How To Unlock the Power of Self-Liquidating Offers

What if you could turn your ad expenses into an investment that not only builds your email list but also attracts real customers ready to engage with your products?

Join me, Gary Redmond, as we tackle the challenges of high ad costs and the pitfalls of attracting freebie seekers. Discover our ultimate strategy: integrating self-liquidating offers into your funnel to offset costs and ensure your list is filled with buyers, not just browsers.

We’ll explore how offering a valuable lead magnet paired with a strategic upsell, like a recorded workshop, can transform your email list into a profitable asset.

• Understanding the limitations of organic and paid advertisement methods 
• The significance of converting leads into paying customers 
• Key components of a self-liquidating offer model 
• Attracting committed customers rather than freebie seekers 
• The importance of effective pricing strategies in driving impulse purchases 
• Implementing a mix of paid and organic traffic for successful funnels 
• Building a self-sustaining growth cycle for your email list 

Learn how crafting a complementary product, such as a detailed PDF guide or a recorded training session, can create a sustainable growth path for your email list. Test the waters with low-ticket offers ranging from $7 to $97, gauging your market’s readiness to invest in additional value while covering your advertising spend.

This approach doesn’t just grow your list; it strategically positions you for long-term success by ensuring that every new subscriber is a potential customer. Tune in and revolutionize the way you think about list building and online business expansion.

If you found this valuable, please reach out at gary@garyredmond.net!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Maximizing Email List Growth With Offers
• 10:23 Creating Self-Liquidating Offers for Growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your online business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach, helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their online business. All right, so today's episode I want to talk about the holy grail of email list growth, and that is the self-liquidating offer okay, or a self-liquidating funnel. So most coaches, including myself, um understand that the your email list size is usually a good sort of metric to determine your income. So there's an old internet adage that generally you'll make one dollar per month, month per email subscriber on your list. Okay, and that's generally turned out to be relatively true for me in my past experience with subscription box coaching and other online business coaching that I've been doing. Like to be honest with you, I probably earned more than a dollar a month because of my specific niche than a dollar a month because of my specific niche, and so you know. But also it was difficult to grow the email list because the niche was. Being specific was a good and bad thing, because you could also be very targeted with your message. But also the list was quite difficult to actually grow. So because, like, even in a wider audience now and if you're going after like sort of a bigger niche of people, you're generally gonna struggle with this growth because organic is slow, okay, and ads are expensive and you can. You know you can always end up attracting, like freebie seekers and people and if you're giving away like a lead magnet and you're promoting it either organically or through paid ads, you know generally you can attract people who are only interested in getting the free thing whether it's an email template or whether it's whatever it is you're that you're giving away for free, you can generally attract a lot of freebie seekers. Okay, and like organic obviously producing content it's a slow burner, it takes a long time, and then obviously you need to build up an audience of people on the platforms, whether it's instagram, facebook, youtube, twitter and then you have to try and convert people through a lead magnet to your list. So it just takes some time to do that, okay. Then you've got ads. Okay, ads are expensive If you send that ads and you're just you're focusing on building your email list and you know you can expect to pay anything from, you know, depending on your niche, between a dollar to $15 for one lead, okay, um, so the real secret weapon here is to have a way to liquidate your ad spent.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Okay. What that means is that you know it's called a self-liquidating offer and that means that I'll explain to you in more detail, but by the end of this you'll know how to grow your email is profitably without burning cash on ads or chasing social media algorithms, okay, so first of all, let me talk about the problem. Okay, so ads are just expensive. You can pay $5 to $20 per lead and hope that they buy later, okay. So if you just have a lead ad running, people are joining your email list. The time that it takes for someone to warm up and know, like and trust you is usually quite a long time, so you can expect to turn on ads and burn a lot of money for quite a while before any of those turn into clients, okay.

Speaker 1: 3:10

The second one is organic. Okay, like, the reach you're gonna get on social media is unpredictable and you just simply don't own your audience and you'll still need to convert people to your email is to really get sales from them. Okay. And the final one is getting people in who are freebie hunters. By giving away really valuable lead magnets and giving away your secret sauce, you get people who opt in and never engage and buy. So the goal really, and the real goal, isn't just growing your email list, it's growing a list that pays for itself and actually buys your products. So, essentially, what a self-liquidating offer is, it's when you have a lead magnet.

Speaker 1: 3:48

In my case, I'm giving away an email writing framework. So I basically have a video created and I'm saying this is the framework that I use to write emails that get sales. So I give away that for free and that's my lead magnet. Away that for free and that's my lead magnet. So if I want to run traffic to that, obviously if people have to pay Facebook to get people to opt into my list to get that lead magnet and learn how to write emails that sell.

Speaker 1: 4:11

But the goal with a self liquid they can offer is, after somebody becomes a lead and clicks and enters their email address to get access to the free thing, you want to try and upsell them with an offer. That is essentially the next step in what they need. So in my case, it's now that you know how to write these emails that get sales. Here is a workshop recording that I've recorded that shows you how to create offers that you can sell with these emails. So, now that you know how to write and send these emails, you're going to need something to sell. Your coaching might be one of them, that's totally fine. Sell your coaching might be one of them, that's totally fine. But this workshop here actually shows you how to create an offer that you can fulfill in just two hours a day. So it's kind of the next logical step that someone would want to take.

