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Most people are using bonuses all wrong, and it’s killing their conversions. What if you could create a no-brainer offer that makes your audience say, “I need this now”?

If your bonus feels like “more stuff,” it’s not helping your offer, it’s hurting it. In this episode, I’m breaking down exactly how I use bonuses to create urgency, drive conversions, and make an already strong offer completely irresistible. 

I’ll share my golden rule for designing high-converting bonuses, common mistakes to avoid, and the timing strategies I use across both live and evergreen funnels. Whether you’re selling a service, a course, or a group program… this episode will change the way you sell.

Key Takeaways

• Why the way most people use bonuses increases overwhelm and actually drives buyers away (and what to do instead)
• How to use bonuses to overcome objections and drive same-day decisions
• My exact strategy for layering bonuses in webinars, evergreen funnels, and sales calls

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Oh, it’s been an incredible week for me. A full week. I said today I’m gonna stop saying I am so busy. I’m gonna make a choice to not use those words. I don’t think I wanna put that label on myself anymore. Life is full in so many beautiful ways since coming home.

From my experience at Joe Dispenza, I have managed to maintain. About a minimum of two hours a day of meditation. There’s some days that it’s been like an hour and a half, but over an hour, um, every single day. So in the morning when I get up and then my kids get 30 minutes of TV at night. And so during that time and a little bit past that time, and it’s been incredible.

I know that sounds like a lot of meditation and you’re probably going, that sounds terrible, but it’s crazy. I, I’m able to. I meditate so much deeper that I lose track of time and so it doesn’t actually feel that long, but my mental clarity is a hundred times better and my overall like emotional state and how grounded I feel is crazy improvement.

Not that I really like would’ve said. I struggled with that before, but. I just feel like anything, anything could happen in my life and I’d be like, I’d be cool, I’d be fine. Um, and I’m sleeping better. I am more patient with my kids. It’s, it’s amazing. So I. I also feel like something with that is, how did I make two hours of time a day?

What was I doing before? Because I haven’t taken away from, you know, time I’m spending in my normal day to day or my training. It’s pretty wild when you make a decision that something is a priority and then you change. Your actions and your habits and I just wake up, I grab my mask ’cause I put a mask over a sleepy, it’s a sleepy mask, but it’s like a blindfold over me when I’m meditating.

And I put headphones in now because it helps, I’d say about 90% of the time. My kids do interrupt me at some point, but I’m like in it and so highly recommend it, but there’s no way before going, I wouldn’t say no way, but before going to that event, it would’ve been really hard for me to meditate that much.

And that was like a bootcamp, a meditation bootcamp. And I’m honestly really excited to see the impact of this, of keeping up this practice for months and years and seeing where that puts me as a person. Because just, it’s been probably two, it’s been what, two weeks? It’s already. I, I feel like a completely different person anyways, you know, I always like to give a little personal update at the beginning of these.

I’ve had some amazing podcast interviews this week, and just a really great week of content creation and team collaboration. April was a very busy month for me and a lot of travel, and so I’m, I’m happy to be home for all of May and just doing some catch up in, in those areas. I thought that today I would do a tactical marketing strategy podcast ’cause I’ve given you lots of interviews or more high level CEO strategic podcast.

So today’s gonna be a tactical one. It might be a quicker one, and it is around using bonuses, using a bonus to get somebody to take action and buy your digital product, your service. Um, it could be used for physical products. It’s probably a little bit less for physical products, but you could still incorporate this into your strategy.

I’m a really big fan of bonuses, so let me start with that. Humans make decisions if they’re forced to. They are given an urgent reason to make a decision, and I think that urgency used in a legitimate, within integrity way is very. Strategic for your marketing, and I almost always suggest having that there’s really two forms of urgency.

We can do a discount on a product or a service for a limited amount of time. Or you can use bonuses, you can also use both of these things. But some people are, are really not for bonuses in their bus, I mean, not for discounts in their business, which is totally fine. And in that case, a bonus could be a great thing.

I, I will very rarely do discounts on my offers. I sometimes will, if I wanna make it a real, like no-brainer, irresistible. And we only do that like maybe one or two times a year, maybe. I almost always use bonuses and I some, I will use different types of bonuses and I will use different durations of the bonus.

So I’m gonna talk about this. So first of all, I recommend having a bonus. If you’re doing a live launch. Let’s say you have a live webinar or a live challenge, when that door opens for your offer and you start, you pitch your offer, and you introduce your offer, that’s now your open cart period, and you’d have a bonus and there’d be a limited amount of time that that bonus is relevant.

