5 Secret Triggers for a 5-Figure Challenge
A trigger is defined as, "something that causes an event or situation to happen or exist."
Synonyms include precipitate, prompt, elicit, trigger off, set off, spark, touch, provoke, stir up, among many others. These are things we want to do with our challengers to move them from consumers to customers.
I've got some news for you: sales psychology says we have to dig some stuff up, we have to trigger a response, we have to provoke people to take action, we have to prompt participation, we have to elicit the feelings of buying, we need to stir up those problems, so that people are ready to take and engage in our challenge.
WE NEED TO CREATE A TRIGGER TO CREATE OUR BUYERS
Five day challenges are an amazing way to launch a product, service or offer for your digital business, and I want to walk you through my five secret triggers today. The triggers, when used successfully, can create MASSIVE results.
The 5 Secret Triggers Are:
- Facebook Ads that are specifically based on behavior
- Live Video that is designed to create perpetual growth
- Sales Sequences that are specifically designed to overcome objections as they flow
- Upsells that are created specifically and in line with our products
- Scarcity that is not built solely around dates
Facebook Ads Based On Behavior
You have probably seen Facebook ads, and I'm not denying that we use Facebook ads to fill up our challenge or sell our challenge - we get great results from Facebook ads!
But what we do with five-figure challenges that makes them so different from our other ad plans is using behavior-based retargeting. Traditionally you see retargeting - especially in online marketing - in the sense that you visit the sales page and you get retargeted, but what do you do with all the people that didn't make it to the sales page?
You see, in our challenges, we believe that there are 3 different "groups" of people based on 3 different levels of action.
- Our first level is people who signed up because they were genuinely interested, but they ran out of time and they didn't get to the videos
- Our second level is people that made it through but don't even realize there's and offer because they didn't get to check their email on Friday
- Our last level is people who have visited the sales page but just forgot to take action, or they're busy, or they thought they'd come back to it later, or they just need that extra push or that reminde
There's different levels of action and inaction. There's "I signed up and I didn't do anything", "I signed up and I did something", "I signed up and I did it all", and we want to create specific ads for each of those people.
When you're running your challenges, don't be asking yourself, "How do I retarget people?" Be asking yourself, "How do I take someone's behavior, create and advertisement specifically designed for that person's mindset, and move them into the next step to be ready to buy?"
In our challenges, we call this behavior based retargeting, and it's an incredibly effective secret trigger to move people from inaction to action, with action being a deposit right into your bank account, and I think we can all agree, that's what we're after when it comes to our launches, right?
Live Video for Perpetual Sign Ups
By the time you're hearing this, live video is nothing new.
The buzz of Facebook Live is kind of wearing off, it's now just another feature.
Periscope has been around for over a year. I just recently celebrated my one year anniversary on the platform.
Me telling you, "Use live video," would have you thinking, "Well, obviously, Zach, it's a new social platform," but let's go a little deeper than that. You're already all over the internet about how live video is a game changer. We want to change the challenge game with live video.
You might be expecting me to talk about how, oh, we use a live video everyday to build connection and get people to take action, and that's 100% true. We do use live video, we do get people to take action because of our live video, but we use our live video as a perpetual growth machine.
Hopefully I got your attention.
With a traditional challenge, you open on a certain date and people sign up and if they're not there on day 1, they don't get in.
We've have flipped the script and we've leveraged live video to allow us to perpetually bring people into the challenge. Even if our challenge starts on a Monday, we're always accepting new challengers on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
It doesn't matter when you sign up. You're always going to be able to get access to the material.
What we do is we take live video and we leverage it as a way to continually push people into a challenge, so our existing challengers are watching us live, and we're leveraging that audience to drive more people to sign.
We can see anywhere from 15 to 25% additional sign ups in our challenges. It's absolutely insane.
We are always taking new enrollment for the challenge. We make it so that no matter when you sign up, you're going to get a custom, tailored message to you, and then we leverage our live audience to bring more people in, and like I said, that brings in even more people into the fold throughout the challenge. Pretty awesome stuff.
