer at the normal price.
For countdown timers, we love to use DeadlineFunnel.
Step 4. Set Up the Redirect in Your Email Service Provider
What exactly does this mean? Most email service providers allow you to redirect your subscribers to a new page after they sign up.
In this case, your new page will be the tripwire sales page.
Step 5. Direct Traffic to Your Landing Page
With all of that set up you need to start directing traffic to your landing page. How can you do that? You can do it in a variety of ways. Social media marketing, blogging, or even paid ads.
One of the best things that you can do is set up your lead magnet landing page as the link in your social media bios. Then create content that will attract the right audience to your bio so that they can click through and sign up.
If you can mix social media and blogging into your workflow then you should get enough traffic to start seeing if your tripwire funnel is working.
If you’d like to try and get a jumpstart on direct traffic to your landing page then check out our AI Pinterest Workflow.
Analyzing and Optimizing Your Tripwire Funnel
With your tripwire up how do you analyze it to ensure it’s working at peak performance? The first thing to understand is that there is no universal conversion rate that everyone aims for.
If you don’t know what conversion rate is it’s the percentage of people that see your tripwire and purchase it.
What to Look for In Your Tripwire Funnel
There are certain metrics that you’ll want to look out for with your tripwire funnel. We’ll start from the beginning.
- The conversion rate of the landing page. How many of the people who are viewing the landing page actually sign up for the lead magnet?
- The conversion rate of the sales page. How many of the people who are viewing the sales page purchase the offer?
The conversion rate of the landing page. This is determined by the type of people that you send to the page. It doesn’t matter if you send 10,000 to the page if they are all the wrong people.
To increase the conversion rate of this page:
- Send the right people to the page.
- Ensure the outcome is clear and obvious.
- Make it easy to sign up.
The conversion rate of the sales page. If you are sending the right people to the landing page for the lead magnet then they should be the right people for the sales page.
Unfortunately, the timing might not be right for the person so don’t get too caught up in over-optimizing this page. Just make sure that you’re doing a good job of answering the questions above and be sure to check out how your page looks on mobile devices.
Tripwire Funnel Success Takes Time
While some tripwire funnels are instant successes it’s important to understand that most of them take time. You’ll need to see what is working and what isn’t.
If there was a guaranteed formula for a tripwire that worked 100% of the time then we would be the first ones to tell you.
