Have you heard of the Tripwire funnel?
It’s a compelling way to get new buyers through the door using a low-ticket offer. They may have never done business with you before.
Tripwire sales funnels help you grow your list of buyers by lowering the barrier to entry and making it insanely easy to do business with you!
You may be selling physical products or online courses, tripwire marketing is for everyone.
In this post, we’ll see how to create compelling tripwire offers to get micro-commitment and set up a profitable and scalable tripwire funnel in WordPress.
Bingo! Let's get started.
Contents
Tripwire offers are low-dollar offers, intentionally priced low to make visitors convert into instant buyers.
They’re well-aligned with your core offer and help you convert a percentage of these buyers into high-ticket clients.
The best part? Creating a successful tripwire offer doesn't require long and complicated sales pages. A short persuasive argument to sell a product under $50 is enough to seal the deal!
Once you've got the prospect's foot through the door, increase their order value systematically.
You can make relevant post-purchase upsell offers to get better returns on your ad spending.
Take a cue from the masters of conversion, Starbucks, who have executed the tripwire strategy brilliantly.
They introduced a new size called Picco for all their beverages. It’s the smallest size at a super low introductory price.
This offer, advertised on the front door, allows Starbucks to attract new customers—those who’ve probably never bought from Starbucks before!
Once inside, these new customers complement their purchases with brownies or sandwiches, hence checking out with higher order values.
Thus, tripwire funnels, also called break-even-funnels, help qualify buyers instead of leads.
Foot-in-the-door is based on the principle of commitment and consistency.
It means people are more likely to follow through when they commit to something.
Two scientists conducted a study at Stanford University to understand the usefulness of the technique.
A group of women received a request to answer questions about their soap usage.
This small request was followed by allowing a group of men to enter their houses and review the products they owned.
When the request to enter the house was preceded by a short questionnaire about their soap usage, the acceptance rate was much higher.
But when a small request didn’t precede it, it had a low acceptance rate.
Hence the scientists concluded that making a small request before a bigger one, also called the foot-in-the-door technique, is a great way to persuade people to say yes.
Two Ways To Implement the Tripwire Funnel in Your Business
Here are the two ways to create the tripwire funnel:
Both methods work equally well. It’s only a matter of testing to see which of these converts higher for the products and services you sell.
Make sure your free tripwire offer is related to your opt-in and provides a ton of value to your ideal customers and set up retargeting ads for best results.
Let’s take a look at some incredible examples of Tripwire funnels.
This one isn’t a one-time offer and one can buy anytime through her website.
The idea is to familiarize people with Kim’s paid products through this irresistibly priced tripwire offer.
Here’s what stands out about it:
Challenge funnels are a big hit these days! People feel motivated to act when there’s a community of like-minded individuals trying to achieve the same goal.
Even in niches like weight loss, where everyone’s specific goal can be different, the process is the same, and hence people feel more empowered when treading the same path with others.
Hydrant is a lightly flavored, real juice-powered, refreshing electrolyte mix that helps you hydrate.
Here are the key takeaways from its tripwire offer sales page.
Here’s what Nik Sharma, a marketing consultant for the DTC brand has to say:
Someone higher in the funnel is keener to try a variety pack or a sampler with the least amount of dollars spent (i.e., a 3-can sampler with $5 shipping), whereas when someone is more educated through the funnel, they're open to spending more. - Nik Sharma.
Nik Sharma
Founder, Sharma Brands
See how Hydrant uses order bumps to cross-sell highly relevant items to the buyers:
Setting up a tripwire funnel is easy. We're going to be using FunnelKit Funnel Builder to do that!
FunnelKit is a WooCommerce plugin that allows you to build beautiful lead generation funnels and sales funnels using pre-built templates.
With a robust rule builder to display right offers to the right people, built-in A/B testing, in-depth analytics, and more, you have a full package to build funnels that convert.
Make sure to install and activate FunnelKit Funnel Builder before moving to the main process.
To add a new funnel, simply hit the ‘Create New Funnel’ button on the top right. This will allow you to see all the pre-built templates that we have.
You will see a library of pre-built templates. These templates are designed for different purposes and for selling physical as well as digital products.
For our use case, we've chosen one of the templates called 'BestTaste'.
FunnelKit is compatible with various page builders such as Divi, Elementor, Oxygen, Gutenberg (Block Editor) and others through shortcodes.
We're going to be using Elementor to customize our template. So let's import it by clicking on the 'Import This Funnel' button.
