Irresistible Offers – How To Actually Make Them

The “irresistible” offer. An offer so good, that no one can resist it. Just make one and you’re set. That’s all you need, nothing else, it’ll sell itself.

Easier said than done, and that’s for as long as I remember, over the past 20 or so years in this game — I never read anywhere on how to make them, what they mean, or what they are All in all, they’re a loose abstraction that gets carelessly tossed around in the guise of sounding good, so let’s change that.

If you’re going to make an offer, make it good. Nah, make it great… make it irresistible.

But what’s that mean?

Well, since my entire philosophy of marketing falls under “competing on economics”, the first thing you do is look at the definition of economics, which is:

“The economics is the allocation of scarce resource which has alternative uses.” – Thomas Sowell

Knowing this, all resources are limited. Time, money, energy, attention, everything is limited, and it’s bound to time, time is the great limiter of everything.

You know what they say: you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want. Because you have limited resources (such as money, time, energy, etc…) — it comes down to “you can have that”, or “but you can’t have that too”.

This inability to have both at the same time due to a limitation forces people to make a choice. In this choice, we have wants and needs. Needs always get a preference over wants.

The more choices we have, and the less resource we have, the more cognitive load we have, which leads to cognitive fatigue, which causes people not to buy.

So back to offers, An offer has two parts, the product/service, and the sales mechanism that sells it, such as copy, VSLS, webinars, phones, etc… When you combine those two, you have an offer.

When it comes to offers, everyone sells based on “features” and “benefits” But people don’t buy for features and benefits, do they? You don’t care about that, and neither do your customers.

Features and benefits are placeholders that are a subset of the mechanism, yet your customers don’t buy for the mechanism either.

What they buy for is what features, benefits, and the mechanism translates into, and that something is the outcome.

Feature + benefit + mechanism = outcome.

So knowing this, we buy for outcomes. Nothing more, nothing less.

One of the things I drill into people is to focus on selling to outcomes, when you do this, a whole new world of copy, and selling ability opens up. It makes things REALLY REALLY easy.

Most of us don’t care about how something works or why it works. We just want it to work. To get the outcome.

You don’t care about how your phone works, you just want to use it. You don’t care about how your car works, you just want to use it, you don’t care about how your food gets to the grocery store, you just want to eat it.

In a world where more and more choice is presented, the only thing that consumers look for is the outcome, everything else becomes background noise.

This means we’re selling to outcomes, and for those outcomes, they have to trade something, in our case it’s money.

Money is currency, which is nothing more than a medium of exchange, something for something, something for nothing, or this for that. A trade.

So the degree of how good, great, or irresistible an offer depends on this trade. A good offer is something they would trade anything for. Anything is usually a form of money. A great offer is something they would do anything for. Anything is usually combined with giving you money for it and spending time on it.

An irresistible offer (here it is) Is something they would give up everything for. Time, money, resources, relationships,

When you start thinking about creating things that people would give up anything for, now you’re in the realm of creating irresistible offers.

I’ll be honest, this is a lot harder than you might think, and it requires a lot of strategic moves and tactical input.

Now, when it comes down to it. Knowing that to create an irresistible offer, you have to have something that they would give up anything for.

This brings you to the thought of “What outcome could this thing possibly give them, that nothing else could, otherwise why would they give up everything for it?“

And then you’ll start to think about using phrases such as “without”, “you don’t have to”, and “it’ll allow you to”. Knowing that these phrases are used in irresistible offers, takes us to one final point and it’s this paradoxical twist:

Even though they would give up everything for that outcome (the irresistible offer), if you make it so they WOULD give up everything if they had to, but don’t have to give up anything for it — you have an irresistible offer.

So next time you’re cooking up an offer, working on client copy, or any of this stuff we love to do Ask yourself “What is the outcome this offer generates for them? And would they give up everything for that outcome?”.

Because after all, if they’re willing to give up everything for it, what’s a few dollars to get it? The closer you get to this level, the more you’ll go from good to great, to irresistible.