How I Made $7,000 In 4 Days With A Free Plus Shipping Offer

A question I get frequently is: “Does free plus shipping work?”

The short answer is:

Yes.

However, free plus shipping as a mainstream phenomenon in the drop shipping scene will get harder in the next few years. I’ve talked about the future of drop shipping in another post.

You might have heard the saying “marketers destroy everything”.

Whenever there’s a new breakthrough in marketing or advertising, eventually other marketers catch up, and collectively destroy what once used to work so well. This happened to banner ads, email marketing and is now also happening to free plus shipping in e-commerce. However, when I say “destroy” I don’t mean it will stop working completely. Email marketing and banner ads still work great, but it’s not as easy as ten years ago. And I expect the same to happen to free plus shipping and also drop shipping in general in the couple of next years.

In this article I’m going to share a case study of a free plus shipping offer I worked on for My Hair Evolution last year. She sells hair supplements that help women grow long hair faster.

She doesn’t drop ship.

So does free plus shipping work when you aren’t drop shipping?

Absolutely.

She works with a contract manufacturer to produce these supplements, private labels them and sells them on her own website. Any marketing strategy, including free plus shipping, will work better if you have your own brand. Having a brand, and a following of raving customers who trust you, will fix most problems. Which is what I recommend you focus on.

In my client’s case, she had already built an email list and social media following.

How did she do it?

Mainly through networking and publishing content.

She engages like crazy with people on Facebook and does a great job at building relationships.

Back when I started working with her she was making around $12,000 a month selling hair vitamins on her own website. Our goal was to deploy more effective marketing strategies.

And we started with a tripwire launch.

Does Free Plus Shipping Work For Tripwire Launches?

It works extremely well.

A tripwire launch is a product launch where you make an irresistible, low-cost offer available that customers will want to take advantage of. This can be done by lowering the price of a product ridiculously low. But another way of doing it is to offer the product for free and only charge shipping and handling. This is known as a free plus shipping offer.

In our case, we took her best selling hair vitamin and offered it for free.

One hair vitamin bottle retails for $29.99.

For our tripwire launch we changed the price to $0 and charged $12.99 shipping and handling. This was an irresistible offer for customers. In fact, it was a bit too good to be true. A lot of customers thought it was fake, so we had to do some additional explaining.

That’s another reason why you should always give a “reason why” when doing a sale.

People need to be able to rationalize why something is on sale, or why something is free. You have to provide a “reason why” because otherwise they’ll make up their own or simply conclude it must be a scam. I’ve used the same principle when drop shipping and it works great.

So what did I do next?

I created a simple long-form sales page with some copy explaining the offer. Later on we added some video because video is always more trustworthy than just text. It was important for customers to see Nanou, the owner of the company, talk about the offer herself.

It gave the offer credibility and created trust.

How I Made $7,000 In 4 Days For One Client Using Free Plus Shipping

The key to a successful tripwire launch is to have upsells in place.

Free plus shipping offers work great on their own, which is why they’ve become famous in the drop shipping scene, but they are way more powerful with one click upsells.

Here’s the sales funnel I built for Nanou:

I built it entirely in Clickfunnels.

As you can see we had two upsells in the sales funnel.

One upsell was for a T-Shirt to measure your hair growth progress and the second upsell was a Hair Moisturizing Line. Around half of the money came from these upsells.

Here’s how the sales funnel converted:

• Tripwire Offer: 6% conversion rate
• Upsell One: 24% conversion rate
• Upsell Two: 20% conversion rate

Usually, with tripwire offers you’ll see a higher conversion rate. It’s not uncommon to see conversion rates ranging between 10% and 30% for tripwire offers when sold to warm traffic.

The conversion rate was lower because people thought the offer was too good to be true.

(Which we fixed by adding a video to the sales page)

The upsells converted at 24% and 20% which is common for one click upsells with low or medium priced products. People just add these products to their order out of impulse, in the heat of the buying process, so to speak. If you keep the price of your upsells under $37-$97 you’re still in this sweet spot where people will buy out of impulse.

For premium products you’ll usually see much lower conversion rates, between 1%-5%.

This tripwire launch generated around $7,000 in a period of four days.

Why only four days?

With tripwire launches you want to have a clear deadline to create urgency and scarcity. I usually use a time frame of 4-7 days. Any longer than that and the urgency starts diminishing.

In case you’re wondering how we drove traffic, we used organic Facebook reach and email marketing. That’s another reason why you want to build a following on social media and email. There’s so much money to be made from your existing followers and customers through retargeting and remarketing campaigns. We didn’t need any cold traffic for this launch.

So does free plus shipping work for cold traffic?

Absolutely.

My first two drop shipping stores were entirely based on free plus shipping offers. I ran Facebook ads and drove cold traffic to my Shopify product page. It worked like gangbusters.

I have countless friends and students in my programs using free plus shipping offers successfully. It still works great in drop shipping. One 17-year old follower made almost $30,000 in two days drop shipping bracelets using influencer marketing. Other students are getting great results running free plus shipping Facebook ads. Does free plus shipping work? Like with everything, you have to put in the work. But if you’re willing to test different products and audiences, you can still get incredible results with the free plus shipping method.