How To Build The Best Welcome Tripwire Offer

Newsletter Welcome Offers have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And almost instantly injected $50,000-100,000 a year into one of my newsletters.

But the magic isn't ONLY in how much money it makes us immediately...

Newsletter Welcome Offers function in two incredible ways:

1. They act as a Tripwire Offer.
2. They shorten our payback period.

And we're going to be breaking down what each of these mean before we get into our deep dive.

What Is A Tripwire Offer?

A tripwire offer generally refers to a low-priced offer (usually somewhere in the range of $7-27, but it can be split test and work at higher prices depending on the audience) that you offer someone for a limited time as soon as they subscribe to your newsletter. 

Tripwire offers are extremely powerful not only because they shorten our payback period (more on that below), but for a handful of other reasons as well:

1. We make the offer at the perfect time: Our audience is literally telling us that they're ready to take action by subscribing to our list. And then we're giving them a way to do that at an accelerated rate with our offer.
2. It gets rid of any "buyer" friction: When someone buys from you once, they're more likely to do it again. We can overdeliver on our tripwire offer, which in turn allows us to remove any buyer friction for when our mid-high ticket offers are presented.
3. It acts as an upgraded "Foot In The Door Technique": The Foot In The Door Technique is a psychological strategy used in persuasion. It involves making a small request that a person is likely to agree to, followed by a larger request. This already took place by getting our audience to join our list, but now with our tripwire offer we started the process of driving them up our value ladder.

If you're unfamiliar with our value ladder, don't worry, I have you covered there as well.

You can jump back into these deep dives for a look at how you should be building out your overall offer stack (and your Welcome Offer will fit right in):

• The Best Low Ticket Offers For Your Newsletter
• The Best Mid Ticket Offers For Your Newsletter
• The Best High Ticket Offers For Your Newsletter
• Paid Offer Rankings Based On Price To Freedom Scale

But as you may have noticed, I'm sometimes calling this offer:

1. A Tripwire Offer
2. A Welcome Offer

So let's discuss exactly why I'm doing that...

 Why Do I Call It A Welcome Offer?

Our Newsletter Welcome Offer IS a tripwire offer, but I call it a Welcome Offer for a very specific reason...

A tripwire offer is generally focused primarily on making the sale.

With our Welcome Offer we're still prioritizing all of the things we learned about creating an optimized Welcome Flow, while also doing all the things a tripwire offer does for us.

So as we move through our deep dives below you'll notice the difference between:

1. A Tripwire Offer: Prioritizing the sale.
2. A Welcome Offer: Prioritizing engaged subscribers, while making an awesome offer.

Note: One of my newsletters actually uses a tripwire offer, while another is far more focused on an optimized Welcome Offer. I will be showing you both!

 What Is A "Payback Period"?

A payback period is a bit more advanced, so I didn't include it in the benefit breakdowns above and prefer to discuss it separately. 

Investopedia breaks down a Payback Period as follows:

"The payback period is the length of time it takes to recover the cost of an investment or the length of time an investor needs to reach a breakeven point."

In this case we're generally referring to when we move into paid acquisition (growing with paid ads).

At a certain point the world's largest newsletters generally grow with over 75% through paid acquisition ... but this isn't  usually the case with creator newsletters.

Let's break it down a bit more...

If I spend $1-3 per subscriber I get with paid ads, and I don't make an offer until my next launch (which could be every quarter), that means I may not earn back the money I spent for 3-6+ months.

(This is also usually the payback period for newsletters who rely strictly on sponsorship; and it can sometimes even be far longer.)

Which also means we may not even be able to track whether or not we're getting BUYERS on our list for 3-6+ months!

But with a Welcome Tripwire Offer we can now do a few more things:

• Offset our ad costs IMMEDIATELY: If I spend $50-100 a day on ads, but I make a handful of sales on my tripwire offer and a cart bump, I can "self liquidate" or essentially earn back all of my costs on the same day.
• Allows us to quickly monitor success rate of our ads: If we can make immediate sales with a tripwire/welcome offer we can recognize that we're getting BUYERS on our list, and not just freebie seekers or people who may not ever be interested in our offers in the future.

This is an advanced strategy, so don't worry if you don't plan on running paid ads anytime soon; but keep it in the back of your mind for when you eventually have a proven monetization strategy and begin thinking about it a bit more!

 Creator Newsletters

When you subscribe to my newsletter I lead by doing all the thing we want to do within our optimized Welcome Flow.