Speaker 1: 5:00

And the reason why you want to do this is because and again, I'm charging $50 for someone to get access to this recorded workshop. And the reason why is number one. Obviously, if I can get let's say, my ad costs are $5 a lead, okay, and I can get 10% of people who join my list to buy that workshop for $50, well, 10% of $50 is $5. So essentially, I'll be growing my email list for free, because each 50 people and one buyer will return the $50 that is spent to acquire those 50 leads. Also, what happens is you actually attract action takers and not freebie hunters, because you're going to get leads and you're going to get customers. Most people still won't buy, and that's totally fine. But if you can get even 5% to 10% of people to buy and that one purchase covers the cost it costs you to acquire all those leads, you essentially have a free lead getting machine and you have a. You have a self-funding system Okay.

Speaker 1: 5:56

Now, for example, you might have, you know, a free email template that someone, that someone can use Okay. Or you have a free ads template, whatever it is that you're coaching people on, or, um, it's a diet plan. If you're a fitness coach, okay. And then, after someone you know opts in, you can say, okay, you've got your diet plan. Here's my, here's my meal list okay. Or here's my shopping list. Or here's my workouts okay, and the same with the ad framework. You know, here's my, here's my list of creatives. Or you know, here's my, my list of hooks okay, and it's.

Speaker 1: 6:27

You generally only want to charge between between seven and ninety seven dollars for this because it's going to be an impulse purchase and you know it's for some, as, again, the no like and trust factor is still. It's still an issue here. So if you're trying to ask someone for five hundred dollars when they've just seen your ad. It's not really going to work. Okay so, um, essentially, you want to make something simple, um, or like something specific. Okay. So, like how to create a winning SLO would be number one. Solve a small specific problem? Okay.

Speaker 1: 6:57

So mine, as I said, is like, simply, if you're writing emails or not, if you're sending emails or not getting sales, it's probably just you're not writing the emails in the correct way. Here's my, you know, here's my free training and templates that will show you how to fix that. Okay, so it's a quick win. It's not like an overwhelming course where they have to spend the next six weeks trying to figure this out. It's a quick win, um, and it's kind of fits into what they're already doing. It's not really telling them to do something extra, it's telling them how to do something better, which they're probably already doing, which is emailing their list.

Speaker 1: 7:23

Okay, and then the next thing, as I said, as, as I said, as I sell, I sell something low ticket $50, which is cheap enough to be an impulse buy but value enough to be a no brainer. So it's like $50 to teach you in an hour call, hour recorded workshop, how to create an offer that you can essentially sell to your list without having to take sales calls. Okay, so now that you know how to write the emails and now you have an offer to sell, you can pretty much go off and start doing it. Okay, it doesn't solve the entire problem, because my, my main offer is like I'll T, I'll essentially coach you on creating, creating and sending these emails and creating and sending these offers. Okay, so it doesn't solve the like. Of course, some people will be able to take this information and go off and do it, and that's the. That's the case with all content is, some people will try and do it for free, but there are will people who there are people who will see value in getting help with it and they'll hire you.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Okay, and then the final thing, after you upsell them to your, to your, to your self, liquidate an offer, is you can, of course, um increase their value as well, so you can also create other offers which are, you know, are more expensive, leading up to, of course, working with you as a coach. The final thing, then, obviously, is to get traffic onto your self-liquidating offer, into your self-liquidating funnel. So if you can run ads and get your ad costs to be liquidated just from using your self-liquidating offer, then that's great. Nowadays that's quite difficult without having quite a complicated funnel with many offers. So what you can also do is you can drive your organic traffic in there. So you have an email list, a social media following, you can build a funnel and you can supplement the paid traffic with some free traffic to try and reduce that acquisition cost and make sure that the actual funnel is profitable. So essentially, that's really it. That's a breakdown of a self liquidating funnel. Of course you can make it more and more complicated or whatever, but the key insight is basically that the right self liquidating funnel or the self liquidating offer can help you profitably build your email list with the right kind of people who not only are interested in your free offers but actually are willing to pay you. And generally you'll find that people who are willing to pay you, even for your cheap offers, are worth 50 times more than someone who just consumes your free content, because they actually have a credit card, they have money and they're interested enough to actually spend some of their money in getting a solution to their problems. So the good news, the good thing about having a self-liquidating offer is you don't just get leads, you get customers too, and then you can turn customers into clients because they clearly have shown that they really want your help. So that's essentially it.

Speaker 1: 9:56

Now look. Another thing to remember is a self-liquidating offer. Especially nowadays, with ad costs being the way they are, it's not exactly easy to set up. You're gonna need a really strong offer. You probably need a strong sales letter or some sales copy in order to convince people that your offer is valuable. But it is a holy grail because if you can do that and you can essentially spend money on ads and have all your money recovered, you don't have an ad budget. You can spend unlimited amounts of money.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Of course, getting there is quite difficult, but it is something to try and aim for if you want to really scale your online coaching business. So for you, have a think and have a look. You can also do some research and Google it or whatever. But if you want to brainstorm one small valuable offer that you could maybe sell instead of giving away for free, or if you do have a lead magnet, what's the next possible step that someone would need to do in order to get the most value from your lead magnet? And think about. Could you record a training or come up with a pdf that would help them to solve that problem and then stick it in your funnel and see if they're willing to essentially invest between $7 and $97 to get it. So I hope this was helpful. A self-liquidating offer is a way to grow your email list at will. Not easy to do, but this is essentially a breakdown of how they work. If was helpful, please let me know. You can get in touch with me, gary, at garyredmannet, and I'll see you next week.