SPI 596: How to Craft Irresistible Offers with Karthik Vijayakumar

SPI 596: How to Craft Irresistible Offers with Karthik Vijayakumar

Pat Flynn: Hey, Hey, it’s pat here. You’re about to listen to something a little different on the show today. It’s not our usual Friday format where I follow up on Wednesday’s episode. Don’t worry. Those aren’t going away forever. Just a little break to bring in something even more special. In my opinion. And this episode in the next few are a part of our teaching Friday series, which we do with our SPI pro members.

We have an incredibly talented pool of people within SPI pro. Why don’t you give our pros, the spotlight and teach you here on the podcast. Every once in a while, it’s just one of the perks of being a part of pro in fact, is this possibility with each episode, you get to hear a different pro, teach you something special from their area of expertise.

Without further ado, I’ll let them take it away. Oh, and if you want to find out more about SPI pro and be a part of it, you can go ahead and apply it. SPI pro.com.

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your guest host. He’s colorblind. And that’s why his world, including his website is filled with a lot of black, blue and red. Apparently one in 12 men is colorblind. Karthik Vijayakumar.

Karthik Vijayakumar: Want to make your products or services irresistible? Here’s a secret. Step one, drop the prices. Step two, add more bonuses. It’s that simple. Or is it?

Hey, what’s up team SPI? My name is Karthik and I’m excited to be your host today. I will share something with you that will completely change how you sell your products and services. But first a bit about myself. My name is Karthik, and I’m the host of the Launch Plan Podcast, creator of the Sales Copy Mastery series and the founder of DesignYourThinking.com.

I’m a copywriter and a lifelong student of good copy. And today I want to share a system that you can use to turn any of your products or services into irresistible precious gems. Your customers will drop everything they have. Stand in long queues and do anything it takes to grab what you have to offer.

Well, that was a little too dramatic. Let’s dial down on the drama and zoom in to offers. As it turns out, creating irresistible offers is both art and science. Before I go on to share my simple three step process to craft highly irresistible offers, I want to talk about. What good irresistible offers really are in the first place.

My interest in exploring irresistibility copywriting and behavioral psychology started when I was pretty young growing up in India, I always had uncles and aunts visiting from the states. Every time they came to visit us in December, they brought chocolates, toys and clothes. I remember them talking about the Black Friday sales, the Christmas.

They described how people would go out shopping on weekends. How they would collect coupons. That was quite unheard of back then, because in India, at that point, people went shopping only when they needed something. Unless of course they went to fairs and exhibitions. I was about 12 or 13 when I went to a fair with my parents.

And all I could notice was a sea of happy people. Walking out with oversize, shopping bags, filled with products that they bought. It made me wonder what made these people happy after spending so much of money. I wondered what made most people go shopping in the first place, even when they didn’t need to buy something.

Guess what? Offers, even if the didn’t want to buy something, they were ready to consider opening the wallets. If they were good offers that they couldn’t resist. And that brings us to the most important question. What are the qualities of irresistible offer? As it turns out I did my research and I jotted down six important qualities.

Let me walk you through the six qualities of highly irresistible offers. First high on perceived value. You will feel like these offers are worth a lot more than what it’s being sold for. Second, highly irresistible offers are high on entertainment or education. You feel like you learn something new or you were entertained. They are high on empathy. They make you feel like it was created just for you. It addresses the core human needs of the target buyer, in other words. Number four, they trigger urgency. You feel like now is your only chance to grab this offer. When you get it, it makes you feel like a winner. You feel like you won a trophy, you feel like you’re so smart. You’re so good. You feel proud. That’s number five and the sixth quality is that the deliver results when you use. You’ll see it working. If you’re listening and looking round for a notepad to take notes, don’t worry about it. I created a checklist bundle for you with everything that I said and everything that you’re about to hear from now on. So just don’t bother jotting down notes, just type DesignYourThinking.com/SPI in your browser and download all of them into your computer. Now that you understand what makes these offers irresistible. It’s perhaps time we jumped into action.

I’ll first outline the three-step process. And then I’ll walk you through the exact steps you need to perform in each step to create your irresistible offer. It’s quite simple. So by the end of this episode, you will be able to use what you learned to craft irresistible offers for your products or services that you can then use on your sales pages, emails ad copies, wherever you like.

So let’s look at the three steps you need to take to create highly irresistible offers. If you’re ready, let’s get rolling. Step number one, identify your target buyer. Step two, create a target buyer profile. And step three is you create your irresistible offer.

So let me tell you the story of two young men. Before we jump too deep into this whole process, it was a hot summer afternoon. The beach was filled with people and kids. Two young men decided to sell something and make some quick money. The first man decided to sell some toys and kites, the wind was strong and there were a lot of kids. It indeed made sense to sell toys and kites.

And our went by and he was getting hotter. People were buying the toys and kites, but people were getting tired too. The second man came by ringing a bell, pushing a cart filled with fresh lemonades and ice creams in no time, people across the beach were flocking around this cart, waiting for their chance to quench the thirst and cool off with an ice cream.

