How to Attract Customers Fast with the Right Incentive with John Dwyer

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down how to attract customers fast with the right incentive. To drop these value bombs, I brought John Dwyer in the EO Fire studios. John is a direct response marketing expert who convinced Jerry Seinfeld to front a record-breaking campaign and now helps businesses attract customers using powerful incentive-based marketing strategies. And today we're going to talk about what you actually do, incentives versus discounts, what actually works, the vacation incentive, and oh, so much more.

0:38John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to John and our sponsors. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days? Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something, short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD.

1:18John Lee Dumas:On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today. John, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Working later than most other people and getting up early before most other people. Everybody talks about the four-hour week and it was a very successful book. However, I must say that I haven't met too many people who have been successful that only work four hours. So yeah, I believe that if you want to be successful, then you've got to put in the hard yards.

2:00John Lee Dumas:Well, one of my favorite quotes that I've used over the years is, I believe that I get more done before 9am than most of the world does all day because I've got an incredibly effective and efficient morning routine that starts at 5.30am and I just crush it. So Fire Nation, get up early and make things happen. You know, I'm not a big put a point of myself of going to bed late because I like to get a good night's sleep, but you know, to each his own, figure out what works for you and make it happen. And JD, I want to talk about what you actually do because your company is the instituteofwow.com and you specialize in direct response marketing.

2:38John Lee Dumas:So break it down. What exactly do you provide to entrepreneurs and business owners? Yeah, good buddy. Yeah, look, I guess if you went to a traditional marketing agency, they would say to you, look, we'll get people to fall in love with your brand so that they'll taste your product. We flip that. As a direct response agency, we flip that. We get people to taste your product so that they'll fall in love with your brand. And I guess really at the end of the day, we're after measurable sales that come fast because at the end of the day, you know, our favourite acronym, mine used to be KFC, now it's CPL.

3:12So, you know, if the cost per lead is too high, then you've got to, you know, be creative to get it down. And that's what we do. We actually, particularly with online those days, of course, Facebook and Instagram and so forth, it's all about making sure that you get the right audience and you get the right CPL.

3:27John Lee Dumas:What I love about you, JD, are incentives because you understand human psychology. You understand incentives. And I want to get really deep into incentives versus discounts because you're a big believer in using incentives, otherwise called the adult happy meal toy, which I love for your phrase. And you even worked on a campaign with none other than Jerry Flippin Seinfeld. So let's talk about why businesses should use incentives instead of just discounting their prices, aka boring. Yeah, buddy. Look, I'll go through the Seinfeld thing in a minute because obviously I love showing off about that.

4:07But just in terms of general marketing now, yeah, you don't want to be marketing your products or services on price. You know, leave that to Costco or leave that to Kmart or Walmart because they're built for that. But if you're a small to medium-sized business, then, of course, you don't want to be giving up margin by dropping your pants all the time. And that's what incentive-based marketing can help you do. Incentive-based marketing is basically designed to take their eyes off the price. And I guess the best exponent worldwide over the last 30 or 40 years has been McDonald's. I've got six children.

4:40They're all grown up now. They're adults. But, you know, we had six under 12 at one stage. and I think we gave McDonald's about seven gazillion dollars throughout those years because, you know, they put a toy in their Happy Meal and that toy took our eyes off the price. Whatever it took to shut the kids up in the car, we would get six Happy Meals and there'd be six toys. And Kellogg's have been doing that forever. You know, Amazon, they have a Prime membership club whereby if you are a member of their Prime membership club, you get free shipping and various, you know, music and movies and various privileges.

5:11Dunkin' Donuts do it. But you know what? Other than the cafe down the road that, you know, if you buy nine coffees, you get the 10th one for free. 97 % of businesses worldwide have never used an incentive. It's too easy to drop their prices. But the stats are 97 % of businesses have never used a toy in the Kellogg's Corn Flakes box. They've just never used an incentive.

