How To Build A High-Converting Tripwire Funnel (From Scratch)

Are you struggling to turn leads into paying customers? Don’t worry, the Tripwire Funnel can be your solution! We’ll explain what a tripwire funnel is and how it works.

We’ll also give you step-by-step instructions on how to create your own tripwire funnel that will boost your business revenue. By the end of this post, you’ll have all the information you need to create a powerful tripwire funnel to help you grow your business.

So why wait? Let’s get started!

What is a Tripwire?

Tripwire is a low-priced offer designed to turn a prospect into a customer. It’s an irresistible deal that helps to build trust with your potential customers and makes them more likely to purchase from you again in the future.

Think of it like a small investment that pays off big in the long run. By offering something of value at a low price, you can build a loyal customer base and ultimately increase your revenue.

The Tripwire offers prices usually from $7-$37, designed to be an irresistible deal that converts a prospect into a customer.

The goal of the Tripwire offer is not to make a profit but rather to acquire a customer and begin a profitable customer journey.

Certainly, here are a few examples of tripwires in real life:

1. Free Samples: Have you ever been to a grocery store and received a free product sample? This is a tripwire. The company is offering you a small taste of their product in hopes that you will enjoy it and make a purchase.
2. Low-Cost Trials: Many subscription-based services offer a low-cost trial period to entice customers to sign up for their service. For example, a streaming service may offer a 14-day trial for $1. This low-cost trial is a tripwire that is designed to convert trial users into paying customers.
3. Loss Leaders: Retailers often offer products at a loss to attract customers to their stores. These loss leaders are tripwires designed to get customers in the door with the hope that they will make additional purchases while there.

The difference between tripwire and lead magnet

While both a tripwire and a lead magnet are used in the early stages of a sales funnel, the main difference is that a tripwire is a paid offer, while a lead magnet is free.

Think of a lead magnet as a free sample that you might get at the grocery store. It’s a small taste of what the business offers, and it’s designed to get you interested in the product.

In the same way, a lead magnet is a free piece of content that a business offers to its potential customers, like an e-book or a checklist. It’s meant to capture the person’s contact information so the business can continue to market to them.

Now, imagine that you’re in a candy store and you see a display of your favorite candy bars. They’re not on sale, but they catch your eye.

Suddenly, you notice a sign that says “Buy one, get one free!” That’s the tripwire offer. It’s a low-priced, irresistible deal that’s designed to turn a browser into a buyer.

It’s works the same in online marketing!

Ultimately, the goal of both a tripwire and a lead magnet is to move prospects further down the sales funnel and towards the ultimate goal of making a sale.

The difference between tripwire and discount code/ coupon

While customers still have to pay for both tripwire and discount codes, they are completely different tactics.

Discount codes or coupons are usually available for a special event or a short period of time. The customers have the opportunity to buy your product or service at a lower price than usual.

Here is an example of Astra discount (Wordpress theme)

You can buy it at $47 instead of $59

$47 is cheaper than usual, but it’s not a low-priced product that is high value enough to attract potential customers to purchase.

This is the reason why discounts or coupons are more difficult to convince than Tripwire. Also, using the discount code should have the right time, and right strategy. For example, Black Friday, Valentine, Halloween, Renew account, etc.

Meanwhile, the price of a tripwire is unchanged.

If you keep reducing your product prices:

1. Customers will not trust the discount code anymore. They will think you purposely raise virtual prices like most popular tactics today.
2. In case you really reduce the price in the long run, the profit will narrow, and over time it may cause you to lose money (because advertising costs are increasing).

Instead, a perfect tripwire is a low-priced but high-quality product. Since then, customers have felt this is a bargain, and they are easy to buy.

Tripwire’s goal is not profit. It’s to gather a quality customer list. People took out their cards for a small fee. Then we’ll invite additional products, upsell, down-sell, … That’s where we really make money.

What is Tripwire Funnel?

It would be a waste if you only sell tripwire products individually and then hope they will return and buy your other someday.

One mistake marketers make is offering products or services, then sending daily emails to customers to nurture relationships, sell other products, and hope they will buy.

This is not entirely wrong.

However, you will want to be able to sell as many as possible right away. Because you never know when the customer will come back to buy from you or maybe never.

Therefore, we need to use the sales funnel – Tripwire Funnel.

A “Tripwire Funnel” is a marketing strategy that aims to convert website visitors into paying customers. It works by offering an irresistible deal (also known as the “tripwire offer”) to potential customers to entice them to make a purchase.

This deal is usually low-priced but highly valuable. Once the customer makes a purchase, they enter the “funnel,” which is a series of follow-up offers designed to increase the customer’s lifetime value.