Well, did you see what just happened? There’s popular advise in the marketing world to create your customer avatar. Some people also refer to it as the buyer persona, essentially. It’s a representation of your ideal customer. The kind of person that you want to purchase products and services from you. Now, that’s what the first young man did.

He decided to sell something to parents and kids aged between 4 and 10, looking to engage their kids while out on the beach. That’s how these avatars were written. Demographics, goals and values, challenges, and pain points and so on and so forth. Well, the second man did something very different. He looked at people around the beach, he looked at the situation and decided to do something.

It was a hot day. The kids were playing and invariably, they were going to get tired, feel thirsty and perhaps need to cool off. And that’s why he decided to sell lemonades and ice creams instead. And that brings us to our first step with creating irresistible offers. Identify your target buyer. Now it’s safe to say at this point that your target buyer is real human real problems is more than at fictional customer avatar.

Surprisingly, it’s easier to find a real person than download templates and pour over blog posts and books on how to create your ideal customer avatar. Right. And if you can. At irresistible offer for one real target buyer, it’s more likely that you will find more people who will be interested in your offer.

So here’s what you need to do to find your target buyer. It’s actually pretty simple. If you have an existing business, look up your CRM to find one customer or client that you wish you had more off. Note down the contact details because in the next step, you’ll do something with it. If you are new to your business, find someone that’s interested in what you have to offer.

Let’s say you are a ghost writer. For example, you find someone that’s looking to write a book and hire a ghost writer to do it. You don’t have to offer them your services yet, but just note down their number or something some way of reaching them when you need to. And that’s the first step. If that was too simple, well, that’s the whole point. You just need one real person now that you have picked that real person, your target buyer. Let’s move on to step two. And I want to start step two by reading what, one of my favorite copywriters once said, and I quote, “The vast majority of products are sold because of the need for love, the feeling of shame, the pride of achievement, the drive for recognition, the yearning to feel important, the urge to look attractive, the lust for power, the longing for romance, the need to feel secure. Terror of facing the unknown, the lifelong hunger for self-esteem and so on. Emotions are the fire of human motivation. The combustible force that secretly drives most decisions to buy. When your marketing harnesses, these forces correctly, you will generate explosive increases in response.” That was Gary Bencivenga.

The second step to creating highly irresistible offers is to create a target buyer profile. And you identified your target buyer in step one. So you have a contact details and it’s time you reached out to them because it’s time for you to create a profile.. But what is the target buyer profile?

Emotions. Simply put the target buyer profile is a way of documenting your understanding of your target buyer. One of the best ways to do this is by interviewing your target buyer. When I do client work, I use various techniques from user interviews to field studies to a lot more to do just that. But in order to create irresistible offers, it’s important to document your target buyer profile at a deep psychological level.

And we will do that right now by profiling your target buyer with six basic human needs. Let’s get rolling no matter where you are from what gender, what culture, race, ethnicity we belong to, our brains are wired the same way. Agree. The choices that we make are predisposed biases or our ideas that we hold in our head and actions that we take boils down to six basic needs.

Let’s do this step by step. The first basic human need is the need for certainty. No matter what our backgrounds are, our brains are wired for certainty. In simple words, certainty is the assurance that we can avoid pain and gain pleasure. A simple example is what you can see on television with most medical products ads.

Here’s one such the ad has an young woman wearing exercise clothes, touching her toes while sitting with a leg stretch. The words of the ad read I’m all Advil because Advil works on all my paints, shoulder pain from my workout, menstrual pain every month. When, what you offer is targeted towards a specific person with a specific need it’s irresistibility quotient goes up. In the case of Advil, the target by a profile shows a need for certainty in this case, woman who has a specific need to get relief from menstrual pain that hits them every month. And hence they are looking for something out there that can give them the certainty that they can award that pain. In fact, the ad also mentioned shoulder pain from workout, and that’s why this ad makes the offer irresistible.

Let’s now look at the second basic human need. Uncertainty. Really uncertainty. Where it sounds strange, but just as much as we humans like certainty, we long for uncertainty too. In other words, it’s our need for surprises and change. The good kind of course. Do you long for a surprise bloody party or a gift? Not quite surprising, right?

You long for uncertainty businesses like subscription in a box are good examples. They are built on this underlying human need for uncertainty for a tiny subscription. These businesses offer surprises delivered to you inside your mailbox. Be observant of your target buyer exhibiting this need during your target buyer interview.

So let’s move on to the third basic human need. It’s the need for significance. In other words is the need to feel important. It’s a need to feel we got attention and that those spotlights are all focused on us and businesses that have target buyers with this need to feel significant, never lose an opportunity to use that in their offers.

Let’s see a few examples from businesses. The first brand I want to talk about is Bonobos. It’s a men’s wear brand that has built its reputation around promising men, clothes that fit well and feel comfortable. They believe that men don’t have to have well sculpted physiques, like models to fit into good clothes.