5:33John Lee Dumas:I love this phrase, and it was actually coined by Seth Godin, is that the problem with the race to the bottom is that you just might win. And you don't even want to be in that race, Fire Nation, let alone winning that race. You're not Walmart, okay, Fire Nation? You are not Walmart. You are not going to win that game. So figure out incentives that actually work. So, JD, Fire Nation, my audience, they're full of entrepreneurs across different industries, verticals. what types of incentives work best and why? Yeah, look, message to market match is important. So therefore I'm a baby boomer. If I walked into a menswear store and bought a suit and they gave me a skateboard, they'd miss the mark, okay?

6:20If it happens to be a women's audience, then you might have, but if they gave me, for example, two gold class tickets to the AMC theater, then all of a sudden that makes sense. if it's a female audience and she's bought some fashion or she's bought some perfume or whatever it may be and they gave her some day spa tickets, then that makes sense. If you're dealing with a male audience that might be contractors, so they're blokey, blokey sort of guys, a carton of a case of beer might be a good sort of value-add incentive. So you've got to design the incentive so that it actually matches the audience that you're chasing.

6:56And I guess that leads me into being able to show off for two seconds, John, Yes, please do. The Greater Building Society. My wife is not here, otherwise she would roll her eyes and she'd say, oh, you're not going to go through the Seinfeld thing again, are you?

7:13Anyway, I had a client down under, and it was called the Greater Building Society a few years back. And they were in a market whereby they were a challenger brand. So they weren't as big as the Bank of America or the Wells Fargo. They were still big. They were the 250th biggest business in Australia, but they weren't the size of Wells Fargo. And they wanted to sell home loans. And so therefore I said to them, we're not going to win on price. You know, every time you dropped your interest rate from 5.5 % to 5.4%, whatever it was at the time, the big 40-tonne gorilla banks would drop, you know, within a day.

7:44So you're never going to win that. It'd be like the little corner store trying to take on Costco. And so they said, well, what will we do? I said, well, why don't you, you know, provide them with an incentive? We take their eyes off the interest rate. And so that's what we did. we came on television and social media and we said, swap your loan from one of the big banks, like the Bank of America, come across to us and we'll give you a free vacation. In Australia, we call it holiday. We'll give you a free holiday. In the first two or three years of doing this, they took an extra$15 billion, not million, billion dollars worth of home loans.

8:15Now, we're talking little Australia, okay? That's big, big dollars. People were just leaving their big banks to come across. And of course, you know, they got their free vacation. And about three years in, we'd, you know, scooped up all the low-lying for it. The bank's general manager said to me, what do we do from here, JD? And I said, oh, well, why don't we go to the next step? Why don't we use a personality, a celebrity of some sort to promote the vacations? And I won't bore you with the details, but I annoyed the daylights out of Seinfeld and just said, look, would you like to do it? It was really down his alley because it was a cheeky advertising campaign.

8:50And this particular building society, we'd created a very cheeky personality. They would give you a vacation. But of course, the big banks wouldn't even know your name. Excuse me, wouldn't know your name. So that's what we did. I chased him and eventually he said yes. And we got Jerry Seinfeld. I'd go backwards and forwards to New York for three years. And Jerry Seinfeld came on TV and said, look, get a home loan and get a vacation. And I've prepared for this, John. You wouldn't believe it, but I've got a 30-second ad here. If you wanted to hear it, I'll play it.

9:15John Lee Dumas:You know, listen, that's a little teaser that we're going to play Fire Nation. as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. When a simple landing page somehow turns into endless tickets, handoffs, and back and forth, frustration can quickly set in. Framer changes that. With Framer, your whole team can collaborate in real time, make updates together, and publish instantly. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams, and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. The best part, agents in Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaborations on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything all in one place.

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10:47John Lee Dumas:So you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at high level fire dot com, you unlock my full bonus stack, a 30 day free trial of high level with full access, a private 50 minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 days to something execution roadmap and more. Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit high level fire dot com and start building your something today. JD, we're back. And we had that little cliffhanger, that little teaser right before the break. You've got a 30-second ad for us.

