How to Create an Irresistible Offer Your Prospects Can’t Refuse
April 22, 2008 by Ryan Wheaton
Filed under Marketing Concepts
Plus 5 Ready to Use Offers You Can Use at Your Martial Arts School Today
As martial arts school owners, we all want more students. And, there is something that might be getting in the way of us achieving this.
It’s called an offer.
I’ve met a lot of martial arts school owners who don’t make an offer of any kind in their marketing efforts. They think that because they’re great martial artists, people will naturally want to train with them.
Wrong.
It doesn’t work that way and I think they’re missing out on a lot of revenue because of this common misperception.
All an offer does is help a prospect justify acting today instead of going to a competitor or doing absolutely nothing (the all too common choice).
Giving your prospects what they want will help you get what you want. By offering them something they want and can benefit from, you’ll get them to commit much quicker because they’re getting something they perceive as valuable in exchange for their decision.
With a call to action, we ask people to do something. With an offer, we incentivize them to take action. When you combine the two, you have a powerful and dynamic duo.
A good resource for this subject is Mark Joyner’s book The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less (John Wiley, 2005). You can find this book at Amazon.com or your local Barnes & Noble.
The Irresistible Offer Defined
The trifecta of the irresistible offer must include all of the following:
1) High ROI offer – Must be extremely valuable to your prospect.
2) A Touchstone – A summary of your offer as a frame of reference.
3) Believability – If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
A common example citied by virtually all marketing authors include Domino’s “30 Minutes or It’s Free” offer and FedEx’s “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
5 Irresistible Offers You Can Try Today
- See if the martial arts are right for you. Receive two free hours of instruction! (trial program)
- Free uniform when you join today! (state retail value here)
- Join today and we’ll waive your sign up fees! (state value here)
- Pay for two months, get one free! (state value here)
- Try it for 30 days. If you don’t like it, you don’t pay!
Be sure to test various offers in different mediums to see what works and what doesn’t to find the right offer for your martial arts school.
What irresistible offer are you making at your martial arts school? Share your thoughts in the form of a comment below.
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I'm Ryan Wheaton and I work with martial arts school owners to help them attract more students. Many martial arts school owners are confused at how to best market their business and feel awkward in selling situations. I help them overcome those challenges to become confident and competent in marketing and selling their services - helping them become more profitable so they can live the lifestyle they want to live.
I can’t agree any more with this topic. As a sales person for an internet company, our offers are not necessarily free, but “part of the package”. Anyone that opens an account will receive Free Tech Support, Free recorded training, and Free usage of our Help Center – just to name a few. I don’t see it any different for my martial arts school to be. In order for The Dojo of Karate to not only get business, but get interested prospects, I am offering certain incentives for students who sign up, such as a free uniform, discounted tuition, discount on first equipment purchase, etc. Values that can exceed up to $250! Which brings me to another topic – building equipment sales into belt promotions. Don’t know if you have written about this, but a sales strategy used by successful businesses.
Javier,
Great point. As you know, I just focused on creating offers to bring people in the door on this post. However, we should also make offers to our existing students (as you noted) as well as to former students. More on that soon!
–Ryan
We offer a free trial to all of our prospects. We have a printable offer on our website that we change quarterly with an expiration date on it. I also verbally offer free classes to new prospects so they can try before they buy. This seems to do well for us as NOBODY here does this. I’ve played with the offer a little. The one that seems to work best is two weeks free because my little people classes are only once a week. My upper level classes are 2-3 times per week and our classes are never the same so they can sample a little more of what we do and what we offer and get a better feel for the school. I definitely believe in the free trial. One other thing we do is we have LOW registration fee that includes the uniform. Once prospects get the $200 shock of registration at another school or the low reg fee PLUS the uniform and equipment purchase at another, our $45 fee seems like deal, which it is.