Here is a tripwire funnel map

Depending on your strategy, your funnel can be different. It will basically have 4 pages.

• Landing page
• Order Bump
• Upsell or down-sell page
• Thank You Page

Who should use a tripwire funnel?

A tripwire funnel can convert website visitors into paying customers by giving them a low-priced product upfront. Here are those who can get the best of this tool:

• Service providers: Graphic designers and digital marketers can offer their services at a luring cost to entice potential customers. Then, they will be willing to purchase more extensive services. 
• Consultants/Coaches: A short online course or coaching session can make an excellent tripwire offer for those people. Customers need trust in their services first before registering for their longer package. 
• E-commerce stores: Customers always want to test the products before they buy. Hence, online retailers of physical products can offer a related product, like a sample or a voucher, for their potential buyers to try first. 

How does the Tripwire funnel work?

There are several ways to use a tripwire funnel. But business owners follow the same process as follows:

• First, you make and advertise an item. 
• Your customers access your offer, which takes them to the opt-in page. They can learn about the offer there. 
• If they decide to purchase the item, they will jump to the tripwire page to get it at a lower price. This option is one-time and limited. 
• They make a purchase and then move to the thank you page. 

Let’s start with the opt-in page.

It’s maybe a free plus shipping offer, give away free samples of your product or create a fantastic white paper report on your industry and give it away for free.

After that, you maybe have an order form.

This is one of my favorite pages after they are purchased, and you can also create an order form bump on this page.

And if they purchased that, you take them to the OTO page or a one-time offer page. We also have a one-time down sale.

This is the secret to increasing profits behind the Tripwire Funnel.

According to Dan S.Kennedy shared in The Ultimate Marketing Plan book:

IN EVERY BUSINESS, there are always customers who “Buy now”. But sadly, most business owners do not make any special efforts to sell to them.

These customers are precious, so instead of redirecting them to the thank you page, you should convince them to buy more products. Not all but a certain percentage of them will purchases. This helps you to increase your profits significantly.

Nowadays, although this approach is not new, however, very few people do it.

Because of that, you will get a huge advantage.

To understand what I said, you can scroll down to Tripwire funnel examples to see how famous marketers used it in their businesses.

Components of the tripwire funnel

Choosing to create a tripwire funnel is not enough for success. Instead, your tripwire offer should have these factors:

• Low-cost: The price of your offer must be low. For example, if the core product costs $500, the tripwire offer should be around $50. 
• High-quality: Despite the low cost, your tripwire must be of high quality to build trust in your customers and encourage them to keep in touch with you. 
• Related to the core offer: Always stick to the core offer when making your tripwire offer. 
• Attainable goal: Your customer should achieve their goals by using your tripwire product quickly. 

Upsell: Ensure to include the core product on your thank-you page.

Why Should You Use A Tripwire Funnel?

Tripwire marketing boosts sales by offering your prospects and leads to an appealing offer. Here are the reasons why you should create a tripwire funnel. 

1. Offset ads costs

The tripwire funnel increases the conversions at the first stage of your funnel, thanks to the low-ticket initial offers. It means that you can bring more paid traffic to your sales funnel, which helps cover the advertising costs. 

The ultimate goal of the first funnel stage is to grow your customer list. With a good tripwire funnel, you can build core offers, and extra upsells to generate profit.

When building a sales funnel, the budget for advertising is vital. Hence, business owners can take advantage of the tripwire funnel to optimize their finance. 

2. Expanded customer base

You may connect to more audiences by offering your industry a low-price offer. Your products will become more popular, too. 

Furthermore, you can overdeliver your first products to those customers, forming a strong relationship with them. This value is essential to all business owners. 

If you choose this approach, your tripwire must deliver amazing value. In addition, the information you give on the offer page must be accurate. 

Those new, passionate customers are far more inclined to buy additional goods you offer in the future via an email marketing campaign or new product launches. It’s a terrific way to bring more loyal customers.

Increased order value

Every marketing effort aims to maximize the value of each customer who enters your sales funnels. In the case of tripwire, it gives you many chances to raise the average amount of money a customer is ready to spend with you.

First, thanks to the offer, you can obtain the first sale quickly. Then, you will sell the core product via the upsell. It’s also a good chance to add some order bumps to increase value. 

Second, you can add a down-sell from the core product. It means that you give buyers an option when they aren’t ready to pay for your core product. 

More profits

A tripwire funnel may help you develop a rapport with them and boost your sales by providing your prospective consumers with valuable things at a cheap price point. 

As a result, people will start to trust you and regard you as a reliable resource for knowledge and products.