Your tripwire funnel will have a sales page, checkout page, one-click upsell offer and a thank you page.
Here's what the backend interface with the pre-built funnel looks like:
The next thing you want to do is edit the landing page for the tripwire offer.
A high-converting landing page has the following sections:
Since we have imported a pre-made template, all we have to do is edit the text and add our own images.
You can, of course, add your own sections and remove the ones you don’t want.
The checkout page is fully customizable. You can edit the fields you want to show, split the checkout process into multiple steps, add new fields, and more.
Here’s the flexible field editor that allows you to do all this and more:
Take a look at the customized checkout page template:
This checkout page is designed with FunnelKit’s WooCommerce checkout manager plugin.
It looks beautiful and has all the high-converting elements you need to enhance conversions.
Order bump is a meaningful offer that’ll help you boost your AOV. To add a bump, make sure you have the relevant product already added under WooCommerce - Products.
The tripwire examples that we discussed above all use the power of order bumps to make more dollars per transaction.
And why not? You have nothing to lose here. Adding an order bump in FunnelKit is really easy.
All you have to do is click on the ‘Add Order Bump’ button below the checkout page.
Next, enter the name and import the order bump skin you want.
You can select the product to display as an order bump:
Choose the product to set up an order bump. You must add the product you'd like to cross-sell as an order bump under WooCommerce > Products.
Once you do that, select the product in the products section of the order bump. Select the quantity and configure the discount amount (if applicable). Further, stylize the order bump element.
Here you can add the title and description to match the product and make it sound desirable:
Be sure to write a compelling description to make the order bump in your tripwire funnel sound desirable.
Keep in mind that everything is fully customizable, from the styling of the section to the text to order bump skin, colours and more.
You can even add more than one order bump using the same interface with ease.
👉 Check out our complete WooCommerce order bump post for crafting compelling offers.
The one-click upsell template is pre-selected. So, to add one-click upsells and downsells, simply click on the page to start customizing them.
Here you'll be able to add post-purchase upsells and downsells. Further, dynamically link them, such that on acceptance of one offer you can show the other and on rejection of it, you can show another.
👉 Learn how to offer relevant product recommendations in your WooCommerce store to boost your store’s average order value (AOV).
Next up, add a custom thank you page. Here's the template for our thank you page:
👉 Check out our detailed guide to designing your WooCommerce thank you pages for your store for relevant product recommendations.
By now, you’ve understood tripwire marketing and how it works. You’ve also seen some really good examples executed well by top-notch marketers.
Let's study the best practices.
Yes, at the start, it might look like tripwire offers aren’t designed to make profits, and they’re the loss-leaders, but in reality, profits can be made on the back end with additional offers.
With paid ad costs going through the roof, it only makes sense to boost a buyer’s average order value systematically.
What’s the best part? You have nothing to lose here.
An order bump is an optional offer on the checkout page.
You don’t have to enable it by default. If a buyer is genuinely interested in what you have, they can add it to their order with a single click. If not, they make the main purchase and move on.
The UI is clean and compelling but not pushy. It’s a subtle nudge, a simple reminder.
Next, show them one-click upsells. With one-click upsells you’ve already secured the initial sale.
Plus, let’s not forget that it’s five times more cost-effective to sell to the same buyer than acquire an entirely new customer.
By not including these complementary offers in your funnel, you can miss the opportunity to make extra money per transaction.
Tripwires are great ways to get people interested in your business. But how do you keep them engaged so that they may spend more? `
Automated sequences are the way to go about it! After you’ve got people through the door, nurture them and engage them through automated sequences.
Based on your strategy, marketing automation can help you sell while you sleep! Take a cue from the ace marketer, Jill Stanton's abandoned cart recovery email from her tripwire funnel:
You can create an abandoned cart recovery strategy for free by using the FunnelKit Automations plugin for WordPress.
Go further by welcoming the new buyers using post-purchase emails. Nurture the new buyers and gradually turn them into high-ticket clients.
That’s all for this post! We looked at how tripwire funnels work and how you can use them to grow your email list and make profits on the backend.
A high-quality product with a high perceived value but priced irresistibly low is the way to go about it.
Place your tripwire offer right after the lead magnet, or start with the tripwire offer itself, and test out different methods.
Make sure your tripwire aligns well with your core offer and represents your brand well. That’s all!
Equipped with all the new knowledge about tripwire funnels and having learned from the various examples, you’re all set to create a great offer yourself.
To learn more about FunnelKit’s Funnel Builder, click on the button below.
Happy selling!
