How to Craft Compelling (& Profitable) Offers That Your Website Visitors Can’t Resist

It doesn’t matter what your product or niche is—ecommerce, SaaS, digital courses, B2B, DTC. If you’re not offering something that enough people feel is too good to turn down, you’ll gradually circle the drain before being flushed into the history books.

But, herein lies two key issues:

1. In most cases, simple “10% off” or “buy one get one free” offers are nowhere near compelling enough.
2. Successful offers won’t last forever. You can never rest on your laurels and must be willing to experiment to find the next winner.

As Chief of Staff at Resident Home (the holding company for names like Nectar Sleep), being a growth advisor to multiple DTC brands and working on other projects like Winner Stack, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t when it comes to crafting offers.

So in this post, I share my three-step process for crafting and testing successful offers for your business time and again. Plus, there’s a bonus section with advanced techniques for creating personalized offers.

SEE MORE: How Nectar Sleep Grew Revenue From $44m to Over $500m in 3 Years While Using ConvertFlow

What is an offer?

Before we get into the bulk of this post, let’s just clarify exactly what an “offer” is. Because most people think about it the wrong way.

It’s not a discount. Or a sale. Or your price point.

Rather, it’s everything that creates a perception of value in the mind of your target customer.

At Nectar, for example, we don’t just sell a mattress in exchange for a few bucks. We sell comfort and a better night’s sleep:

On a more tangible level, we then bundle in accessories and extras to maximize perceived value as much as possible:

All of a sudden, an offer that could have been a run-of-the-mill “get $X off a mattress” becomes so much more enticing to potential buyers.

Why test your offers?

The above Nectar example didn’t happen overnight. It takes work to get to an offer that is both profitable and converts consistently.

This means you need to hypothesize, test out, and tweak your offers until you find one that works for your business and its website visitors.

Even successful offers don’t last forever—eventually, you’ll need to switch things up to prevent stagnation and keep the conversions coming. It therefore makes sense to be proactive and to always have new offers in the pipeline you can roll out and test.

Let’s now take a look at a system you can use to do that.

3 steps to crafting the perfect offer

In my experience, there are three crucial components that go into every successful offer:

1. Unit economics
2. Creating value
3. Messaging

Let’s go into each one in more detail 👇

Step 1: Unit economics

Before rolling out any new offer, you always need to consider whether it makes sense from a business perspective. You can’t give away items or discounts if it’s not profitable in the long run.

This is where unit economics comes into play.

Your goal here should be doing the math to find a balance between increasing conversions and minimizing costs.

Two key questions to ask yourself:

1. Where is there room to provide value to the end-consumer?
2. How much money/product can you give away without affecting your margins?

A lot goes into making the unit economics work for each business and the offer(s) it wants to run. So, you must be clear on fundamental metrics like your gross margins, acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value.

Giving away “$99 off and a free gift” might convert well as an offer. But can you actually afford to be running it?

Step 2: Creating value

Once you’ve figured out the economics of what you can mathematically afford to give away, the next step is to start packaging up an offer and value proposition.

You have multiple levers you can pull here:

• Dollars off
• A % discount
• Buy X get X
• Gifts and bonus products
• Bundling products together
• Extended trial periods
• Combinations of the above

Finding a winning formula takes time—it’s all about hypothesizing and testing. So, make sure to have several different offers in the pipeline for you to replace and test when needed. 

But, there’s more to crafting offers than simple metrics like X% off. You should also be thinking about how you can position it to the target market in a way that resonates.

Take our Nectar Sleep example from earlier, for instance.

This offer is a value play about getting the best night’s sleep of your life at an extremely good price:

Awara Sleep, on the other hand, takes a different angle with its mattress.

The offer still has a focus on comfort and price-point value. But, there’s a big green/environmental play baked into it, too:

All in all, this step in the offer crafting stage is about understanding what’s important to the audience you’re going after. Essentially, you want to take the math you did in step one and position it in a way that your target market will care about.

Step 3: Messaging

Our offer now has some profitable unit economics and a high-level value proposition. But, there are a million and one ways you can put that offer across to people. 

So, it’s time to start testing the granular messaging of our offer.

You’ll do this in a bunch of different places:

• Your ads
• Home page hero
• Lead capture popups
• Landing pages
• Product pages

Basically, anywhere mentioning and/or promoting the offer in question.

You can test different headlines, body copy, imagery, placements, etc. Just make sure you have some kind of hypothesis as well as a means to test it and determine a winner that can be rolled out on a larger scale.

This is where I recommend using a tool like ConvertFlow.

You can create multiple variants for every CTA, each with slightly tweaked messaging or design. The conversion stats can then be tracked for each individual variant:

All this makes it simple to test out different theories you might have about your messaging. Meaning you’ll be able to quickly find out which one resonates best, and run with the winner. 

Bonus: How to personalize your offers

One strategy that should be a consideration for all brands is to personalize your offers according to the preferences and tastes of website visitors.

For example:

A fashion brand might sell all kinds of clothing. But one website visitor might be looking for a new jacket, while the next is more interested in shopping for t-shirts or trousers.

So, you could present these two people with a different offer, depending on the search terms they came in on or ads they clicked:

You can segment visitors and determine who sees what offer using a variety of methods:

• Search terms
• Ad clicks
• Landing page URLs
• Email clicks

Of course, it takes a little bit of extra work to come up with extra offers like this. But, the more personalized you can get, the more likely people are to take action.

Start crafting new offers today

Practice makes perfect when it comes to crafting offers. So, start thinking up the next compelling angle you can take with your products—then roll it out with your visitors to see how it plays out.

Use the advice laid out in this post, tweak your messaging, and follow the data given to you by your audience to keep honing your skills.

Eventually, you’ll find something that fits. And remember: always be willing to test and experiment to find the best converting offers possible.