Today I want to talk about bonuses. You know, those things you add on to your offer, or your course, or your coaching program, or whatever it might be, so people feel like they’re getting additional value to what they’re buying.

What I want to share with you today is a different way. I want to offer you a different perspective when it comes to bonuses. In fact, I really think that it’s time to rethink how you’re using bonuses to sell your product or service.

I actually think you should stop using them in your offers altogether, and I want to explain why.

This is a topic that’s come up quite a bit recently, and this is something that I’ve thought about in my own business, especially over the past year now with our Accelerator coaching program.

So, here are some of my best quick tips and best practices around the topic of adding bonuses in your business, and what you can do instead.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why we feel compelled to offer bonuses
• What to offer instead of a bonus
• How to handle potential objections to your offer
• How to feel confident in your pricing

Links & Resources:

• Brittany McBean
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips
• The Art of Online Business website
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

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Quick Tip: 3 Essential Questions For Clarity In Your Business

[00:00:00] Rick:
What’s up, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, as always, for tuning in today. We are getting into another quick tip episode here on the show.

Today, I want to talk about bonuses. You know, those things that you add on to your offer, or your course, or your coaching program, or whatever it might be…

[00:00:48]
so people feel like they’re getting additional value in addition to what they’re buying.

What I want to share with you today is a different way. I want to offer you a different perspective when it comes to bonuses. In fact, I really think that it’s time to rethink how you’re using bonuses.

[00:01:11]
In fact, I actually think you should stop using them in your offers altogether, and I want to explain why.

Now, this is a topic that’s come up quite a bit recently. This is something that I’ve thought about in my own business. Especially over the past year now with our Accelerator coaching program. It’s a 12 month coaching program.

[00:01:35]
There’s not bonuses that we add on to it, because we include everything in it. That’s something I want to get into today.

[00:01:43]
Speaking of Accelerator, by the way, we are accepting applications right now.

So, Accelerator is a one-on-one coaching group, coaching and mastermind experience for established course creators, coaches…

[00:02:00]
teacher entrepreneurs. By established, I mean, you’re already doing at least 100K a year in revenue from your online business. You’re looking to scale. You’re looking to create more profit, a bigger impact, all with less hustle. Because, my friend, it is not about working more hours in order to achieve more profit and more impact.

[00:02:24]
So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed in your business, if you’re feeling stuck in your business, you’re not really sure what next steps to be taking, what to be doing in the business. Would it be focusing on in the business, right. Building out your team, et cetera. Then I want to invite you to apply. It’s application only. Go to RickMulready.com/Accelerator.

[00:02:43]
Okay. So, in the past, when it came to bonuses, generally bonuses—and this is the way I’ve taught it in the past several years, too—in general, bonuses are usually used to overcome people’s objections to joining your course, or membership, or coaching program. Meaning, “Okay, I don’t think this is right for me because…

[00:03:15]
I don’t have an email list.”

So, if you don’t teach how to create an email list in your program, then you might want to include a bonus training about how to start email list,

[00:03:29]
Which brings up, why not just, you know, teach how to, how to build an email list in your program. Right. But that’s beside the point. We’ll talk about that here in just a couple minutes. So with that, you know, the, overcoming objections thing. Here’s why I see a lot of people, including bonuses and they’re including bonuses to compensate for not feeling fully comfortable charging the price. That they’re charging for their offer. I want to say that again, they’re including additional bonuses too, so that they can make themselves feel better to sort of compensate for themselves, not feeling comfortable, charging the price that they’re charging for their offer.

[00:04:17]
So they try to add in a whole bunch of bonuses to overcompensate and make themselves feel better about the price of their. They also assign random dollar values, right? To each of the bonuses that they’re offering something like, you know, they say something like, so you’re getting $7,792 worth of value for just, you know, $697.

[00:04:42]
And there’s zero judgment here. I used to do this too. I did this for a lot of years. And what I want to offer to you is to give your potential customers more credit than we’re giving them is especially, especially when it comes to assigning values to your bonuses. Right? My friends people know what’s.

[00:05:11]
Right. In the previous episode, we just heard from Brittany McBean, who is, our amazing copywriter talking all about these types of topics here. We didn’t talk about bonuses, but this is something that I’m seeing more and more where people are just coming up with random bonuses to include as part of their offer so that it looks like.

[00:05:38]
They’re just giving all this additional value as part of their offer, but yet it’s, there’s no intention behind it. Okay. Now I’m not saying don’t do any kind of bonus, right? So I, where I think I’m a good bonus, what that might look like. Granted, it’s not super scalable. If you have a team that could handle calls, that’s a different story, but.

[00:06:07]
If you’re on the smaller side in your business and you have the opportunity to do this, you know, I think a good option for a bonus would be time with you, right. A, you know, a coaching call or something like that. A 30 minute coaching call. Okay. Now, if you don’t offer this in your business, as it is.

[00:06:32]
Don’t go assigning some, you know, made up value of a coaching call with you, right? If you offer this, that at a, at a certain price, then go ahead and do that, but don’t go randomly making up some, you know, dollar value for a 30 minute coaching call with you. If it’s not even something that you, that you are.

[00:06:56]
Okay. Now that would be, I think, a good use of a bonus now. it? Isn’t it. Isn’t overcoming an objection. I think if you are offering your time again, the scalability factor comes in, right? So if you have a larger business and a lot of students coming in, this is not something that you’re going to want to be offering, but.

