How To Use One-Time Offers (OTOs) To Quickly Boost Sales

Nov 6, 2018 | Email Marketing

In yesterday’s blog post, we discussed the value of a customer list. Today, I want to share with you a simple but oh-so-powerful strategy to take advantage of the fact that your existing customers are your most valuable assets. We’re looking at OTOs, which is short for one-time offers.

Growing Your Bottom Line

To grow your bottom line, you only have a few options. You can cut expenses, get more customers, or increase how much money each customer spends with you. Getting customers to spend more with you without having to raise prices (and often lower conversion) is what the remainder of this 7-day series is all about.

The hardest part of making money online is to get people to spend those first few dollars with you. Once they’ve done that, they are more likely to spend money with you again and again. One of the best times to get them to buy from you is right after they’ve made a purchase. That’s where one-time offers or OTOs come in.

How Do One-Time Offers (OTOs) Work?

The idea is to present your customer with a great deal on a complementary product as soon as they finish buying. This could be a bigger version of the same product (so if you sold them 10 blue widgets on the initial sale, offer them 50 more widgets at a great price). It could be something related (an offer for 10 yellow widgets to go with the blue ones), or something that helps them make better use of what they’ve bought (a book on how to install those blue widgets).

one-time offers

Where To Put OTOs

The best place to start adding OTOs to your funnel is with your best-selling products. What’s making you the most consistent sales right now? Or maybe there’s something you’re thinking of launching in the next few weeks that could benefit from an upsell offer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lower priced product. The volume of sales is more important than your actual profit on the initial offer, since customers won’t see the OTO unless they buy the first product.

Why OTOs Work So Well

There are two reasons that one-time offers work so well:

  • The first is because people are already in a shopping mindset and comfortable buying from you. They just bought one of your products when they are presented with this upsell offer.
  • The second reason is fear of missing out. The whole point of a one-time offer is that it is only available “right now.” Once they leave the sales page, the opportunity to take you up on the offer is gone. This creates urgency and scarcity and with it, the fear of missing out.

Try it by creating an OTO for one of your best-selling products. See for yourself how much you can increase your bottom line by adding this to your overall sales funnel.

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