On a recent visit, my young nephew asked if I had any ice cream…
I had none to offer. Bad uncle!
So we hopped in the car and went to 31 flavors.
The excitement of getting ice cream was quickly replaced with the dilemma of making a choice.
Which one is the best? What if I choose the wrong flavor (can you?)? Will I wish I had gotten something different halfway through my cone?
Having lots of choices sounds great. But sometimes it makes decision making harder.
The same applies to offers in your sales and marketing.
Sometimes our marketing isn’t effective because it doesn’t include a clear offer – a solution to a problem that is important to the reader.
This happens a lot with content marketing. People have been told by the “marketing gurus” that they should focus on providing value and that selling is evil, so they don’t include an offer.
But there is nothing that says we can’t do both. Why not provide value AND make an offer to provide even MORE value?
Can You Have Too Many Offers?
On the other hand, presenting TOO MANY offers at once can be just as bad.
In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely, professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke, shared an experiment demonstrating this.
The experiment used a display of jams.
For the first round, the display offered 24 choices of jam.
145 people stopped by and only 4 of them made a purchase.
Next, the display was changed to include only six choices of jam.
This time 104 people stopped by and 31 made a purchase.
In other words, by reducing the number of choices from 24 to 6, sales increased by 775%.
How does this apply when marketing consulting and professional services?
Sometimes we make the mistake of offering people a large menu of choices. I know I’ve made that mistake.
After all, it’s exciting being able to help people achieve their goals. But that excitement makes it easy to overwhelm them with too many choices.
It happens when:
- we are meeting face-to-face
- writing a promotional email
- creating a sales letter, or
- constructing a landing page on our website
We think we are being helpful – letting them choose what they need.
But what we are really doing is creating overwhelm rather than clarity.
We’re making is easier for (even encouraging) our prospects to do nothing.
When your prospects are overwhelmed and decide to do nothing you hear is “Let me think about it”.
And then radio silence.
If you want prospects to make decision faster – to give you a definite “Yes” or “No” – then don’t confuse them.
Make them a clear, strong offer.
And don’t overwhelm them with multiple offers all at once.
