A-Z Systems Marketing Blog

Posted by Alexei Zoubov, August 30th, 2008

The same day I posted The Beast Called OTO I bumped into another example of One Time Offer used in an annoying and non-productive way.

I tried to sign up for a “free” newsletter and membership site and, when trying to get to the site, was presented with three OTO’s one after another, almost identical to those I described in the previous post.

My opinion is - if you use OTO’s this way, you might sell a few offers, but you’ll also drive away many of the prospects who could potentially become your long-term customers. It drove me away for sure!

If you try to google for one time offer, you’ll get an endless list of reports, posts, even scripts that aim at helping you to create your own OTO pages and offers. Unfortunately, most of them present OTO as a universal, almost magical tool that should be used wherever and whenever you can imagine - which is, most of the time, not true.

Well, if your goal is to make a fast buck without aiming at long-time profitable relationship with your prospect, go ahead, insert OTO’s everywhere.

But.. really successful marketers know that the most money is made from return customers, so the first impression is the most important thing and trying to use OTO’s¬†indiscriminatly¬†could be harmful to your business.

Here are the rules that I use and recommend:

• Don’t use one time offer with free offers. Most of the prospects will feel cheated and trapped, and will never trust you again.
• Use OTO after your customer already decided to buy from you.
• Use a related product for your OTO, something that would compliment your original offer. If you sell them a book, you can offer discounted retail rights. An autoresponder service could offer one time discount for leads or a book on follow-up email writing.
• Don’t offer the product that could be easily bought somewhere else for less. If you are offering a product that isn’t unique, make sure that you offer a real discount.
• OTO’s work best when they offer something for less than the price of your original offer, or at least not for much more. The exception could be the offer of the package that includes your original offer. It should be clear that with the package the buyer will get your original offer for less.
• If you say that the value of your package is something like $2356 and then you offer to purchase it for $47, most of your prospects feel that there is something wrong with your presentation or your product. Clearly present real benefits, but don’t make unbelievable claims.
• Don’t chase your buyer forever! If you chain too many ¬†OTO’s one after another, you create an impression that you are desperate to sell at least something and the result is the lost trust. Two OTO’ could be OK, if there is any logical connection between them, three could be too much.

These are my personal opinions, my rules, they work for me and you should use your own judgement (and testing). There is more and more evidence that so called “hard sell”, pushy selling tactics, work less and less successfully.

So, try to sell “softly” and offer good products and services - the money will follow!