Your Value Ladder - How Important Is It?
So what the heck is a value ladder?
When I first started this affiliate marketing buisness, I had never heard of it and lost out on a lot of money by not implementing it. When I joined a couple other platforms for training, (yes, you can never learn too much!) i ran across the term and what it was and how it worked. My eyes were opened to why I wasn't making great profits.
If you look around you, there are lots of brick and mortar businesses that use the value ladder. Dentists, chiropractors, mechanics. I never had realized it before, but now it's so clear.
A value ladder is simply that. You start off with a low cost or free offer to draw the customer in. Then once you achieve that, you offer them something of a little bit more value, and a little more cost, then after that, even bigger value and higher cost, and so on.
Let me show you a rough draft of a value ladder for a dentist.
He brings in new clients by offering a free cleaning. So, he'll start off losing a little money because of the cost of advertising for the free cleaning and the time to perform it. However, he has a good value ladder so he's not worried. Once he has his client and performs the cleaning, he may suggest a thorough check up. This will recoup the money lost on the first step of the ladder. From there, maybe a whitening process. At this point, if not before, everything from this client is pure profit. Rinse and repeat.
You need to do the same for your online business. If your an affiliate marketer, work up a free offer in exchange for theri email address. Once you have that, you can send them on to your bridge page explaining your product (affiliate offer) and then on through the affiliate link to the sales page. The key here is getting the email address. You then can follow up with email campaigns with more offers up your value ladder. Another thing that will really help you, is when choosing your affiliate product to represent, make sure they have their own built in value ladder offering a range of higher price products. This way, you have the opportunity to recoup frontend costs acquiring your new client/subscriber/customer.
My main goal is to just break even acquiring that customer and depending on the product/service i'm offering, sometimes I don't mind a small loss on the frontend. Because I know the profits and real money is on the backend. And if you have a value ladder it will speed the process.
I plan to go in more depth about frontend and backend sales in upcoming blogs, so be watching! And as always, if you have questions about anything now, just ask them in the comments below and I'll be happy to answer and help!
Until Next Time...Take Action!
Grant
Feel free to join my private FB group for more help and support along your journey. You'll fine the link bottom right of my WA profile page.
Recent Comments
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Not really... a funnel can be a small value ladder, but you use a true value ladder in your follow ups. Your email campaign, ad campaign, etc. I can see what you're saying though as far as overall you could look at it as a funnel, but generally, it's over a period of time rather than quickly like a true funnel.
The way I understood a funnel was the relationship you build over time with the target persona. You move them through the phases so that you wind up retaining them for life.
I am sure there may be short funnels for a niche website that doesn't really care about a long term relationship.
But for an authority site, it would make no sense to constantly send people through lots of short ones unless you are looking to label them as a number instead of a person.
The funnel I’m talking about is a sales funnel that you use to make sales. It’s like a miniature Website with 3 to 6 pages. The first page is opt-in Page, the next page is the sales page then you can have up sell page then thank you page. See my blog following this one.
Knowing what we are selling and to whom we are selling it to, how we are going to achieve it and what the profit is, can make and create the value edge.
A good blueprint there Grant.
Isn't something like a loss leader in sales.
Value leader? Is it equal to upsell ... which is done by many internet marketers now?
In a way, yes. Your funnel can be considered a small value ladder, but it’s your front end sales, still. The real money is in the backend with the email follow up and value ladder.
Hi Grant. That dentists ladder has me worried. I have to visit one soon, I think you put me off. Jim
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I work in the dental field and your dentist example is spot on! I will remember this as it correlates to WA!
Michelle