There’s an urban legend circulating around the internet about a guitar pick seller from eBay. This seller would offer bags full of guitar picks at ridiculously low prices, instead of offering picks individually one-by-one like other sellers did.
This person has soon become the leader of the “guitar pick” market and wiped out his competition completely. People couldn’t see how he can possibly make money by selling picks at such low prices.
The answer’s: he didn’t make any money.
At least not by selling picks. But he was still a successful entrepreneur. How come?
It’s all about the real market he was in. As it turned out, he wasn’t in the “guitar pick” market, he was actually a member of the “guitar” market.
Every customer of his (every person who bought guitar picks) received some promotional materials regarding guitars and guitar equipment, and they were additionally invited to join a newsletter.
In the end, the guy made his money by selling guitars, and picks were just an entry-level product…
What’s the lesson here?
Get a friggin’ entry-level product!
The trick here is this, sometimes people need to be invited into your marketing funnel by making the smallest possible purchase (like buying guitar picks).
Then once you have the person, you can sell them on additional, more expensive equipment.
There are only two steps to introducing an entry-level product, and they are as follows.
1. Identifying the product
First of all, it needs to be something cheap, and at the same time it needs to prequalify your customers for your next offerings.
Let’s use the guitar example again. Guitar picks are a perfect entry-level product. Whoever buys them certainly plays a guitar. So once we have such certainty we can confidently start to promote all kinds of guitar equipment, and because of this narrow targeting we are likely to get good conversions.
Start by looking at your current product or range of products, and try to distinguish one single element that would be useful on its own and could be sold at low price.
Another way is to look at what your competition is selling within your niche. Can you offer the same things at low prices? If so, do it.
Finally, you can do a brainstorming session and come up with some new (small) products that your audience could consider useful.
Since you’re probably doing business through your own site (not eBay) you don’t even have to be cheaper than your competition. Your offer just has to be noticeably attractive.
Once you have the product identified the only thing left to do is have it created.
2. Creating and selling it
Your entry-level product should be cheap to produce (to get) and cheap to deliver to your customers.
(It’s probably something I should have mentioned in the previous point, anyway.)
If you run an online business and all of your products are digital then creating a new one shouldn’t be that challenging for you. You can always outsource the work to minimize costs and maximize your free time.
When it comes to selling, what’s important is to make your “entry-level product” really the entry level to your offerings…
Bear with me, here’s what I mean: You should focus significant part of your marketing attention on this new entry-level product. Make it the first thing people buy when doing business with you.
Now the most important thing. Almost immediately follow it with an additional promotion and an email newsletter signup invitation. That way you’re building your list of buyers, and at the same time you can get some immediate monetization by selling your first upsell.
Selling your main product
After you’ve convinced someone to join your newsletter you can promote additional products whenever you want (within reason, obviously). Email promotions work very well, as long as they’re not run too often, so make sure to keep your newsletter content-heavy, instead of promotion-heavy.
You can use all the marketing methods you’ve been using earlier to promote your main product. Your entry-level product is just an additional way of bringing people through the door, not a substitution for your previous methods.
However, chances are that selling your main product to someone who has already bought your entry-level will be significantly easier than selling it to someone completely new … and that’s the whole idea.
Entry-level products can also work great as bonuses for joint venture products (or for affiliate products). Picture this, since you already have an entry-level product, and it’s cheap to produce, why not giving it away as a bonus to go along with another, bigger product? This can only increase your conversions.
Do you have an entry-level product yet? If so, what is it (if you don’t mind sharing)?
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Revealed: Why Having an Entry-level Product Can Make Your Business | newInternetOrder.com