Before You Offer a Discount, Try This Instead

Okay. Good morning, it's Dean Jackson reporting live from Winter Haven. No cameraman today, but we're going to continue. The show must go on. So we're going to continue our exploration of my life in advertising by Claude Hopkins.

And this kind of series has become a kind of guided thing of my life, applying my life in advertising. And one of the things that Claude Hopkins was particularly well known for was sampling and giving people an experience. We talked about getting people a result. Well, one of the things he was absolutely known for was instead of getting people to take a chance on you, he was very, very set on taking a chance on people because he knew that if you have a good product, if you have something that people are going to like and it gets the result that you say it's going to get, or they're going to have the. The delight that you say they're going to have by trying your baked beans over other baked beans that you're going to win.

So one of the he would do is they would test their theories, they would test their proposals in small towns and they would offer by direct mail, which of course is very controlled, before running out to a mass distribution, they would offer people a free trial of whatever, of Liquozone or whatever proprietary he was using, or baked beans or condensed milk.

He would offer them a certificate, a coupon they could take in to the grocer or to the druggist and exchange for a free bottle. Now, this was done for two reasons. Number one, this would help them establish distribution in a market where they didn't have distribution. They would go in and they would say to the druggists, they here's the every household in your town is about to get this letter offering this free trial of Liquozone, and they're going to need to go to the druggist to get it.

So we will pay you a hundred percent of the retail price for this for this person. And the druggist was kind of like forced into carrying it because if people came in and they weren't, they didn't have it, then they would go to another druggist. So they were able to establish both users and distribution with this one approach of giving people something to try. And it's a really interesting thing. I've used this in many, many ways.

You know, we've used it, as I mentioned, a free facial where somebody could come in and get a free facial or a free mosquito treatment because you know that it's going to work. You know, they're going to get the result that you're promising that they're going to get and you know that there's a really good chance that they're going to want to continue to get that result. So this definitely falls under that category of sometime. It's less expensive to get a result for somebody than it is to convince them to give you money to get that result. And that's not a natural instinct for a business owner.

A business owner is proud of what they're doing. They want to maintain their price integrity. They don't want to discount or have to, you know, feel like they're giving stuff away. When in reality doing it this way you get to maintain the level of your price. It's not a percentage off, it's not a buy one, get one.

Which is one of the biggest ways that people kind of hedge themselves is they hedge their bets by saying, you buy something from me, you do something nice for me and then I'll do something nice for you. You buy one and I'll give you another one. It's kind of like you go first and then I'll go. But when you set aside your own selfish desires and know in the long game, and by long game I mean just the next purchase, if we're talking about facial, it's just 30 days so they come back for the next one.

Or a mosquito treatment or if you own a, a cafe, giving somebody, we would do this with cafes on the birthday marketing, give somebody a best birthday week ever coffee card that was free coffee every day for your birthday week and we even expanded it to your birthday month because the benefit of getting somebody started established as a long term customer is way more valuable than trying to protect that initial profit that you're going to make on getting somebody to buy your thing first.

So how I think we could look at you applying this is thinking how can you, what is the result that you could offer that would give somebody a sample of what you've, of what you've got. And you know, in a lot of, in restaurant ways we've done this with a $25 gift card or with microblading, we did with a hundred dollar gift card. So anything that has a real value as opposed to a percentage off of something is going to be an advantage for you. It's, it's where people really see that this has real value. Like imagine, you know, you are a, you're a trash customer for a residential trash service.

And then in your statement you get a gift certificate for $25 at one of the restaurants that's one of the nicer restaurants in town that's going to feel like real value, that's like real money as opposed to, you know, buy one, get one or, or 20% off or whatever that is, you've got real currency that you can use that way. So that's one of the biggest lessons that I've always had is thinking how can you get somebody to just try your product or service once, knowing that it's going to be a long term thing for them.

So that's the way every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen, onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And if I can turn people on to that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business, I'm all for it. So this Friday at 1pm, I'm going to do for the first time a 50 minute profit finder workshop and you're going to join me live on Zoom and we're going to go through a 50 minute exercise.

Bring your pen, bring a notebook or piece of paper and I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business. And maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there, but I'm going to show you where to look for it. So it's free, it's for you. It's Friday at 1pm this Friday. Just watch.

Just go to 50minuteprofitfinder.com and I'll get you all the details and hopefully you can join us then. Friday 1:00pm.