Clients who have bought something from you are more inclined to make another purchase. They’ve already committed to working with you and made the first move toward that goal.

After that, you may use follow-up marketing strategies to upsell and cross-sell further services and products, increasing your profits even more.

What makes your tripwire successful?

When you create a Tripwire for your business, there are certain things you must be focused on, depending on the situation. While the cost is low, you want to offer a high perceived value and a money-back guarantee.

Show that there’s no risk in trying it out, and people will be more enticed to spend money on your offer. 

Of course, the product/service quality still needs to be very high, although you can leave your customers wanting more. Offering some of the free content and then requiring customers to pay for the Tripwire can help a lot. 

Plus, you always want to generate a sense of urgency, making you generate more customers quickly. Keep the Tripwire relevant and specific, study your competitors, and always try to add more to the offer to make it irresistible.

Tips for creating a great Tripwire

• First, you want to have a perfect lead magnet. You must then find Tripwire offers that relate to the lead magnet and show its value and quality.
• Identify the type of Tripwire you want to offer if you’re going to deliver a quick win, if it focuses on skills or if you are prioritizing any rapid consumption via a downloadable Tripwire.
• When you choose the Tripwire name, try to be very creative and make it distinct, rewarding, and easy to understand.
• You should always create outstanding visuals for your Tripwire. Eventually, you can use a lot of red because it generates a sense of urgency.
•  Design a great landing page and make sure you address all customer requirements on it. You also want to have a call to action at the end, eventually boosted by an excellent deal for your Tripwire product.
• Always keep the Tripwire price point entry-level, as it will help you bring in more sales.
•  Establish a powerful email campaign that will make people buy your Tripwire offer. You should also follow up with customers to ask for feedback. Don’t step over this since it’s a crucial part of the process. You want to be 100% sure that you’re getting the best value and quality. 

How to use a tripwire funnel in your business?

In the value ladder post, I talked about the sales funnel inside the value ladder. You can see that the tripwire funnel will be in the middle (buyer funnel) and can be completely combined with other sales funnel to get the highest profit.

There are two main types of tripwire funnels:

• The standard funnel (Paid offer) begins with a tripwire sales page. 
• The 2-step funnel (Free offer) begins with a freebie or lead magnet on the opt-in page. 

Because of the different purposes, these funnels include different pages. You can choose the right one for your needs as you create the sales funnel.

1. Use the Tripwire funnel directly

First, you will attract potential customers through tripwire. Then build a relationship and nurture them to sell more products and services on a higher tier of the value ladder.

Pros: Build a list of hungry qualified buyers without wasting time on “Freebie-Seekers” who rarely purchase anything. Persuade people who already buy to buy is easier than persuading people to buy your product or service for the first time.

You can watch the video below to see Peng Joon reveal the secret behind his tripwire funnel that helped him earned  over $10M.

2. Lead Funnel + Tripwire funnel

This model applies to business owners who have a low budget. First, you will attract potential customers through the lead magnet. Then you will invite them to buy Tripwire on the thank you page, as shown below.

Pros: The cost to generate a list of potential customers will cheaper and easier. After getting their email address:

1. Use tripwire to upsell directly to filter out qualified buyers.
2. Nurture and build relationships to sell other products and services in the long term.

Here is an example

The 99 Instagram Secrets is an affiliate funnel that I have used. In fact, the idea behind this funnel is learned from the 99 Marketing Secrets Blackbook of Russell Brunson.

This is a combination of the lead funnel and the tripwire funnel together.

The first page provides an ebook with 99 tips to help you increase followers on Instagram.

Visitors just need to leave their email addresses so they can download the ebook for free. On the second page, I will fulfill my promise by sharing the link to download in step #1

Additionally, in step #2 is a link to the tripwire offer (the product I’m promoting as an affiliate).

After clicking on the link, the visitor will be redirected to the sales page (free + shipping).

Best 3 tripwire funnel examples

Here are some examples of how to apply the tripwire funnel in online business that you can consult

1. Perfect Webinar Scripts Funnel – Russell Brunson

Website: Perfectwebinarsecrets.com

Price: $7

Why it’s work?

For just $ 7, you’ll not only get the framework and script that helped Russell Brunson and his students create scripts for the webinar with high conversion rates and get massive money from that but also training videos to guide you every step inside.

I have talked about this product in the Perfect Webinar Script review. You can click here to read.

Suppose you are someone who loves selling onstage or selling high-priced products like consulting services or real estate. You won’t miss the chance to create a perfect presentation, script for just $ 7.

In fact, the profit he earned is in the Upsell. Check out the image below to see Russell Brunson’s funnel structure.