[00:07:21]
One-on-one time or an audit or something like that, which SI which your team could handle, that sort of thing is, could be a very nice additional bonus. Right. And so with that though, I want to sort of bring you up to how I’m thinking about bonuses today and how I’m teaching bonuses. And the question I want to ask you is, do you really need to, do you really need to offer bonuses?

[00:07:48]
Do you really need to offer them? I think that your offer should be able to stand on its own and be amazing in its own. Right. And your messaging and your copy are the things that should be used to address people’s objections that they might have. If you’re doing a webinar, use the webinar to, to address potential objections.

[00:08:15]
Use. Emails use your sales page, that sort of thing. Okay. And so this is really where I’m coming at it from a bonuses perspective. I just see too many people throwing in a whole bunch of bonuses without any sort of intention or strategy behind it to cover up if you will, or to make themselves feel better about the price that they’re offering.

[00:08:42]
You know, their course or their coaching program or their membership or whatever it is that they’re, that they’re offering. And so that’s what I really want to encourage you to look at. If you have bonuses tacked onto one of your offers or two, your two, whatever many offers that you have, I’d look at why you are using them.

[00:09:04]
And are you using them for the right, for the right reasons? In fact, I actually think. That for the most part bonuses really aren’t necessary anymore. Again, are there exceptions to that? Of course there are, but I’m of the mind that your offer should be able to stand on its own and just be the amazing offer that it is and include.

[00:09:37]
People need in that offer. Right? I know it’s a, it’s a concept, right? And let your messaging, let your copy, let your webinar, let your videos, whatever it is that you’re doing, your emails, whatever it is that you’re doing to sell your offer. Let those things overcome. People’s objections. You can include that in your copy in your sales pages.

[00:10:04]
It’s. Okay. So I really want you to think about that, because again, this is something that I’m thinking about. This is something that we started doing in our business, early 20, 21. So really not that long ago, or like, you know what our offers stand on, you know, by themselves.

[00:10:23]
And stand really strongly on their own. And this is not something that we need to do to overcompensate for anything. If you don’t feel like your pricing, if you don’t feel confident in your pricing, that’s a huge red flag. If you are not confident in your pricing, when you go to convey the pricing to your audience, to your people, they’re going to see right through that.

[00:10:48]
You have to feel confident in your price. Right. And so one of the things that I talked to our Accelerators all the time about is does it make sense to increase your price? And a lot of times they’re undervaluing, they’re underpricing their offer. And when we start throwing around, you know, different pricing, Opportunities.

[00:11:13]
I’m not telling them what to price it on. Right. But we start brainstorming different, you know, different ways to think about it. They might think like they have to make this big jump there. They, you know, a light bulb goes off and they’re like, yeah, I could, I, I really should be increasing because of the value that we provide delivering on the promise that we make with our program.

[00:11:36]
But they might not be ready to make that big a jump. And so if they know that they want to charge, you know, that higher price, just, just as an example, if they realized they’re like, you know what? Yeah, I really think I should charge more for this, but they’re not quite comfortable with that amount yet. If they try to go right to that amount, with that, you know, lack of confidence and being able to communicate that that’s not good because again, The people that they’re selling to are going to see right through that so that you have to feel comfortable with the pricing.

[00:12:09]
And now it’s like, feel comfortable just outside of your comfort zone. That’s what I that’s, that’s the way that, the best way I think I can describe that right now. And so you do have to be able to confidently communicate and message about your offer and your pricing. And don’t use bonuses to overcompensate for it to make yourself feel better about the pricing.

[00:12:36]
Because again, like I said, I see it all the time. People just start throwing random things in there to offer as bonuses when it doesn’t really make a ton of sense on a lot of different levels. Right. One of which being, it should probably be re be included already in the offer. Right. Lastly, I also want to add that, this came up in a recent conversation on a coaching call and I’m so glad that this person, brought this up the conversation around pay in full bonuses, right.

[00:13:11]
Incentivizing people to pay in full rather than do the payment plan. Right. And. Having bonuses, you know, offering a bonus or bonuses when people paid in full and this person, I was so proud of them. And so happy that they said this. They said, you know what, I’m not doing pay in full bonuses because I want my offer to be accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they can afford to pay in full or not.

[00:13:44]
I’m not going to incentivize a pay-in-full option ror accessibility reasons. I want this to be the accessibility for everyone. Love that. That’s what we’re all about here.

So, if you’re thinking about including a pay-in-full bonus—and really think about why you’re doing that now—number one, I totally understand it.

[00:14:08]
And again, I did this for years, but this is part of the growth that we’ve experienced, that I’ve experienced over the past, really the past year and a half in that, you know what it’s, let’s not incentivize people to pay in full when this is really about accessibility and whether someone can afford it. If someone cannot afford to pay in full let’s not penalize them for that.

[00:14:36]
Right? So, I’d love to get your thoughts on everything I’ve said today about bonuses. Leave a review, leave a rating review for the show over on Apple Podcasts, or you can now do that on Spotify. I’ll be sharing how to do that, because I heard from somebody recently that you can do that.

[00:14:56]
I haven’t seen it myself. Or, shoot me a DM on Instagram. I’m @RickMulready. Let me know what your thoughts are here on bonuses.

As always, my friend, thank you for tuning in today. Super appreciate you. I’ll see you right back here for the next episode here at the Art of Online Business podcast.