11:24John Lee Dumas:Let's hear it, brother. Okay. This is Jerry Seinfeld using an incentive to get people to swap their home loan. I'd like to talk to you about a home loan. Not for me, for you. I have a home. Get a getaway home loan from the greater. It could be the most fun financial decision you'll ever Mate, just ask a Grater customer. When we shopped around for a home loan, we found the Grater had one of the lowest interest rates. And a free holiday with over 200 choices, and there were no catches. Get a Getaway's home loan and go on a free holiday. Or loan us some money and we'll go on a holiday. Either way, someone's getting out of here.

12:01John Lee Dumas:That is so Jerry Seinfeld, by the way. Like, that's his personality. Yeah, look, because we had created a cheeky personality for this particular bank, where we said, you know, if you've got your home loan with the bank, they'd probably treat you like a number. They don't know your name. They charge you all these extra fees. Swap across to the greater, of course, Heavenly Music and White Doves, and you get a free vacation. And it was a pretty powerful sort of, I guess, option for people to take up. And, of course, you know, when we put Seinfeld on for, you know, marketing it, well, you know, it shut the gate.

12:33It's all over.

12:34John Lee Dumas:Now, how can a business actually access and use something like this? So they're listening right now. They're like, well, that's an absolute no brainer. This makes sense for me. What would be your advice for them? What are next steps? Yeah, well, what happened, John, is that after the Seinfeld campaign, I got contacted quite a few years ago. It was before COVID. And it was from a travel wholesale company. And they said, look, we've seen your Seinfeld stuff. It was pretty hard to keep that a secret when you've got Jerry doing your ads. We're a travel company and we get access to unsold rooms right throughout America and around the world.

13:07would you like to create some sort of Happy Meal toy package for businesses to use these vacations as a lure for customers? And, you know, you pay us a royalty. I said, yeah, hallelujah. I've been through the whole learning curve with understanding just how valuable, you know, vacations were in terms of a customer drawcard. So I said, yes. And that's what we did. We launched it. Obviously, we had to sit on our hands for two years when COVID came along because everyone had to. But Yeah, so what happens is that we actually package this up and we provide it to businesses as an adult Happy Meal toy.

13:41And, you know, whether it's a lawnmowing company or whether it happens to be a retailer or it happens to be any business at all, you can actually say, look, buy my product or service and I will give you a free vacation. And I know the question is probably, you know, in everybody's mind at the moment, well, okay, what is the vacation? It's between three and seven nights. People can stay at places like Orlando, New York, Chicago, Grand Canyon, in Las Vegas, New Orleans, Niagara Falls, Mexico, Cancun, all throughout America and Mexico and Canada and Europe. And guess what? The vacation's worth about$1 ,000 because it's between three and seven nights and we sell them to businesses for$97.

14:22And if you don't mind, John, I'll just tell everyone where they can go. Just go to vacationsincentive.com, so vacations, plural, vacationsincentive.com, and you'll see it's$97 there, but you're getting something worth$1 ,000. So therefore, of course, if you're selling a product that might be$1 ,000, then what you're doing here is for the equivalent of what would normally be a 10 % discount, you're swapping that 10 % discount to basically give someone something that's worth$1 ,000. But the good news isn't, you know, this is coming up, John, is that in just a moment I'll tell you how you can get those vouchers, not for$97, but for$32.

15:02John Lee Dumas:Wow. I mean, Fire Nation, it just keeps getting better. But before we do get there, JD, I want to talk about low costs and high value because we've already kind of played around this topic a little bit today, but I really want to dive into why the best incentives have a low hard cost, but a high perceived value. Why is this such a flipping game changer? Yeah, look, the reason McDonald's Happy Meal Toy has been so successful for four or five decades is not just because they've taken out licenses with Disney and DreamWorks and Warner Brothers. It's because that toy costs them just 20 cents to make in China.

