The Different Value Ladders Used By Top Creators To Lead To Higher Ticket Sales!

Value ladders are one of my favorite things to examine when it comes to doing case studies on top creators and brands, and today we'll be doing that, but with a specific goal in mind...

We don't want to just take a look at these creators "funnels" overall, we want to see how each one of these creators uses The Foot In The Door Technique to slowly start their value ladder.

You see, Russell Brunson doesn't just talk about Value Ladders a lot because they're cool; they're also extremely powerful because they tap into marketing psychology.

The Foot In The Door Technique: A persuasion tactic used to increase conversion with a specific request by first making a smaller, more reasonable request.

The name "foot-in-the-door" comes from the idea that once a person agrees to a small request, they are more likely to agree to a larger request later on.

We actually saw this a bit in our case study on The Psychology Of Amazon, but now I want to take a closer look at how you can start with one small request, then level it up to a bit...and then a bit more.

So, if it wasn't already clear: we're going to be breaking down four top creator's value ladders, but each one will be taking a look at a very specific way they use The Foot In The Door Technique to start it.

Here are the four creators we'll be analyzing for this case study:

1. Russell Brunson
2. Amy Porterfield
3. Matt Gray
4. JK Molina

Side note before we get started: The most common way of using The Foot In The Door Technique is to ask for someone's email address and getting them to sign up for your email list/newsletter with a direct CTA or lead magnet. 

For that reason, I may highlight that example, but we're going to be going one layer deeper than that for each creator so I don't strictly show you a bunch of creator's email list CTAs.

 Russell Brunson: Book Funnels and ClickFunnels

Of course we have to start with Russell Brunson.

The Value Ladder is one of the big things he teaches in a lot of what he does within his Secrets Trilogy (DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets, Traffic Secrets); and we're actually going to be looking at TWO different examples of the Foot In The Door Technique that he uses to lead into different layers of his value ladder.

Being that I already mentioned them, let's discuss his books and how he uses them as a Self Liquidating Offer to start his ladder.

Firstly, a self liquidating offer is an offer that can be used to run ads that will "self liquidate", meaning it will cover the ad spend with the money it makes with the offer on the frontend; essentially getting you "free" leads.

Russell Brunson Book Funnel FITD:

Note: FITD = Foot In The Door.

In the picture above I added a screenshot of Russell's landing page for his book funnel of his first book in The Secrets Trilogy "DotCom Secrets".

Russell offers the book FREE (just cover shipping), making it really $9.99, and then he offers you two cart bumps (upsells on the cart), and a few post purchase upsells, each offer gradually increasing in price.

Each offer has a smaller percentage of sales, but even the handful of purchases that come in allow Russell to continue running more ads.

Russell Brunson Book Funnel (Fake Example):

• Ad Spend = $1000
• Book Sales = 20 x $5 Profit = $100
• Bump Sales = 10 x $25 = $250
• Upsell #1 = 3 x $200 = $600
• Upsell #2 = 1 x $500 = $500
• Profit = $450 and 50 free leads.

This is a mini value ladder, or what would be referred to as a cart funnel, even before Russel's REAL value ladder starts. 

He gets you to agree to the small ask of getting his book FREE, and then proceeds to slowly increase the ask a bit more over time.

Then, after he already has you on his list, it becomes ever easier to ascend you through the full value ladder.

BUT, before we go too deep into his self liquidating offers, I want to show you another awesome FITD he uses for his product ClickFunnels.

Russell Brunson ClickFunnels FITD:

This next FITD tactic that Russell Brunson uses is one that you generally see with memberships, and something we saw used by Amazon (with their Amazon Prime membership).

Russell is willing to offer a ton of free stuff AND a free trial to ClickFunnels to be able to get you to try it out.

This is not only a variation of The Foot In The Door Technique, but it also plays into a second psychological bias: loss aversion.

Loss Aversion refers to the psychological tendency of individuals to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains. 

So while we may not care too much if we lose out on ClickFunnels as an offer that might go away, if he makes the offer awesome enough for us to take advantage, we're much more likely to not want to LOSE it once we have it.

This is a brilliant strategy for any creator-marketers who have a membership they can use with their FITD tactics.

 Amy Porterfield Webinar (Masterclass) FITD

Amy Porterfield has been absolutely crushing it with webinars for YEARS.

Between being an absolute pro email marketer and crushing webinars, Amy has her value ladder mastered.

She technically calls her webinar a "masterclass" now instead of "webinar" because I believe webinar started getting a bad rap, but she still structures it virtually the same and crushes it with value.