2. Instagram Mastery Ebook

Website: Yesocialmediaagency.com

Price: $7

Why It’s work?

Similar to the perfect webinar script funnel above, the Instagram mastery book funnel starting at $7 too. He gives you 7 Steps To Master Instagram.

There are so many similar products and ebook people giveaways out there for free, and you might think this is nothing special and hard to attract potential customers well.

However, if you know the author owns one of the Instagram accounts with more than 250k followers, you will think this is a real bargain.

Follow his Instagram profile @the_boss_entrepreneur_inc here.

On the checkout page, there are two options: $ 7 and $ 25 (plus Audio book).

Not stopping there, in the order form, he will invite you to upgrade your order through a one-time offer for $ 37.

After completing the payment, you will be redirected to the Upsell page with an incredible offer Instagram Mastery For Business ebook one time offer$ 297

Besides, on the Thank You page, he also linked to another sales funnel.

To make it easier to understand, see the funnel map below.

3. Sell Like Crazy Book – Sabri Suby

Website: Selllikecrazybook.com

Price: Free + $6.95 for shipping

Why It’s work?

In case you don’t know, Sabri Suby is a CEO of King Kong (Digital Agency) and one of Australia’s fastest-growing businesses.

Sell ​​Like Crazy is one of the best-selling marketing books on amazon with a current rating of 4.6/5.

And ranked # 6 in Industrial Marketing (Books). Very impressive, right!

Instead of spending up to $ 24.78 to buy a book on Amazon, you can get this book for free and pay a small fee of $ 6.97 for shipping (cheaper than the Amazon Kindle) when signing up on the sales page of the author.

Also, you will receive other bonuses that are completely free.

Therefore, for $ 6.95, this is so cool and could attract many small and medium business owners.

You know, he cannot make profits with $ 6.95. The real profit is inside the sales funnel. This is also a Tripwire funnel (some people will call it Free + shipping funnel or book funnel), but the process behind it is the same.

After click on the “Claim special offer” button at the checkout page, you can easily upgrade your order through an order bump form for $ 37

Similar to sales funnels above, after you press the check-out button, the customer will be redirected to the upsell page with other one-time offers so they can upgrade their orders.

After watching the video, the call to action button will appear.

What is different between this funnel compared to the cases above is if you clicked on “No thanks, I don’t want this once…” You will be redirected to the downsell page.

The same goes for the upsell #2 page. To analyze each page will be very long, so that we will talk about it in another post. In this case, to save time, you can see the funnel map below to understand how his funnel works.

Exclusive Bonus: Tripwire Funnel Template Free Download

• Funnel #1: Click here to download
• Funnel #2: Click here to download
• Funnel #3: Click here to download
• Funnel #4: Click here to download
• Funnel #5: Click here to download

How To Test And Measure Your Tripwire Funnel? 

To be sure that your tripwire sales funnel is running effectively and delivering the intended results, you have to test and analyze it. We can try the following ideas: 

Step 1: Choose the metrics 

The metrics you choose depend on your goal, which can be lead generation or sales increase. Then, track the right metric to determine if your tripwire funnel is performing well. 

You should often focus on the conversion rate when building a tripwire funnel. We have done a lot of research, and here are some standards for each page of your tripwire funnel:

• Tripwire sales page: A conversion rate of 0.5% is low for a tripwire page. Most range from 1.5 to 3%. The highest we have seen is around 5%. 
• Order bump: A good conversion for your order mump, which is often at the checkout page, is from 40 to 60%. You should work harder to improve your tripwire funnel’s performance if it’s below that range. 
• Upsell: The average conversion rate for upsell pages is around 20%. 

Besides, you can use click-through rates, bounce rates, or revenue to keep track of your funnel’s performance.

Step 2: Test different elements

You need to test every element of the tripwire funnel, including the image, offer, headling, and CTA. A/B testing is an excellent choice for this test. It’s about creating and comparing two versions to determine which performs better. 

Then, you can analyze the results and metrics to find the superior version. Sometimes, you need to adjust some elements to optimize the page, such as:

• The form placement and page layout
• The color, style, text size, and copy language
• Price of the tripwire offer
• Price of the upsell offer
• The tripwire offer itself
• The style and copy of email sequences

Conclusion

The tripwire sales funnel is a simple yet powerful sales tactic. You only need to make an offer that is hard to reject because of its low cost and high value. 

To create a tripwire funnel, try utilizing the ideas outlined in this article. You’ll be amazed by how much it boosts your profit margins and conversion rates.

Hopefully, this article has helped you learn more about tripwire funnels. What do you think about them? Please share your opinions in the comment section. It’s how our marketing community grows up!

Thank you for reading and sharing!