A-Z Systems Marketing Blog

Posted by Alexei Zoubov, May 12th, 2009

Some time ago I wrote two posts on so called One Time Offer (OTO), where I questioned the benefits of this widely used method of squeezing more money out of the customer.

Here are these two posts in order they’ve been published:

A Beast Called ‚OTO (One Time Offer)
Taming The OTO Beast (One Time Offer)

I’d really appreciate if you read these posts, and even more - if you leave your comment (there or here).

Mike Filsame, an extremely successful Internet entrepreneur and guru, always used OTO’s in his sales campaigns. He is a great marketer, he makes enormous amounts of money, but I humbly admit that sometimes I thought that his methods were too pushy.

May be it’s one of the reasons that he makes so much more money than I do (I’m not complaining).

One of the methods I really didn’t like was an extensive use of one time offers.

That is why I was very pleasantly surprised when I came across a short¬† interview with Mike Filsame where he plainly states that, although one time offers can bring more money immediately after the original offer, in the long term you can lose the customers that could be annoyed by OTO’s.

He still thinks (and I agree) that the offers could (and sometimes should) be combined together, but crude headlines like “Stop! You will see this page only once” should be avoided.

In short, you can make an extra sale it One Time Offer, but you could repel many returning customers and lose the money! I have to say, that I often was the customer that was so disturbed by multiple OTO’s, that I got off many lists and became this “lost” customer for many marketers.

Filsame’s idea is, that instead of immense pressure of OTO, more subtle and non-threatening offers work much better for him. The offers, following the original one should look like a nice and useful addition. He calls it an upsell method.

Bravo, Mike Filsame! Sorry, I don’t give the link to the interview here, I still haven’t signed for his offer.

Meanwhile, here is by far the best lead generation tool I use right now:

http://www.leadgusher.com/r/alzoub/homepage.html