Here's how it looks:

1. You see an ad like one of the ones above (I even pulled on way back from 2018-2019 to show you how long Amy has been crushing this; and it started well before that).
2. You sign up for the webinar/masterclass.
3. Amy delivers TONS of free value.
4. Amy pitches an offer at the end for a course/cohort of some sort.
5. You leave happy regardless of whether or not you bought or didn't because you got tons of value.
6. Amy collects your email with the webinar sign up, and also converts on a high percentage of attendees.

The Foot In The Door in this case was the initial ask of attending the webinar.

Amy's pitch after providing tons of free value also then hits on the law of reciprocity before she then asks her second larger request (the sales pitch).

The Law Of Reciprocity is a social psychology principle that states that people tend to feel obligated to return favors, or kind gestures that they have received from others.

In other words, when someone does something nice for us, we feel a natural inclination to reciprocate and do something nice in return.

In this case, Amy provided tons of value, stacked on top of the fact that she already hooked us with the FITD technique by getting us on the webinar, and now we're far more inclined to potentially take her up on her offer when she pitches.

This is just one of Amy's amazing FITD and funnels she has used, but one that she has had incredible success with for YEARS, even after "webinars" apparently died...

That said, Amy also scales up the offers in her value ladder like this:

1. Lead Magnet (Freebie or Masterclass)
2. Book (Amy recently wrote a NYT Bestselling book "Two Weeks Notice") $15-20
3. Systems That Scale $297
4. List Builders Society $497
5. Digital Course Academy $1997

Amy ascends us into different offers we need at different times.

 JK Molina Workshop FITD

Next up is JK Molina with his Workshop FITD Technique.

We actually saw Casey Parram use this as well in our case study about creating scarcity, so a Workshop Offer is great for a few different marketing levers we have talked about, and something that can work from the beginner level all the way to the largest creators we study.

As you can see above, JK Molina leads with a workshop and then he also sells higher ticket clients as well.

He creates scarcity with his workshops by offering them for a limited time and slowly ticking up the price of the workshop as the deal goes away (I have seen him use this tactic, though he may not every single time).

The workshop is generally priced around $100 or so acts, which acts as his Foot In The Door Technique (after his email list, of course), and something he can just continuously switch around his offers for (switching the topic).

The genius part of this is there's only one more layer to his value ladder: his community.

So here's how it looks:

1. FITD: Workshops with Scarcity (which he is already doing for the people in his main offer anyway...!) - $100
2. Main Offer: Cash Collectors Community, Course and Coaching - $250 per week.

So he is not only using scarcity, but he is actually using the scarcity and FITD Technique stemming off of something he would be doing either way for his paying customers...!

 Matt Gray Welcome Offer FITD

Last, but certainly not least, we have Matt Gray's Welcome Offer FITD.

Rather than just touch on my own Welcome Offer for Superhero Jacked that I shared in this past case study, I wanted to share another one that I love - which is Matt Gray's.

This one is also more specific to the niche you guys are likely in, which may help a bit more.

This Welcome Offer takes advantage of quite a few things:

1. Scarcity: It's only available right as you optin.
2. FITD: You JUST essentially told Matt you are ready to take action by agreeing to join his email list and now he's immediately giving you a way to do just that.
3. Timing: Timing for your audience is massive, and as I mentioned above, this is a way to perfectly time when your audience is looking to take action.

In this case Matt is layering his FITD in two ways back to back, but if he can get you to take advantage of both the email list optin AND the initial purchase he is one step closer to getting you to ascend even higher up his value ladder.

Further into Matt's Value Ladder we find:

• Community OS: $20
• Newsletter OS: $49
• Audience OS - $150
• Content Empire OS - $150
• Founder OS - $997-1997
• Coaching - ???

So as you can see, even without us purchasing the initial welcome offer, Matt is still going to be taking advantage of the value ladder by trying to ascend us through his products slowly, timing where we need to be at a specific time.

 How To Build Your FITD Technique and Value Ladder

My personal favorite is the last one because this is similar to what I have used to add an extra $50,000 in yearly revenue to my income with Superhero Jacked's Welcome Offer which stacks with Russell Brunson's cart funnels - but these are all incredible models.

To recap, here are 5 Foot In The Door Offers to start your Value Ladder with:

1. Book Funnel (Self Liquidating)
2. Free Trial
3. Masterclass (Webinar)
4. Workshop
5. Welcome Offer

And, of course, let's not forget the most common one that EVERYONE should have: the email list.

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