$37 vs $77 tripwire experiment: the cheap one made almost 3x more

I sold the same product for $37 and $77. The cheap one made almost 3x more.

Back in June I told you I was going to run a price test on the Tripwire Toolkit as a tripwire offer after my webinar registrations and report back whatever happened, including if it made me look dumb. Results are in. It made me look a little dumb, but only in the way that trying new things always does. You won’t know unless you try though!

P.S. This is part of my Jenna Kutcher JV Webinar and my Gemma Bonham-Carter JV Webinar, both of which have their own debriefs.

The setup

The Tripwire Toolkit is the $37-ish order bump people see immediately after they register for one of my JV webinars. They've just given me their email, the confirmation page loads, and there it is. Impulse territory.

I ran the same product at $77 for Jenna Kutcher's webinar in June and $37 for Gemma Bonham-Carter's in July. Same product, same checkout, same $17 Optimize Your Tech Stack bump attached to it. Only the price moved.

I want to be upfront that this is a sloppy experiment (my #1 core value is transparency, and that includes admitting when my methodology is held together with tape).

Jenna's list is 10x the size of Gemma's, which is smaller and warmer to me because I just sponsored her AI Unlocked summit back in May.

Different month, different audience, different weather. Price is one of maybe four things that changed. Real A/B testing would run both prices to the same list at the same time, which I did not do, because I am one woman with a chronic illness and two children and a finite supply of Jenna Kutcher’s sending traffic to me for free.

So: directional, not gospel.

What happened

Halving the price didn't double conversion. It quintupled it. Gemma's list bought at 5.8x the rate, which is why 47 sales off a thousand people out-earned 53 sales off six and a half thousand by nearly 3x per lead.

If I'd looked only at the raw totals I'd have concluded $77 won ($4,642 vs $2,017 gross) and moved on. The totals are a lie told by list size. Per-lead is the only honest comparison when your two tests have wildly different denominators, and it's the number I'd been lazy about tracking before this.

The part that actually surprised me

The bump went the other way. Hard.

At $77, 62.3% of buyers also grabbed the $17 tech stack add-on. At $37, only 29.8% did. Same bump, same page, same price for the bump itself.

Paying $77 selected for somebody who had already decided to spend money that day. Once they were at checkout with their card out, a second yes cost them nothing emotionally. The $37 buyer was making a much smaller decision (some of them, I suspect, barely registered it as a purchase) and was correspondingly less warmed up for a second one.

That's why the $77 average order value came out at $87.58 against $42.91. Fewer buyers, each worth twice as much.

Did buying the tripwire predict buying MBA?

This was the question I actually cared about, because a tripwire that only makes tripwire money is a rounding error. A tripwire that identifies your future $1,497 buyers is a lead-scoring machine that happens to pay for itself.

Yes in both cases. And the $77 buyer was 2.6x more likely to go on to MBA than the $37 buyer.

I checked the order of operations on Gemma's two, because "did they buy the tripwire first or after" changes the meaning entirely. One bought the toolkit July 14 and MBA on the 22nd. The other bought the toolkit July 9 and MBA on the 22nd. Tripwire first, both times, well before the cart opened.

Two people is not a finding. I want to say that plainly rather than dress up n=2 in a percentage sign and hope you don't notice. The only reason I trust Gemma's 4.3% at all is that it points the same direction as Jenna's 11.3%, which sits on a sample three times the size (which admittedly, is also still a small number).

What I'm doing with this

Keeping $37 as the default. Cash per lead is the metric that pays my mortgage, and $37 wins it by 2.8x. More people in the ecosystem also means more people seeing everything else, which showed up in a way I didn't predict (below).

Testing $77 as a qualifier on ads traffic specifically. If the $77 buyer is 5x more likely to become an MBA buyer, then for cold paid traffic where I'm trying to find the 2% who'll spend $1,497, the higher price might be doing lead scoring I'm currently paying Meta to do worse.

Rebuilding the bump for the $37 buyer. A 29.8% attach rate against 62.3% tells me the bump copy was written for someone who's already in spending mode. Different buyer, different second yes.

And one genuine gift from the cheap price

Five people took the $7 trial on the $1k/Day Experiment. Four converted to the $27/month subscription. That's 80%, and they're still billing now. Four of those five came in through the Tripwire Toolkit first.

So the $37 buyer who "wasn't worth as much" bought a $37 thing, then a $7 thing, then kept paying $27 a month indefinitely. Cheap entry, long tail.

Next test is the $77-on-ads version. I'll report back on that one too, including if it flops.