How Adding Bonuses to Your Offer Makes It More Irresistible

As a business owner or entrepreneur, you want to grow your business. You want to make sales.

Right?

But what if you’re losing business? What if everyone who reads your sales copy throws it in the trash bin? What if everyone who visits your website bounced?

Never to return.

What happened? Your goals of selling your product or service, and your prospective customers’ desire to fulfill their needs clashed.

You want them to accept your offer. They question whether your product or service will give them the results they want… Whether it’s worth the money you’re asking.

The result is they’re reluctant to move forward… They’re on the fence.

Why?

You failed to make your offer irresistible.

But you can strengthen your offer.

Think about those TV infomercials you’ve seen. How does the presenter make the offer more irresistible?

He lays on the benefits. He piles on the bonuses.

How often do you hear him say, “But wait! When you order, you also get …” And he begins to pile on the benefits and bonuses.

So, what is a bonus?

Your bonus is something extra. It’s an incentive. Something unexpected that enhances the perceived value of your product or service. Which helps get prospects off the fence and is a good way to get them to:

1. Pay attention to your message – a diminishing attention span means people are more distracted than ever before. And chances are, other people are trying to reach them too.
2. Read the copy, because of greed.
3. Push them to take the action you want.

Significance of The Free Bonus

You can’t take the power of the free bonus lightly. It plays an important role in your marketing: It can help defend and justify the value and price of your product or service. And so it helps reduce your prospective clients’ natural resistance.

This leads to an increased chance of making the sale by causing people who might not have bought your product to buy.

Also, you can use the bonus to encourage people to buy during the early phase of your promotion. Some people will delay buying, waiting for the last day, or the last minute, of the promotion. The problem is some forget. And by the time they remember, your offer expires.

By giving away something of value for free, you strengthen your offer. And this might not cost you anything. Your free bonus can come from the available inventory — or surplus merchandise.

For example, instead of only getting your training program for $197.99, prospects also get 1 hour of one-on-one coaching over the phone or on Skype.

Or a free report with valuable information.

But whatever it is, it should be free and seem desirable.

In his book, The Irresistible Offer, Mark Joyner wrote,

“Stack on some unexpected added value to your offer, and your customer will resist less and less … Just be sure to offer something of genuine value. Remember the Golden Rule of freebies: Never give anything away that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to sell.”

Two Types of Bonuses

Now, you can choose from two kinds of bonuses when you’re making an offer: the related and unrelated bonus.

The Unrelated Bonus

This is the every-day gift that is unrelated to your product or service – calculator, bags, or gift cards.

Although these kinds of incentives are unrelated to your product or service, these things are useful to most people.

For example, The New Yorker gives a “weekender bag” as a bonus when you sign up for a subscription.

This gift is unrelated to the service and doesn’t give anyone a better understanding of the benefits of subscribing to The New Yorker. But it gives prospects the extra push to sign up.

With this type of bonus, you’re limited only to your imagination.

Another example: A lawyer once gave me a teacup (with his name and contact info. Slick!).

The Related Bonus

Related bonus is something related to your product or service, like an accessory … a video, coaching sessions, a free report, or a booklet about a topic related to your product or service.

This highlights the benefits of your product.

Say you’re selling a pair of ski boots, you might throw in a pair of ski poles, too.

A perfect example of this is when magazine publishers offer an extra issue free for subscribers.

And say you’re selling energy-boosting vitamins for men and you’re offering a free report.

You’d explain how he’d benefit from this report:

In your free report, you’ll discover:

• How to drive your metabolism so you maintain proper body composition.
• The danger of a lack of adequate vitamins and minerals so you can stave off debilitating disease.
• Why every fifty-year-old should ask his doctor this one question during a physical check-up.

See how this relates to the product (Energy Boosting Vitamins), and how it enhances its value.

If this were a real free report, we’d have to demonstrate the claims we’ve just made. As marketers, you can’t promise people they’re going to learn something and don’t deliver: that’s wrong.

Another popular example of the related bonus is the ones you often see on TV infomercials. You double the product. It goes something like this:

“But wait, order now and we’ll double your order. You get not one (name of the product), but two (name of the product) for the price of one. Just pay separate shipping and handling.”

It doesn’t get any more related than that.

Let’s imagine you’re selling beauty products. You could put together your bonus like this:

A Resource at Your Fingertips!

To ensure you have all the advantages in maintaining a youthful complexion, I’m giving you a valuable bonus. Keep it. Flip through it. And benefit from its invaluable advice.

Your Free Bonus:

An Essential Guide to Healthy Looking Skin (Value $25.99).

• Discover the best fruits and vegetables to promote healthy-looking skin so your skin retains its natural glow
• Learn the right questions to ask your dermatologist so you’ll always have the latest information
• Find out how this one technique can let you remain wrinkle-free even in your golden age without surgery.

Do you see how this is related to the product, and how it enhances its value? That’s the benefit of the related bonus.

Take a quick look at the title of the bonus. Did you notice I added a price value to it?

Putting a price value to your free bonus tells prospective customers your bonus is valuable. It’s just another way of enhancing its value.

When you tailor your bonus to the product or service, you increase its value in the eye of your prospects. They’ll even see you as generous.

This is why you should aim for a related bonus. Here are some ideas:

If you’re a service provider, a lawyer, for example, you could offer a free consultation as your bonus. A dentist could offer a kit containing toothbrush, floss, and toothpaste.

A car salesperson might offer free oil change within a certain time of buying the car.

Bonuses you can add to make your offer more irresistible

These are just some ideas, some incentives, marketers have used to make their offers more irresistible. Use what works for you, whatever produces the most value to your customers.

• A Skype session so you can help your customers with challenges
• A series of email support
• Video or training sessions that demonstrate how to use the product
• A checklist that tells customers how to do something
• One or two of your other courses

Where to put your free bonus

It’s more important you include an incentive than where you put it. But there are places you can deploy them to maximize your efforts.

Opt-in Form:

Whether it’s your landing page or email newsletter, you can always improve opt-in by offering a free bonus.

You can take this a step further by putting a price value on your incentive.

Another bonus option for improving your opt-in is the risk-free trial. With the free trial, you’re saying “try it for free; if you don’t like it, no hard feelings, no commitment”.

With the free trial, you get your product in your prospects’ hands, showing them the advantages and benefits of using it. They get the opportunity to experience all the benefits of your product or service.

Sales Page:

You can put your free bonus anywhere in your sales copy – upfront, middle, or at the end. You can even mention your bonus in all three places.

But if you put it at the beginning or middle of your sales page, it’s a good idea to repeat it at the end.

Webinar:

Ever presented a webinar and in the end, nothing happened? Like no one made a purchase.

Try adding a free bonus. Something of value they’ll want. Something that lets them put the topic of your webinar into action.

Here’s what you do:

You offer it only to those who buy before the webinar is over. This way you create urgency in your audience.

Summing Up

By now you understand how adding a bonus to your offer can enhance its value. That’s why marketers offer free reports. Why advertisers featured it prominently in infomercial ‘buy one, get one free.’

You position your bonus as an incentive for accepting the offer. In giving away a free bonus, your aim is to make the offer irresistible.

You’re sweetening the deal.

So, add a bonus or two to your offer. Make it seem as high a value as your product or service and you’ll have a steady flow of business.

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