And we will talk about the different options. But that could be you have to buy right on the webinar to get the bonus, or you have. The next 24 or 48 hours, or you have five days to get this bonus, and it of course pushes the urgency. If you have a more automated funnel, like you’ve got an Evergreen webinar, you do the same thing.

It’s just based on when people are in the funnel, they listen to the webinar, they. You share the bonus, and for them it’s a 48 hour bonus, but it’s based on when they hit that point of the funnel. You can use softwares like Deadline Funnel. Um, I think, you know, some of the softwares like ClickFunnels or Kajabi, they have timers built into them.

They’re not as robust in terms of redirecting someone if they have a new IP address or, or something that they’re looking at the sales page on. But it, it will work. I, I oftentimes tell people with that. If you’re creating a bonus in an evergreen funnel and you need a timer because you need based on when that person landed on the page, it to be redirected in a certain amount of time that the bonus goes away.

I say, prove the funnel and just use the easiest timer you have, whether that is. S within your platform or not, and then invest in the deadline funnel and add the other softwares just ’cause you, there’s a lot of expenses, right? That can build up. So that’s generally the advice that I give my clients, um, is keep it as simple as possible, but have the urgency.

You need to have urgency and. It works great in live launches, and I always have something in a live launch, but honestly even more so in Evergreen because in something that’s always going and you always have people coming in, there’s gotta be a reason for them to buy. ’cause if they think they can come back and buy it with, you know, the same exact option and the same exact offer in a month or two months from now, or they tell themselves, I’ll do it next week, they’re gonna wait because that’s what humans do.

So that’s my spiel on why have a bonus. You need urgency and if you don’t wanna do a discount, bonuses are great. Most people make a big mistake when it comes to creating bonuses. This is what most people do. Most people say, okay, I will give them more. I will give them more. More content. Another training video, access to a course I made in the past, a mini course, a workshop, whatever.

I’ll give them more content. And to you in your mind when you choose that it’s valuable because you know the value of that content. You know that if you give them that workshop, you taught this in the workshop, and that’s a valuable, free thing that you’re giving them as a bonus. However, to the person who is.

Perceiving this value, they see it as it’s more information I need to consume and I’m already considering joining a course or signing up for a service likely ’cause I need to save myself time to get to my end result. And if you present them with a bonus and you’re like, I’ll give you a mini course, or I’ll give you a workshop, or I’ll give you an extra training, while it could all be great and probably is great content.

The perceived value of that is low because it’s not perceived with getting to their result faster. So here’s the golden rule with bonuses. Every good bonus is associated with speed and ease. How can I get to my end result? Get to the outcome I’m trying to get to with your product or service? Like why they’d buy it in the first place?

The outcome they want, the desire they have. How can they get there? Faster and easier. So they hear your whole offer and they hear you talk about your offer, and they’re in their mind, hypothetically, they’re going, wow, if I had this, I could really see how that’s gonna get me this result. It’s gonna get me to this place of losing weight, of, of improving my marriage, of making more money, of having a marketing strategy, whatever.

It’s, they see that with your offer and then you go and on top of all this incredible components to my offer. I am also gonna give you this bonus. And then they hear that and they go, oh, well there’s no way I won’t be successful with that. That is incredible. And it is going to get me to my end result in an even more guaranteed way with less effort and less work on my part.

So. Drill this into your mind. All good bonuses are associated with speed and ease. We want an offer to feel irresistible. Somebody hears about it and they’re like, I have to have this. This sounds incredible. I know that if I have this, it will get me where I wanna go, and I’m excited about it. And it has that, like that irresistible excitement, energy to it.

And then when they hear the bonus, it just pushes them over the edge and they’re like, done. I’m sold. That’s so good. That makes the value of what you’re offering 10 times for me. So how do we do that?

Well, you have to ask yourself what would make them getting to where they wanna go in a faster and easier way. So here’s some formats that I like, and these are the questions I ask clients when we’re coming up with bonuses. I say, is there something that’s maybe in your program we’ll do we’ll separate programs and services.

So if you have a program like you sell a group program, a digital product, something that you know, they buy and they get access to, and there’s whether or not there’s live components or not, it doesn’t matter. Is there something in that process or in that deliverable that if you reviewed it with a Loom video quickly, you know, five minute loom video, but you gave customized feedback, it would be super valuable to them.

