What is a Self-Liquidating Offer (SLO)?
For those who are just getting started, this term “SLO” will be new to you. However, after you finish reading this blog, I strongly suggest you create your own self-liquidating offer because it can really help you recover some marketing cost you have spent to acquire new customers.
Back then, when I first got into digital marketing, I was spending a lot of money running ads to validate my offers. I was thinking about what ways can I use to minimize the ad cost because validating offers can be really expensive at times especially when your sales funnel isn’t converting at all. After some research online and acquiring YouTube education, I found out a particular term some marketers is using, the word self-liquidating offer (SLO) and that literally gave me a good idea to approach my cold market because it is very challenging to sell them directly without a proper way of building relationships and trust. SLO is perfect for me to start as I can provide real value to the marketplace yet having the possibility to break even my ad cost.
Without further ado, let me share with you what SLO is all about and how it helps me along my journey until now and in future.
The Importance of Having an “SLO” in Your Sales Funnel
First of all, self-liquidating offers allow you to create a cheaper version of what your main offer is about at the back of your sales funnel. The price of SLO should be aimed to cover just the cost per acquisition (CPA) of a customer. Let’s look at this example of how SLO is applied to the main product you wanted to sell to your dream customers.
In MLM or network marketing, we are given a product to sell by our own network marketing company. This example will assume you use that MLM product you plan to sell as the main product, and I will take weight loss drink as the MLM product here.
The price of the drink is around $30 per bottle, as set by your MLM company. As you start to sell this product, you realized that you need to find the right customers that need your product. Then, you thought about searching for them online through digital marketing and started running ads.
Your target market saw your ads and decided to enter your sales funnel to have a look. In reality, we are aware that not everyone will buy your products directly after looking at your sales funnel, but it is confirmed that a large sum of money is spent to drive those advertisements to your target market.
Therefore, instead of driving your website visitors directly to your $30 product, you can choose to drive them to your cheap offer upfront (assuming that you create a $7 product and show them first before your $30 product). The $7 product can be a simple weight loss program that you have created yourself. With this instance, you can have a higher sales conversion rate because a customer can spend up to $37 instead of $30. That $7 product can compensate for some of the ad cost that you used to acquire that buying customer.
Furthermore, if your conversion rate is really good, you indirectly acquire yourself as a free customer since your profit actually breaks even with your ad cost. Existing customers that you have gained using SLO can be lead to purchase other offers you may have that benefits them without the need to spend on advertisements again.
How to create your own “SLO” in your sales funnel?
Step 1: Create an Objective or a Goal
Take note that the purpose of SLO is NOT to make a profit out of it! You are using SLOs to create a unique customer email list for yourself, and that list will be useful for you to sell other products or services that are related and beneficial to them.
Identify what are the software tools you need to build your SLO funnel that can generate your own email list as quickly as possible. Once you start to have a list of subscribers, build a personal relationship with them through an email newsletter or inform them about your publications (if any) over time.
An email autoresponder is highly recommended to shorten the time required for you to send your weekly or monthly newsletter to all of your subscribers.
Step 2: Brainstorm Your Bonuses
To ensure your MLM offer is more attractive, you need some bonuses to support it. These bonuses can be in these forms: physical products, spoken products or written products. I will give you a simple example list as a head start so you can begin brainstorming your own bonuses for your MLM product.
Main Product Example: Weight-Loss drink
Physical Product Bonuses → Free packet samples of the drink
Spoken Product Bonuses → Interview with health experts regarding weight loss
Written Product Bonuses → 30-day workout plan to lose all those unnecessary weights
Aside from these 3 main bonuses, you can also include other bonuses such as Facebook groups or consulting services, depending on what type of offer you want to create and your desired price point. Brainstorm as many products as you can so you have more things to choose to create your offer stack in the next step.
Step 3: Create and Structure Your Offer
This is the most important part where you structure your “SLO” in your sales funnel. In almost every purchase decision made online, your offer plays a huge role in influencing that purchase decision regardless of what price point you have set.
To structure a good offer, you will need to add on a few bonuses that support your main offer. Take note that your main offer should be able to stand alone without the need for the bonuses. These bonuses can further convince your customers to buy from you instead of your competitors because they are unique, a must-have for all network marketers to gain more sales. Fast-action bonuses are essential in telling your customers to buy from you now.
A standard offer stack (your main offer + bonuses) should consist of these items, depending on your final price.
- Your main product/service
- Add-on bonuses
- Fast action bonuses
Before you move to the next step, read this checklist to ensure you have everything you need before we move on to the advertising platform.
a. A FREE product as a lead magnet (Report, Guideline, Checklist etc.)
b. SLO offer stack/SLO alone (To recover some ad costs)
c. Your main MLM product offer stack (The actual thing you want your customers to get)
Step 4: Choose Your Advertising Platform
There are a few advertising platforms you can use to run ads to get some traffic. In this case, I will only talk about Facebook ads as I am more familiar with it compared to others such as Instagram or Twitter. I will attempt to test with YouTube as well but that will be short.
When you create your ads, you need to know the goal that you are aiming for. In this case for SLO, your main goals should be to generate as many leads as possible. Please do try out different headlines on your ads to test them to observe the market’s response.
To further increase the click rate to your website or sales funnel, use the free lead magnet product as a bait to get the right prospects to buy what you offer in exchange for their contact details. In that way, you give yourself a chance to build a relationship with them over time and eventually offer them something else without the need to run ads again to acquire new customers.
Step 5: Launch and Test your SLO!
By this step, you probably should have everything set up. Here’s a checklist for you to refer to just to make sure you have everything done. If the product is not completed yet, you can still launch without it because you want to be sure there is a demand before you waste time creating those products. You only finish the product when people start opting-in or buy from you, ensure that you inform your customers upfront that your offer is not completed and will be delivered at the promised time you set in advance.
Checklist (The bare minimum you must have before you start driving traffic)
- A website/landing page to collect user info
- A working payment gateway to receive customer payments
- An email auto-responder to initiate follow-ups, update your customers and receive any feedback.
- Ads that retarget them to your website/landing page.
If possible, attempt to run through your system using a test credit card provided by the payment gateway you select and an actual credit card to ensure the transaction works.
The goal to test the system with an actual market is to identify how efficient is your sales funnel. You have to ask yourself if the funnel breaks even your cost or the funnel is profitable or if you are running at a loss. Make necessary tweaks until you are satisfied with the outcome you get.
Conclusion
I hope the information that I have shared here may inspire you and helped you to create systems to run your MLM business effectively and efficiently. Before you go, please do not forget to check out my other publications at
Facebook -> https://www.facebook.com/MarketSolversIsAwesome/
YouTube -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgd41HgCVaMaLdvTSfRvwDA?sub_confirmation=1
Spotify -> https://open.spotify.com/show/2hLPUkmed4fMBVsrsJ3Fhe
More awesome tools -> https://www.themarketsolvers.com/softwaretools
I also will be releasing a free training video series, especially for network marketers/MLM to show how to build and recruit your own elite marketing team and sell your products without bugging your friends and family. If you want to be the first to get my video series, please leave a message below this blog or you can email me at support@marketsolvers.zohodesk.com.
Till then, take care!
Update: The free training video series has been released! Be the FIRST to get yours now at https://lnkw.co/mlmtutes.