15:37But it looks like it's worth$5 in Kmart. And so, therefore, what they've done is taken advantage of a low cost but a high perceived value. You see, those examples I gave you before when I said if I was to buy a suit at a menswear shop, you know, and they gave me two tickets to the Gold Cinema, you know, at AMC, then really I know that those tickets would have cost them $50. If they gave me a$50 dining voucher, it means that they valued me at$50. The lady who buys clothing and she gets a voucher to go to a day spa, she knows that's worth$50 or$100. The beauty of the McDonald's formula is that they get the toy made for 20 cents, but of course it's worth$5 in Kmart in terms of the customer's perception.

16:20So that's where this vacation voucher thing that we've got just really, really is a winner because you can pick it up for less than $50, but to the consumer, it's worth$1 ,000. So that's the sort of incentive you want. You want an incentive whereby you don't pay very much for it, but to the consumer, it's worth a fortune.

16:37John Lee Dumas:So you did kind of give a little bit of a teaser for a special offer for Fire Nation. You've got something special. Tell us exactly what that looks like and how we can take advantage of it today. John, hopefully I've teased your listeners into at least considering, I guess incentive-based marketing for their products or for their services. As you said, price discounting is a race to the bottom. Yeah. And it's not sustainable. There's nothing wrong with getting rid of your warehouse stock twice a year. But to do it every week, if you're not Kmart, you just can't sustain that because if you're a small to medium-sized business, you need to put food on the table so you need to have margin.

17:18And so what we're saying is that you should look to running an incentive this particular one, I have to say to you, I've never seen anything like it. I've been doing this for quite some time. I'm not 21 anymore. I've tried every incentive you could possibly think of from microwave ovens to bicycles to dining vouchers to movie vouchers, you name it. And nothing comes near this. And look, it's not only because we all love to get a vacation, but also too, it's appealing to all demographics. So, you know, a 25 year old, a 35 year old, an 85 year old, everybody wants to go on a free vacation. And so what I've put together is a webinar, just a short 20 minutes or so webinar that I provide everybody who comes to that webinar with a lesson on incentive-based marketing.

18:03I dive a little bit deeper than what we have here today because I've got a little bit more time up my sleeve. And if anyone wants to come to that webinar, at the same time, if you fill the form in to watch the webinar, we will give you, wait for this, every single person, a free vacation. So therefore, yep, I'm going to drink my own Kool-Aid. I'm going to give it away.

18:22John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation sounds like an irresistible offer, which is just what you want to create. So, J.D., what is the exact call to action for our listeners who want to check out more? If you go to incentivewebinar.com, okay, so incentive, singular, incentivewebinar.com, when you go to that page, you'll see that there's a form, fill in the form, and then we will email you a PDF vacation voucher, and that vacation voucher will be worth around about$1 ,000 and that will allow you to choose from all sorts of destinations, Orlando, Disney World, New York, Chicago, Palm Springs, San Diego, Cancun, all throughout America, Mexico, Canada and Europe.

19:03So therefore you've got yourself a three to seven night vacation. It's for two adults and two children staying in the same room and absolutely free. There's no catches, we don't have any catches to it But hopefully when you do go to that page, incentivewebinar.com, you will take 20 minutes out of your time and watch the webinar. Because with the webinar, I will show you how you can then get the vouchers for your business to hand out as a Happy Meal toy for$32. Not for$97, but for$32. We're talking about the same price that you would pay for lunch or a snack at McDonald's. you're going to be able to get these vouchers.

19:41And then you would use the vouchers to cost entice people to buy your product or service.

19:46John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JD and JLD today. So keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type John, J-O-H-N in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And of course, go directly to incentivewebinar.com. That's where all the next steps are for everything that we talked about. And John, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and John for sponsoring today's episode.

20:22John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. So to learn more about becoming a guest, visit EOfire.com slash guest. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. stop duct taping your business together high level runs your website your funnels email automation scheduling payments and memberships all in one place and when you sign up at high level fire.com you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more visit high level fire.com high level fire.com fire nation Are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days?

21:05John Lee Dumas:Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something. Short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD. On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today.