So if we look at weight loss, you’ll review their food log or you will review their. F their um, p and l statement. I had a client do that once, is that was her bonus is I’ll review your profit and loss statement, and for you it takes five minutes because you are pulling it up. They submit it somehow. You pull it up, you create a system, they submit it, you pull it up, you review it, you make a loom video and you send it to them.

To them, that is very valuable because they just got customized personalized feedback. And where most people get stuck in programs and courses is when they run into nuances. Is this right? Am I doing this right? You know, I ran into this question and I didn’t know, so I love audits. Some sort of review or audit already baked into what you’re doing.

So we’ve done that a lot with our bonuses where, um, we’ll review your offer or we’ll audit your sales page. Uh, I have clients who do like, we’ll, audit your Instagram bio, uh, and maybe rewrite it for you and improve it. Simple little things. Easy to deliver, but high touch. You also could go the route of, they get access to, let’s say, a group call with you.

There’s a bonus group call and only people who you know get this bonus, get to come to the call. But you have to paint the picture of why that’s beneficial. So we’ll talk about that in a minute. But as I’m talking, one other piece to remember is when we say the bonus, you have to also tie it to an outcome.

Someone can’t automatically assume that access to a, you know, private group call with you is beneficial without you saying, and on that call, we’ll do a hot seat and we’ll talk about this, this, and this, and help you with clarity around this, whatever. You could also do a private one-on-one. I have clients who offer a 30 minute call or, you know, you get a one hour strategy call with me.

Um, obviously like that high touch time is, is always valuable and it’s associated with the speed and the ease because it’s right into customization, personalized time. If you have a service, then something you could do is additional done for you work. So we’ve done before with our program, by our program, and we’ll give you, we’ll build your funnel.

We will do that for you. Um, with our like agency service. You get everything. You get everything in that service. So it’s harder to do bonuses, but we will do, we’ll do extra organic social media for you as a, as a additional bonus. So if you have a service or if you don’t have a service, but you feel like this could be valuable to somebody who can do some sort of like, done for you piece to your, to your program, um, or your service, something that.

Adds value to what they’re already buying, but again, is focused on their result on where they want to go. So I like audits because they’re easy to deliver, but obviously you know your time one-on-one calls or extra group calls, or maybe there’s something that really compliments what you’re, what you’re selling.

So I have a client who sells something on the weight loss, but she’s all focused on nutrition. Yeah, everything’s fo focused on nutrition, um, in her program, and she really gives them everything they need in terms of recipes and meal plans and the whole thing. But she doesn’t have anything about exercise.

So one of her bonuses is an exercise guide to go with. Her nutrition academy. So that’s another way. It’s like, okay, I wanna get to the result of losing weight. You’re covering the nutrition portion in your offer, and now I will also give you the exercise ’cause that’s something you need and everything is delivered in a way that feels like, it feels like a hack.

It feels like a quick win. So bonuses need to feel like. Like they won. Like if I have this, I will be successful. There’s no way I won’t, like the bonus itself is so valuable that I could say just having that bonus is worth the offer. That’s how you have an irresistible offer when you tell someone your offer and then you tell them the bonus that you’re offering and they, they have the perceived value and association that if they just had the bonus, the whole investment would be worth it.

Now selling becomes so easy. Selling becomes a byproduct of you just telling people about your offer. That’s where I want to get all of your offers, because if you have an offer that is so good like that, and it just addresses all the problems, and when someone hears it, they’re like, there’s no way I won’t get to where I wanna go.

And then you add the bonus on top and it’s like cherry on top done. Selling’s easy. Selling is no longer challenging because the second someone hears about it, they are convinced people wanna solve their problems. People wanna buy from you. They, they throw money at their problems all day, every day. They just have to believe that you were the right person for it.

Okay, a few more things on this. Next thing I wanna talk about is the positioning of the bonus. So when you explain the bonus, whether that’s on a webinar or on a sales page, or in your emails, it always needs to be tied to the outcome. So you have what your bonus is, but it’s not enough to just say you can submit your food log to be audited.

No. You wanna explain? You can submit your food log to be audited by me personally, and I’ll review it and tell you exactly what food you shouldn’t be eating, what you might have been missing when you thought. You were eating healthy or what foods are healthy and you should keep eating, and you’re painting that picture of the outcome of, oh, I’m gonna get feedback on my food so I know exactly what to eat and therefore I will lose the weight.