Strategic Sales Sequences
At Heart, Soul & Hustle, we believe that aggressive email sales strategies are okay, because we truly believe in our products, we truly have the testimonials to back them up, and at the end of the day, selling is human.
We've done another episode with Aandra Bholen where we talked about sales and I won't get into that here, but I truly believe at my core that when you sell to your audience and you believe in your product and you have an amazing product, your selling is a true gift, okay?
Don't take this for granted - it's okay to sell your products.
With that being said, we do something a little bit different, which is, as our challenge ends, we only sell for about two and a half days, but over the course of just over 48 hours you're going to receive six emails from us.
Here's the thing: you've been in launches, you've been part of webinars where you see these sales emails, but so many people miss the subtle psychological secret to making these emails sing and sell, and that secret is that we take our customers on a journey.
We have designed an email layout that specifically moves people from where they are now to where they need to be to buy.
The truth is, some people are going to finish your challenge and they already want the program. Before they even know what it is, they loved spending time with you, they loved your free content, they want more, and they already have their hand on their credit card, waiting to get more.
But that's only SOME people - what about the rest?
For the rest, we identify core psychological triggers that people need to overcome in order to be ready to buy our product.
Three of the core emails we use are objection overcomers, case studies, and result recaps.
Overcoming Objections
We identify the core objections of our program and we overcome them with an email shortly after the 5-day challenge content ends.
Overcoming objections is a skill, but the truth is, it's very, very simple, because if somebody tells you why they're not buying or you're able to identify why someone's not buying, you can specifically address that question, concern, whatever that is, and bring a solution to the forefront.
Case Study
A case study email is a psychological email that is specifically chosen as "not the most impressive ever".
This is not our star case study, this is not the best case study. We have one program where we actually have a student whose case study, they've made like $50 000 as a result of the program, but we don't reference the $50,000 - we only talk about their first $5,000 win.
See, we choose a case study that's achievable.
All of the stuff you see out there, says, "Highlight your best testimonials," and while we do that, we do highlight the "big" winners - we do that on our sales page.
We do that in various emails and in passing on our site, but in one specific email this it's a case study that's specifically someone who achieved a reasonable level of results.
If I come to you and I say, "This system makes a $100 000 for Bob," your thought is NOT, "Oh my gosh, if Bob can do it, I can do it."
It's more likely your thought is, "There's no way I could make $100 000."
But if I come to you and I said, "This system made Sue $5 000 and she did it in a month, instead of two days," suddenly that's approachable. Suddenly you feel like, "Sue is right where I was, I could achieve that level, I could hit $5 000."
You see, we take the traditional case study model of highlight your star student, and instead we take it down and we show the average person and we show the average results.
We don't do the infomercial results of results not typical. We take a typical result and we highlight it.
The Results Recap
In a third email, we recap the results that we've achieved in the past week. When we do challenges, we're really careful to only highlight things that we know. We specifically highlight things that we know and implement in our business.
I'll give you an example. We did a five day Periscope challenge, where we help people generate twenty leads and their first sale on Periscope.
Well, since I was using Periscope that whole time, and I was following along with them, and I was using Periscope in the challenge to generate sales I was able to end the challenge and send an email saying, "here's what I did over the past week, with Periscope."
You talk about your big ones, but if you talk about what you're doing right now, it doesn't feel achievable, because we just said use that case study so you're sharing achievable results, right?
However, if we do the case study first to show the typical results and we overcome the objections and then we say, "Here's what I've done in the last seven days," what we've done now is we've created this cascade effect that makes your results approachable.
We've given them that case study that says, "Oh my gosh, I could do this too," and then we show them what's possible.
Notice how subtle this is. If I had led with my results, people would feel like they can't approach that, but since I lead with a case study and I overcome the objections and then I share the potential of the things that I've done, suddenly we've created a very sequential sales path.
Strategic Upsell
I have been online marketing for quite a while and what I've noticed is that not enough people talk about this strategy.
Upsells are an incredibly natural part of business outside of the internet. It's one of those weird things where we love to take traditional stuff and model it to fit on the internet, but very few people talk about or use upsells!