I break down this entire page in depth in our Welcome Flow deep dive, but this time I want to focus on the Welcome Offer.

Before we get there, here's a recap of what I focus on with the Welcome Page itself:

• Optimize for getting them to open the welcome email.
• Tell them what to expect from the newsletter.
• BONUS: Branded Emoji (I discuss in the deep dive).
• A little bit about myself to build authority.
• What to expect in the coming emails.
• Optimize for click with a deep dive on lead magnets and the rest of the case studies.

You can't see all of this in the screenshot, but you can find it in the full deep dive - and more than likely already saw it when you initially subscribed to the newsletter.

Here's a few things you NEED to know before we analyze further:

1. This offer is ACTUALLY exclusive to the welcome page. 
   • I'm not creating fake urgency/scarcity. I am literally ONLY making this offer to people as they subscribe to the list. These offers actually DO sell elsewhere for much more money; but it's worth the tradeoff of being able to build trust and overdeliver for my audience.
2. I split-test my Welcome Offer A LOT. 
   • We're going to take a look at my offer for Superhero Jacked below and you'll learn that I split test A LOT. I have currently tested 3-5 or so different Welcome Offers for Creator Newsletters, and the current has been best in terms of both conversions AND feedback on over-delivery (testimonials/feedback AND leading to high ticket offers).

As we already know from our Welcome Tripwire Offer, it's accomplishing a slew of different benefits.

But it also needs to help me accomplish a few more things...

And each of these will be MY JOB to allow it to do (the positioning of my offer).

For example, my offer needs to:

• Be the next step in my audience's journey. If you're subscribing to my newsletter, my welcome offer should be an obvious next step. It should be a no brainer purchase.
• Confirm my discovery content is doing it's job. If my welcome offer is "The Top 50 Hooks For Threads" I may make a decent amount of sales from my Threads audience joining my newsletter ... but I'm learning next to nothing, and not driving my audience up the value ladder properly.

Read that second one again, because it's where most people make their biggest mistake.

You should be less concerned about how many conversions you make overall, and more about leveraging the full power of a tripwire offer.

 Superhero Jacked

I have over 25 different tripwire offers for Superhero Jacked.

They're all identical, but themed specifically for my audience's interest.

So if you subscribe for a Marvel inspired workout, you'll see the offer above. But if you subscribe for a DC Comics inspired workout, a Naruto inspired workout, or a Dungeons & Dragons inspired workout, then you'd see an offer specific to that theme.

I tested dozens of tripwire offers before landing on this methodology, and then I proceeded to test tons of variations of bundles, bumps and upsells.

These have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars, and almost immediately injected $50,000-$100,000 of yearly income in my business.

But I also use more of a Tripwire Offer than a Welcome Offer.

You can see towards the top I tell them that what they subscribed for is on their way to their inbox, but I don't do much more than that.

Why...?

My Superhero Jacked audience is MUCH younger.

While testing dozens and dozens of tripwire offers, I have also tested the structure A LOT as well; but in the long run this has worked best for this specific audience.

It has proved to be MUCH more important to build immediate trust and overdeliver on my tripwire offer than actually take them through my Welcome Flow.

I believe part of this is because they're opting in for a specific lead magnet (I don't love lead magnets, but they drive 300-500 new subscribers a day for Superhero Jacked, and they're highly effective for content sites specifically); and they're telling me they're ready to take action on THAT specific magnet, not necessarily the newsletter itself.

So I'm taking a less engaged subscriber right off the bat, and focusing on primarily driving them into my value ladder and building trust.

This works best for this newsletter's audience; and you'll need to find what works best for yours.

My preference is still a Welcome Offer like I use for Creator Newsletters.

 Failory

Let me preface this with the fact that I think this offer can DEFINITELY be optimized in multiple ways, and I'm 99.999% sure that it hasn't been split test (I was in the group with him when he implemented it and he hasn't deviated).

That said, it's a good example of an offer that I would consider a Welcome Offer, but one that puts a bit more focus on the sale than I do.

As you can see, Nico from Failory newsletter leads off by telling us that he just sent us an email and asks us to reply and confirm we received it.

This doesn't really nail the Welcome Flow as much as we'd like, but he makes it easy to read and see right off the bat.

I also really like this offer because of the simplicity.

No fancy sales page by any means, but still converts.

I'm not exactly sure why Nico chose a Welcome Offer at the $97 price point (this would imply the he is more focused on earnings) rather than prioritize the power of a tripwire offer at a lower price point with more conversions...