The second example I have here is Stack Overflow. It’s another business that offers something that directly addresses software developers need to feel significant in their community. It’s actually a Q and A portal for software developers. When developers answer questions, they get assigned a reputation score, the better, the quality and quantity of the answers, the better their reputation score.

They make developers feel special by giving them more exposure and credibility. Now, do you know a business that does this really well, maybe it’s yours. Maybe you’re getting some ideas to do something with your business with respect to significance. So that’s the action I’d like you to take at this point, when you do your target buyer interview, be observant.

If they are exhibiting the need to feel significant. Profiling your target buyer is a very interesting exercise and we are like halfway through it right now. Don’t worry about taking notes because I have you covered with all that you need. The checklist bundle is available at DesignYourThinking.com/SPI, just in case you want.

And now that’s move on to the fourth human need is the need for connection and love. You can see pet businesses doing this all the time. They tap into this need for humans to feel connected or close to something. In fact, many businesses leverage this basic human need in their target buyers.

During the lockdowns worldwide, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tinder makes a great case where the uses in their irresistible offer for their target audience by addressing this basic human need. So, so far we reviewed the four basic human needs, certainty, uncertainty, significance, and connection and love. These human needs are more external in nature.

But the next two that I’m going to talk about are more intrinsic. So let’s take a look ready. So the fifth basic human need is growing. This one is more intrinsic to humans. We don’t talk about it, but we all seek it. The basic human need is the need to grow and expand and growth here could apply to any aspect of your life, including money, relationship, our status, financial management, businesses and businesses related to career, like LinkedIn addresses their target buyers need for growth.

Let’s look at the final, basic human need which is contribution. Just like growth contribution is intrinsic to humans. It’s a need to help give and support someone or something. Contribution is a powerful need for which humans are willing to walk the distance.

Two examples that come to my mind are Tom’s shoes and Patagonia. In fact, I even have a third example here, Warby Parker. Tom’s shoes addresses this need in their target buyers, the profile by promising to give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. Every time you buy. Warby Parker does the same with glasses. Patagonia, on the other hand, does it with their promises to reduce repair, reuse, and recycle when anyone buys a product from them. It’s now time for you to profile your target buyer. You can download the checklist and here is hat tip. Before you go on to this activity, if you been able to identify. Two or more needs in your target buyer profile, then you already have an resistible offer.

That’s right. So that brings us to step three, which is crafting your irresistible offer. And for that, let’s bring back the two young men. Remember them? They were selling toys and ice cream at the beach. Well, but the first guy was busy selling toys and kites, the second guy was keenly observing people. He spoke to a few of them and that’s how he mentally created his target buyer profile.

But how did he translate that to his irresistible offer? It’s actually simpler that you can imagine. You can do this too in two steps. First, you need to construct your irresistible offer. Essentially. You need to translate each need that you identified with your target buyer to an element of the product or the offer.

Let’s say you sense the need for connection or love. You can consider using tools like group calls are community elements, like forums. The slack community is a great example here. Let’s say you have a community and you sense the need for significance in your target buyer.. Think of ways you can make them feel special.

This could have an impact on your offer copy, or even inside the product itself. Having rituals inside your community like member of the month is a very common way some communities address this. I have created a checklist with the tips. So you don’t really have to break your head as you create your offer. So when you download the bundle, make sure you take close, look at this particular checklist.

And now let’s jump on to the second step with creating irresistible offers, which is to present your offer. So let’s bring back the ice cream seller. Shall we, did he know how he presented his irresistible offer? Well, he put up a placard that had these words on it. It’s hot. Are you thirsty? He had big pictures of a bottle of chilled lemonade and an ice cream cone right next to it.

And then when people came over, he sold them fresh lemonade, ice creams, and some combos with water and ice cream popsicles for a prize that buyers thought was a steal. He went back with an empty cart in less than an hour. I’ll have a shot in long form template available for you in the checklist bundle. So you can use that to present your irresistible offer on a sales speech, a newspaper, social media ad, a billboard or a placard like how this young man did at the beach.

And that brings us to the end of this. So here’s a quick recap of what we covered today. First I walked you through the six of the most important qualities of highly irresistible offers. They were high perceived value, high on education and entertainment, high on empathy, triggers urgency, makes you feel like a winner and delivers results.

And then I walked you through the three steps of creating higher irresistible offers. Step one is to identify your target buyer, not avatar. Step two was to create your target buyer profile. In that we talked about the six basic human needs. And step three was to create your irresistible offer. In that we talked about two steps inside, which is to construct your irresistible offer, and second step was to present your irresistible offer.

That brings us to the end of this episode. I really hope you found this episode helpful, and you can find the checklist bundle once again, the link is DesignYourThinking.com/SPI. Again, my name is Karthik Vijayakumar and thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I hope to see you soon.

Pat Flynn: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.