Claude Hopkins said, “A good article is its own best salesman.”
He was talking about samples.
If you were sending a salesperson door to door to sell a product, you’d give them samples. You’d want people to taste it, try it, or see what it could do.
Yet companies would spend a fortune on advertising to persuade those same people to buy without ever letting them experience the product.
I’ve thought about that a lot over the years.
When I started working with Mosquito Authority, we had something that made a dramatic difference. They could treat your yard, and the mosquitoes would be gone for weeks.
Now, if you’ve tried citronella candles and bug zappers, you might be skeptical of another promise about mosquitoes. I would be too.
But what happens if we treat your yard and you get to spend an evening outside without being bitten?
You know something you didn’t know before. You can feel the result for yourself.
We’ve used the same thinking with free facials. If a spa has the staff, chairs, and equipment available, the cost of giving someone a facial can be quite small. That first visit lets them experience the treatment, meet the people, and decide whether they’d like to come back.
Or think about a restaurant giving someone a $25 gift card. The point is to get them through the door and let the meal do some of the selling.
That’s the lesson I took from Hopkins and kept applying:
Sometimes it costs less to get someone a result than it does to convince them to give you money to get that result.
Sometimes it costs less to get someone a result than it does to convince them to give you money to get that result.
If you know people love what happens after they start, it’s worth asking: What could you let them experience before they have to decide?