But from what he has said, it has added a good chunk of revenue to his monthly income.

 Matt Gray

Next up we have Matt Gray.

Matt has what I'd call a true Tripwire Offer.

He shares even less than Nico above and dives right into a full-fledged VSL sales page, pushing the sale of a 3 course bundle for $29.

Matt's growth is entirely (from what I know) organic, which means he is doing this to overdeliver and use this as a foot in the door technique, driving people up his value ladder and getting them used to spending money with him.

Another reason I can analyze that this isn't based around income or shortening a payback period is because he also doesn't offer a cart bump or upsell on the purchase.

He could easily attach one or both of these and increase his revenue by thousands and thousands of dollars based on the volume of subscribers he's bringing in on a monthly basis - but instead he chooses to simply overdeliver and let his subscribers decide when they're ready for the next step.

 Nicolas Cole & Dickie Bush

Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush have a similar approach to Matt Gray, but in my opinion they do a better job driving people directly to the next step of what they opted in for.

They have a handful of different lead magnets and newsletters, and you'll only find this offer attached directly to an email course on getting started with digital writing.

So having 60% off the 22 laws of digital writing and the art and business of online writing seems like a no brainer - especially if it's only available for that day!

I also like the simplicity of just offering 2 books for $19 or so (though I think saying they're discounted from $45 in order to get to that discounted price is a bit hard to believe for people considering the price point of eBooks).

 Final Tips for Your Welcome Offer

In this section I want to share a few big tips for getting started with your newsletter's welcome offer.

And number one is making sure you're putting the newsletter first...!

In order to do that, you'll need to know the difference between a tripwire offer and a self liquidating offer (SLO).

Tripwire Offer VS. Self Liquidating Offer

One thing I want to make note of is that a Tripwire Offer can be used as a Self Liquidating Offer (SLO), but it's not always an SLO.

By definition the Self Liquidating Offer and Tripwire Offer are almost identical, but they generally function differently in the actual process they take.

Here's what Social Media Examiner tells us a SLO is:

A self-liquidating offer (SLO) funnel delivers an inexpensive entry-level purchase opportunity that leads your target audience toward investing in one or more substantial purchases. The best part about these offers is that the initial purchase typically pays your ad campaign costs.

Here's the big differentiator:

• Tripwire Offer: Takes place after someone subscribes.
• Self Liquidating Offer: Usually takes place PRIOR to someone subscribing (though a tripwire can still be used as an SLO).

For example, you may see Russell Brunson offer one of his books "for free", which is his "Free + Shipping" self liquidating offer. For every person who purchases his book, it offsets the cost of the ads.

But then if they buy his cart bump and any upsells, they're offsetting the cost of more ads, and generating revenue at the same time.

This is another tactic that can be used, but it does NOT put your newsletter first.

It's also more effective for people looking to dive directly into paid acquisition, where-as a Tripwire Offer allows us to take advantage of A LOT of benefits that aren't directly related to paid ads.

 Kickstart Your Value Ladder

The "put your newsletter first" is going to be a trend throughout all of these final tips.

Next up we're talking about kickstarting your value ladder. 

At the beginning of the deep dive I shared links to other deep dives you can go through to learn more about building out your value ladder, but all in all you can think of slowly building out an offer stack like this:

1. Low Ticket Offer
2. Mid Ticket Offer
3. High Ticket Offer

There are a lot of variables depending on the specific niche and creator, but this is a simple value ladder.

The key is the fact that it needs to actually function as a ladder!

If you're not slowly leading me to the next stage/step in the ladder, then you're not doing your job.

Your Welcome Offer is a piece of this value ladder, and as the STARTING POINT, it's an extremely important part of it.

This means it's extremely important to make sure you're actually prioritizing your newsletter's value proposition and getting your subscriber started in the right direction.

I shared an example of this above, but here's a reminder of it:

If I sold a guide to hooks and growing on Threads, I could probably convert more to the audience subscribing from Threads - but I wouldn't be learning anything, and I wouldn't be starting them in the sequence of taking them through the optimal value ladder.

Split Test A LOT

My final tip is to constantly split test.

This goes for almost everything you do, but with your Welcome Offer it's even more important for me to mention it again.

The reason for this is because sometimes it may seem like you've finally found the sweet spot, but you're actually just a few stages away from REALLY optimizing your offer.

So even when you feel like you nailed it, keep testing.