Or if we think about, I will give you a a one-on-one call. Okay. And I do these sometimes on my webinar. On that one-on-one call, I put this on my webinar slide on that one-on-one call, you get to talk to me about your marketing strategy, your business strategy, anything related to being a CEO, your messaging, and pick my brain and get personalized attention for 30 minutes.

So I’m painting the picture of the outcome versus just saying, here’s the bonus. And this is true for all of your sales messaging. Everything needs to be tied to an outcome because. Especially cold traffic, but really any lead, they’re, they’re not gonna have any idea why something’s valuable. If you don’t tell them why, if you don’t tie it to an outcome.

And why this is going to help them get to where they want to go. Every offer does that. I have people who say to me, what if my offer is not outcome based? It may not be like, make more money, right? But there is still an outcome. There’s still a problem somebody wants to solve. If you even think about physical products, why does somebody buys something?

There’s an outcome. There’s something that they want, they a problem they need to solve, or a desire they wanna fulfill and they wanna solve that outcome. So when you speak about your bonuses, wherever that is written or verbal, you need to tie it to an outcome. Don’t just say Get a get, get access to a private call.

Get access to a group call. Get access to an audit. Tie it to why that’s gonna help them get to their end result. Another thing you could consider here is, are there objections that people have to buying? Like things that they think, oh, I. You know, this is gonna get in the way of me implementing your, your service, your program, and getting results.

Can bonuses offset that? So one of mine for our expand program is that people have to implement their funnel. We don’t build it for them in the program. And they know themselves typically. And I’m gonna get stuck on the tech. I’m gonna get stuck when it comes to executing and. Setting all this up. Okay. So we’ll take that and we’ll build your funnel for you.

And I have a team and so it’s obviously, it takes work and investment for us, but it’s, we’ve got a system down to do it pretty efficiently. But that’s like a massive, massive win for somebody that you could argue is equivalent to equal to what they had invest in the whole program. So I’m also thinking about objections.

If we use the um, client who does the nutrition academy, people’s objections might be, but I haven’t figured out my exercise. I haven’t, I don’t know what I should do, and I know that’s important. What if I don’t lose weight? ’cause I don’t have that dialed and I need to go find that somewhere else. And she’s not offering it.

Oh, well, we’ll solve that problem for you. And again, in the communication about the outcomes, you’re tying it to. If you have, I’m giving you everything you need in the Nutrition Academy, and now I’m gonna give you this exercise bonus guide so that on top of fixing your, what you’re eating and knowing exactly what to eat and how to track your macros and blah, blah, blah, you also know how to exercise.

You’re guaranteed now to to lose weight if you implement, because we’re solving both the problems.

Final thing I wanna go over is how to use these in different timing. So timing your bonuses. One of my favorite things to do is have an if you buy on this webinar, so if you’re running any sort of strategy that includes a webinar or a workshop or some sort of live training where everybody comes on and then they hear you pitch.

If you’re running a strategy like that, I like to have a bonus that if someone buys either on that webinar or that same day. Like some serious urgency. You have that bonus. And then you also have a bonus that’s like a period of time after like five days or three days or seven days if you buy during this time.

And the reason I do the on webinar bonus is because that’s when you have everybody at the most heightened energy. When somebody’s on a webinar and you’re going through content and your content is good and you’re getting people to realize. Here’s what I’m missing and here’s what I need to do, and I see the path and I’m pumped up and I’m excited and I wanna get this result, and I’m all in and my energy is high.

That’s the best time to get somebody to buy because they are giving you their full attention. They believe that you can solve their problem or they wouldn’t be there. They’re excited. They’re ready to go implement. They want to take the next step. The second thing, get off the webinar. The thoughts start happening, right?

And not that you’ll lose everybody, obviously some people still buy, but you’ll start to run into situations where people get in their own way and they go, well, what if this doesn’t work for me? And. X, Y, z excuse, and maybe this isn’t a good time because my kids are gonna be outta school for the summer and blah, blah, blah.

Because human brains like to make excuses on why we can’t do something. And so the second somebody gets off the webinar, you’re just starting to fight against that. And again, it. People will buy off the webinar. It happens all the time, but the more people you can get make the decision and pull the trigger on the webinar, the better.

So having a bonus that’s really good and it’s on the webinar live. I love doing so. I give my best bonus usually on a webinar live. If I have the capacity to do this, I will offer 30 minute calls with me, limited to five people. And we do this a lot of webinars. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing the calls, so we don’t do it, but, or I got a backlog of them.

