10 Elements of a Winning Offer & How to Test Them: Operators Build (E9)

Matt Bertulli (0:00)

Welcome back to Operators Build, Episode 9 Have you ever wondered what makes a great offer? See, there's a lot of content online about offers for B2B businesses, for info businesses. There's even a big bearded guy that loves to talk about all those kinds of companies. But what about consumer? I couldn't really find much on consumer. So we decided to make an entire episode on offer. And we're gonna use our new brand, Winks, to talk about offers in depth. We even have two different guest segments today to help us think it through. But before we get to those segments, which are awesome and you should stick around for, I want to break down some of the bigger points on offers and the 10 elements that we used to figure out our offer with Winks and actually that we continue to use because I still don't think we have figured out our offer for Winks. First, what is an offer? See, most people think offer means discount. It doesn't.

Everything is about perception. This is the perceived result your customer wants. This is how much she believes you're going to deliver it. Then there is perceived risk. So there's perceived value. Then there's perceived risk. How long is it going to take to get the actual value? How much is it going to cost her effort money? Your goal with offers is to make your customer feel like they are going to get all of the perceived value and it will take little to no perceived risk and effort. But if you do this part well, price matters less and less. So unlike info and B2B, we just have less things to play with. This is why you see brands focus so much on trust and social proof and those signals, especially when it comes to anything a person might consume. See, a great offer makes the customer feel stupid for saying no and it leaves your unit economics better after order one, not worse. Okay, now that we have a bit of a framework on what an offer is, let's get into the actual 10 things that we're using to figure out offers on Winks. Number one, offer is not just about price and discounts. Offer is product and price and positioning and terms and proof. A discount gives away margin once and then the customer leaves. Everything else on this list is about keeping the list price where it is and giving your customers reasons to come back.

I happen to be one of those people that believes that the reason that people repeat purchase is because the experience was great at every step of the journey. It's not just some SMS or email thing that you send out after. Number two, this is the second thing.

It fits how the product needs to be experienced. This one's big. Everybody on this show came from Durable Goods, Cody being the exception, he comes out of Beauty, and how our offer is constructed for a consumable, so we are selling it as a subscription. We're going to have to do everything we can to make sure that the offer and how the product is experienced, line up with one another. This was very different when I was running Pela. We're very different from when I was running Lomi, or how Sean runs Ridge or Mike runs Simple Modern. This is where things like sampling come in for some brands. If you have a product that people love after they try it, you create an offer that lets them try it. The offer is a product decision. It is not just a marketing one. Number three, your offer needs to be built for one customer and one problem for that customer. In our case, she should say, this is for me. The ad, the landing page, the cart, the checkout, everything should sell the same story. You've heard a lot of people talk about funnel congruency, especially on this podcast. It is real and it matters. You can have a winning ad angle and still pull the wrong customer if the page and the gifts and everything else sells something different than the ad. Number four, it adds value before it cuts price.

This is why I think you see in a lot of subscription brands, consumables, supplements, whatever, they do a lot of gifting, a lot of bundling. Some companies give out credit, access perks afterwards. This is all about stacking value that isn't a discount. Discounts take away from value. And if I'm being honest, we have not cracked this part of the Winks offer stack yet. We've still got so many things we're gonna try. This is a big area of focus for us. The trick with a gift is you want something that is low cost and high perceived value to the customer. So in our case, like a nice sleep mask might cost us a few bucks, but it might have really high perceived value, especially when she gets it and tries it. So your customer actually has to want the free gifts.