I think it's because a lot of new marketers take all this work and all this effort, and how can I ask somebody to buy if I just took their credit card, but the truth is, upsells are a game changer. We have gotten massive results from our upsells. I actually want to walk you through one of the challenges that we did and show you some of the results that we got from our upsell.
Let's keep continuing with that Periscope challenge that we did. For that challenge, we ended up selling 104 products at $200 a piece, which meant we did just about $20 000 in sales right from the product?
However, we also sold 19 upsells at $97, which equates to approximately 18%, which is pretty decent for an upsell. You want to be right around 15 to 20% is pretty good.
What that means is that we optimized an additional $2 000, give or take, in sales, so if we hadn't done that, we would have left $2 000 on the table. It was a $97 price point, we weren't aggressive, but here's what we did. Within our challenge, we highlighted the need for the program, we also highlight the need for the upsell.
A core piece of ethical upsells is that your customer can't need them. If you create an upsell that people feel like they can't get results without buying, that's a little shady if you ask me, but if you create an upsell that enhances, improves, and creates a better experience for your customers, that's an awesome upsell.
When you do that, you're helping them create additional results for an additional cost!
Consider getting an upsell in place, and like I said, these upsells don't have to be extensive. I mean, I think this particular upsell is about four files, total, all outsourced and designed by someone else, and two ten minute video trainings, yet the feedback for it has been AMAZING!
Scarcity Factors
What we do with our scarcity that makes it more than just a time deadline is we turn our challenge into a bonus.
We're very strategic about this. We have the videos in a certain order, we create additional products and offerings, but if you take a close look at this five days of content, you've created a miniature program.
Rather than create a scarcity that's purely based off all this content, why not create a scarcity that leverages that content?
So many people panic when it comes to scarcity, "What bonuses do I make? What prices do I offer? What do I do with this, what do I do with that?" and what we've found is you've just created five days of solid content - you don't have to go searching!
You just trained people on a day-to-day basis. You just created shift and results in people's lives. Why do you need to create all these extras? Why not leverage the content you've just created as scarcity? Why not set the replays to expire?
That's what we do. All the replays of our five days, they expire on Sunday night. You see, rather than just having a scarcity deadline on the product, we have a scarcity deadline on the challenge.
Some people ask, "Well, don't you always want it to be available? Don't you always want to?" In this particular case, we don't, because again, we've now created two scarcities within our offer.
We have whatever scarcity you create - give away a bonus, offer a price break, or do a cart close - that's the scarcity we traditionally see, but not only is the program price or availability going to change, but we also have this second piece of content that's going away.
Scarcity is a powerful tool when used correctly, and if you create a scarcity deadline around your challenge, you can create massive, massive results.
If you decide to do a five-day challenge, which I would highly encourage, you should definitely consider creating a scarcity around the offer, and a scarcity around the challenge, because now you have co-existing scarcity, you have dual scarcity, which is the biggest trigger you can have.
Results From A Past Challenge
A Past 5-Day Challenge we did that generated $22,000 in Revenue.
Before I wrap this up that I would like to share some of the results from one of our challenges.
Back in March, we did a five day Periscope challenge. What we ended up doing was having 1292 people sign up for a total ad spend of $434.23, and that's all of our ads.
Sign up ads, retargeting ads, across the board, we spent less than 500 bucks on the challenge. It took us less than ten days, start to finish, to complete all the content, launch the content and close the cart.
We had 104 sales at $197 pricepoint, which means that at our front end, we did $20,488 in sales.
Like I said, we then did an additional 19 upsells, so we did an additional 19 upsells at a $97 pricepoint, which was $1,843, which meant that when all was said and done, we had done $22,300 sales, meaning the average person who signed up was worth $17.28.
Five days of content and seven days of launching, we did $22 000 in sales for less than a $500 ad spend, because we leveraged these secret triggers that create massive buying mindset, and that's what you want to do.
Want to learn even more? Don't forget to grab your cheat sheet and get on the wait list for our 5-Figure Challenge Program.
