The Problem
Why Most Offers Don't Convert
One of the biggest reasons offers don't convert is because a lot of marketers don't realize the difference between their product and their offer.
Behavior Model
No motivation to buy now
BJ Fogg, PhD, runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University.
In 2007, he created the Fogg Behavior Model to explain how human behavior works:
The Fogg Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. (https://www.behaviormodel.org)
In the context of email marketing, “Ability” and “Prompt” means telling your audience about your offer and giving them an easy way to take action:
Send out an email or email sequence with your offer
Create a landing page that people can visit to learn the details
Add a buy button to that page
Once those fundamentals are in place, the missing piece is "Motivation."
And one of the most powerful forms of motivation that you can use in your email marketing is an authentic deadline.
Without a deadline, your audience does not have the motivation to buy now.
Missed Opportunities
Take action when you have the attention of your audience
One example of a time that your subscribers give you their maximum attention is immediately after they join your email community.
When someone subscribes to your email list, that is when they are most interested in learning more about you:
—1
Who are you?
—2
Am I a good fit for your community?
—3
How can your products and solutions help me?
Over time, that attention will fade. And your emails will get mixed in with hundreds of other emails they are receiving each week.
That’s why it is critical to make an offer to your subscribers before their attention disappears.
Businesses that don’t make relevant offers to subscribers during that time are losing a significant percentage of potential revenue.
Each time that you have someone’s attention, it is an opportunity to delight them with content and/or present them with an offer that is relevant to them based on where they are in their customer journey.
Broken Messaging
Your product might not need to change right now
Whenever an offer is not converting, most businesses immediately look at the product they’re selling and try to fix it or improve it:
changing or adding to their product
investing more time in making their product perfect
copying what their competitors are doing
Startups like to talk about product/market fit, but what they usually mean is "let’s keep changing our product until until people like it."
The problem is that "product" is only one part of product/market fit!
The "market" in product/market fit is just as important, but that’s what most companies overlook.
If your offer is not converting, there’s a very strong chance that your product is good but your positioning and messaging are not working:
