Self-Liquidating Offer

Summary:

The SLO (Self-Liquidating Offer) is a way to break a bigger conversion from a prospect/subscriber into a customer into two smaller steps with better overall conversion by introducing a much smaller sale offer before presenting the prospect/customer with the large offer.

Name of the pattern:

SLO, Self-liquidating offer

Description:

Suppose you want to sell a $1000 item to the prospect. Getting from a mailing list subscriber to a $1000 purchase is a very big and hard to achieve conversion. To implement an SLO pattern, you first present the prospect with a much smaller offer, for example, a $30-$50 offer which won’t make you a lot of money, but at least does not cost you money. That’s why it is called a “self-liquidating offer”, the sale covers the expense of getting the customer but is not considered a profit maker itself. Once the prospect accepts the SLO, he is moved into the customer mailing list, where the $1000 offer is featured.

The idea of the SLO is to train the customer to buying from you before presenting him with a large offer. It may also be considered as a step in a sales funnel pattern.

When to use this pattern:

When the conversion from a prospect to a customer is difficult because the price of your main product is high.

You get better a conversion rate for the real offer, filtering out prospects that won’t buy (and cutting associated expenses), and lower product return and chargeback rate.

Attribution:

Richard Deiss (at least I’ve heard it from him)

Related patterns:

Conversion, sales funnel

Related anti-patterns:

None

Comments:

None, really.