Pile the Value

Summary:

"Pile the Value" is a sales patterns to increase sales and reduce returns. It's about giving so much value (in a form of bonuses) that prospects are willing to pay the price just to get the "free" bonuses.

Name of the pattern:

Pile the Value

When to use this pattern:

When you want to increase sales and reduce returns.

How to use this pattern:

Add relevant highly desirable bonuses to your offer. Picking the right bonuses may be a tricky thing to do. It's very easy to fall into "Pile the Crap" anti-pattern, which often happens when marketers use pile a lot of PLR stuff as bonuses.

It's very important to keep bonuses relevant. You would not include a women perfume as a bonus to man pants, won't you? The same principle applies to digital products as well. For example, if you sell an Article Spinner, it makes sense to add a PLR package or articles as a bonus to start spinning immediately. I am not fan of article spinners, but it makes sense. The opposite is also true, if you sell memberships in PLR clubs, article spinners and submitters are great bonuses to include. However, a guide on getting traffic from Twitter may be not that good idea. It would get people puzzled and confused, if the need articles at all, or maybe they should put their efforts into social media marketing instead, so you will lose the sale.

Attribution:

I think Paul Lemberg is the first, I've heard about this pattern.

Related patterns:

Moving Freeline, Affiliate Bonus

Related anti-patterns:

Pile the Stuff

Comments & details:

Pile the Value pattern does most importantly two things:

• No matter how targeted your traffic is, there are always edge cases, when people want something very close to what you offer, but not exactly that. Bonuses allow to cover large audience and avoid losing sales on traffic that you've already invested in and have.

  Notice that you still should target your original narrow niche, Pile the Value just allows you to keep those who's already got into your sales funnel anyway. In fact, you may be able to redirect them later into another sales funnel, specialized for their specific market, if it's viable and you have resources to cover it.

• Occasionally, people may keep the product even if they are disappointed in it or found that they really don't use it, just to keep the bonuses. It actually happened to me as a consumer a couple of times. If bonuses are picked well, that may be more that occasional case and it may result in significant reduction of returns.

Just overwhelming the customer with the number of bonuses or megabytes to download has a questionable value. I've seen discussion on the subject in Internet marketers communities, and the outcome is not clear. There could be markets where this works, but there could be the markets where it may even hurt, especially if you cross the line into the "Pile the Stuff" anti-pattern. Frankly, I still did not buy Bill Glazer's "Outrageous Advertising" book because I don't have time for all the bonuses packed with it. As usual, test, if you can, although with bonuses it may be tricky.