How to handle “should have” offers in your buyer journey

One of my natural tendencies as a creator is to create broccoli products. Namely, products which I think people should consume, and which are good for them, but which they don’t want to consume. Imagine a loud voice in your head saying “Eat your broccoli”. Even though I initially felt queasy about foisting my sense of obligation on others, now I realize broccoli products are best placed placed further down the customer journey. Existing customers will be more open-at that point-to engaging with you. And you earn the satisfaction of truly serving your customers.

At first, I thought landing page testing served to filter out my broccoli product ideas. This is what landing page testing is designed to do: optimize a single step in a journey. If each step is optimized, then the whole system is optimized. Using real data about actual preferences, not declared or imagined ones. But I’m beginning to realize that isn’t necessarily true in this case.

A big factor in successful journey design is knowing where to put which piece. The order of operations. Remember grade school arithmetic, where 2+3*4 wasn’t the same as 3+2*4. All the same parts. And the same operations. But they give a different outcome.

Lead with something that addresses an immediate pain point. Then fully solve the (small) problem for them. Then upsell them on broccoli. Or something else. But at least you have their attention and you’ve earned your credibility, rather than trying flash in the pan trickery to extract their credit card details.

The initial offer can’t be a “should have” but a “must have”–in their opinion. And it needs to address a current issue the prospect is actually having. Without this, your front-end conversion will be a lot lower than it could be. But after that, you have a lot more leeway.

And eating your broccoli is a good idea anyway.