Um, but I actually enjoy doing the calls. It gives me content ideas. They’re easy for me. I get on and I can coach people. I can make a huge impact in 30 minutes, but I limit ’em to five and people have to make the decision on the webinar. They have to book their call. On the webinar for me, um, and it, and it gets an incredible conversion like we’ve tried without an on webinar bonus and it’s, it’s sometimes double the conversion on the webinar with it, but it’s gotta be a good bonus.

It’s gotta be a really good bonus, like your best one, like, because you’re not gonna, you are not gonna have hundreds of people buy that unless you obviously have thousands of leads on your webinar. But. So it can be something you can deliver at a small scale. So I can deliver five 30 minute calls, that’s, you know, two and a half hours of my time.

That’s spread out over months. I can do that now. I would never offer that bonus to everybody who buys steering by launch ’cause it’s too much to deliver it too much time. So on webinar bonus, the most juicy one, and then have something else. That’s a period of time after the webinar. And what that does is it allows you to talk about it in your emails.

It allows you to create the urgency in all of that follow up messaging. And then one other option is if you’ve got, let’s say, you know, a seven day open cart period in the middle of the seven days, sales usually slow. You get the initial round of sales and then people wait till the end of the cart because they have no reason to buy.

Like they can wait in the middle of it. You could have a surprise bonus. And so I had a client I suggested do that. We’re in the middle of the open cart. Um, she offered a discount for anyone who bought within 24, a 24 hour period, and the people who had already bought got that discount. ’cause that is one thing, if you create a bonus in the middle of open cart, people who already bought should get that bonus.

Otherwise, it’s not really fair to punish someone for buying too early and then like they might want that bonus. So it needs to be something that somebody can, you can give to the other people. So in her case, she had already offered that discount on her webinar, and then she offered it again one more time for 24 hours, and it sold her a lot.

Um, but you could, you know, drop a, a bonus group call or a bonus resource. Remember the quick wins though? It’s not like, let me give you this whole mini course. It is, what can I give you that is a shortcut to your success? That is a shortcut to you getting where you wanna go with less effort and energy on your part as your ideal customer.

So figuring out where those fit in. And then this drives your messaging. It helps you have different angles and different ways that you can talk about it inside of your emails. On your sales page, social media posts, and just creates that urgency. The more irresistible you can make your bonus, the more irresistible your offer becomes and the easier it is to sell.

So you can take this and go look at, do you have bonuses? You might be making that mistake of just giving people more information. Um. Do you not have a bonus? Can you add a bonus in? I’m a big fan of urgency and really irresistible urgency. Like I think one of my superpowers is looking at an offer and create, making it irresistible and creating irresistible offers that are way beyond the value that I’m charging.

The perceived value is so much higher than what I’m charging, and that’s how you have an incredible offer, because if it’s a no brainer when someone hears it. They’ll, they’ll throw their credit card at you. They wanna buy it. And there’s so much force and resistance I think that people go up against when trying to sell an offer because they haven’t gotten theirs to that irresistible place.

That’s one reason. The other is. They don’t have a lot of warm traffic and trust and people are taking a little bit longer to make decisions to buy. Um, that’s a whole other podcast episode. The more irresistible you can make your offer, the more reason you give someone to take action right now, and in the moments that they’re super excited, the better.

I wanna say one more thing that I forgot to add in, which is if you have a strategy where you do calls, sales calls, you can give a bonus to somebody who. Um, if they book the call by the certain date and they end up buying, that’s how they get the bonus. That’s what we do. You also have the option. I just consulted a client In doing this, you have the option of giving someone on a bonus when they’re on a call and saying, Hey, if you are able to make this decision today, I’ll throw in this extra bonus for you.

And that same, same rules that I talked about today. Yeah, quick and easy. It’s a done for you some. Sometimes we will use that on calls of, if we, let’s say we have an extra spot for a strategy call with me, my team will say, look, you know, I talked to Emily and if you’re able to make this decision today, you know, we think you’re a great fit, and she’ll do a bonus 30 minute call with you.

And then that gets them over the fence because again, you catch people in the moments where they’re 95% there. And you get them to make the decision they’re in. The second they leave and they go away, the thoughts come in. Life gets busy, things happen. Excuses come, objections come get louder. You. You gotta overcome those with urgency and bonuses and a reason to buy.

All right everybody, I hope you have a beautiful week. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you next time.