There may be affiliate links in this post which means I may receive a commission if you purchase something through a link. However, please be assured that I only recommend products I have personally used and love!


I love tripwire offers…. when you’re presented with a low-cost bite-sized offer as soon as you sign up to someone’s email list.

This blog post is not about convincing you to set up a tripwire offer (click here if you want to know that).

This blog post is about the tech. *groan*

There are quite a few tech tools out there that allow you to add ‘evergreen countdown timers’ so that each person has a limited amount of time to grab the deal.

But Deadline Funnel is hands down the very best tool for the job.

Especially if you also want to put countdown timers in emails, or set up full evergreen sales funnels.

Deadline Funnel is an extremely powerful bit of software, but sometimes that can be overwhelming when you’re trying to do something very specific and don’t know which settings to use and which features you can ignore.

This blog post is designed to be an ultimate guide for setting up a simple tripwire offer using Deadline Funnel… with my hints and tips along the way. ?

Step 1 – Create your pages

You need to create 2 pages:

Page 1: The tripwire offer page

Page 2: The page to redirect to once the offer has expired. This could either be a ‘full price’ page of the tripwire offer or a regular thank you page.


Step 2 – Get your code

Sign up for Deadline Funnelย or login to your account.
(If this is your first time using Deadline Funnel, you might need to click through a lot of the onboarding stuff).

Navigate to the Tracking Code (in the top menu bar) and then copy your unique code.


Step 3 – Install Deadline Funnel on your site/page

Put the code into the backend of your website or page builder (wherever you are creating the tripwire offer page).

You only need to do this once and then it’s set up for all future Deadline Funnels you set up. (Leadpages and ClickFunnels are an exception unfortunately).



Step 4 – Create your Campaign

Your Tripwire Offer is going to be one ‘Campaign’.

Navigate to Campaigns โ†’ Create New Campaign

Overview

  • Give your Campaign a name and select a Category.
  • Select your Email Service Provider (we’ll use this for tracking) and your Landing Page Builder.
  • Once you’ve done that, click ‘Next’ on the bottom left.

Blueprint

  • Select the ’15-Minute Optin Upsell’ Blueprint

  • Click ‘Next’ on the bottom left.

Deadline

  • Choose how long you want for your tripwire offer. (I recommend 15 – 30 mins).
  • Select your timezone. (This has no impact on the setup except for reporting).
  • Click ‘Next’ on the bottom left.

Funnel Steps

  • Add the url of your main tripwire offer page, and the url of the page subscribers will be redirected to once the offer expires. These are the two pages you created in Step 1.

  • Click ‘Finish’ on the bottom left.

Step 5 – Campaign Settings

Pages

Click Pages on the left hand menu.

Click ‘Edit Settings’ next to the Funnel Step you just set up.

Change from ‘Display Floating Bar’ to ‘Display Inline Timer’.

Click to save.

  • Click ‘Colors‘ on the left hand menu.
  • Choose the colors you’d like to use.
  • Click ‘Continue’ at the bottom left.
  • Click ‘Settings‘ on the left hand menu
  • Choose the style of digits you like from the dropdown options.
  • Choose which digits you want to show. I recommend turning days and hours off.
  • Click ‘Continue’ at the bottom left.
  • Click ‘Template‘ on the left hand menu.
  • Choose the style of countdown timer you’d like to use.
  • Click ‘Save Selection’ on the left hand menu.
  • Click ‘Size‘ on the left hand menu
  • Choose how large you want the countdown timer to be. I recommend 50% or 75%.
  • Click ‘Continue’ at the bottom left.

Click ‘Save and Exit’.

Emails

There’s nothing you need to do in this section ?

Appearance

There’s nothing you need to do in this section (unless you are planning to use a floating bar which I find is a bit OTT for a tripwire offer).

Settings

Click Settings on the left hand menu.

Scroll right down to the Advanced section at the bottom.

If you want, you can set the ‘Tracking Lifetime’ to be 30/60/90/etc days. This means that if someone signs up to a new form/landing page after that length of time they will see the tripwire offer page again. I have this set to 30 days for my tripwire offers.

Scroll right down to the bottom and click to save.


Step 6 – Adding the countdown timer code to your page

Copy this code:

<div class=”ddio_countdown_wrap”></div>

Add it in a code/html block on your tripwire offer page where you would like the countdown timer to show. You can add it in multiple places. (Usually above the buy buttons).


Step 7 – Testing

Fingers crossed, your evergreen countdown timer should hopefully now be all set up! ?

Go to your tripwire offer page and take a look if the countdown timer is showing where you placed the code in Step 6.

If it’s showing… yay! You’re all done!

If it’s not showing… hmmm….

  • Did you correctly install the Deadline Funnel code in Step 3?
  • Is the page published? And is it the correct URL (that you gave Deadline Funnel)?

If you ever want to reset the countdown timer on your computer, go into the Campaign โ†’ Testing โ†’ Click ‘Clear Tracking’. When you go to the tripwire offer page you should now see the countdown timer as though this is the first time you’ve ever visited the page.


Optional: Step 8 – Setting up tracking

If you want to accurately track your tripwire conversion rate, you need to set up tracking so that Deadline Funnel knows when someone buys your tripwire offer.

Set up your tag/list in your email service provider

Create a tag or list in your email service provider for buyers of your tripwire offer. This may be the tag/list you give them to indicate that they’ve purchased your tripwire offer, or it may be an additional tag/list specifically for Deadline Funnel tracking.

e.g. You might have a tag that’s just ‘Purchase: Tripwire Offer X’. or you might use that tag and another tag, ‘DF tracking: Tripwire Offer X ($17)’.

The reason you might create a new tag/list is if you have the tripwire offer version as well as also selling it at ‘full price’. You need to be able to distinguish who bought it as a tripwire vs. who bought it at full price off your site.

Set it up in Deadline Funnel

In the main menu at the top, select Integrations.

Make sure you’ve selected your tripwire Campaign.

Click ‘Add new Integration’.

Select your email service provider and click Next.

Click ‘Add Account’ and put in your API details from your email service provider, and click Integrate.

Next, in the Deadline Funnel main menu at the top, select Analytics.

Make sure you’re viewing event tracking for the correct Campaign.

Click ‘Start Setup’.

Select the currency your tripwire offer is in, the price of your tripwire offer, and then select the tag/list you identified or created at the start of Step 8 to identify tripwire sales.

Click to create the webhook or confirm the event tracking integration. (It’s slightly different for different email service providers).

Whilst you are still on the page, open a new tab and add a test subscriber to that list/tag in your email service provider. Deadline Funnel should pick this up and confirm that the event tracking is working, but it doesn’t always do this. As long as you carefully followed the steps above, you should be okay.

Click back to Analytics โ†’ Event Tracking.

Do you now see it showing 1 sale? If so, you can go ahead and click ‘Delete’ next to that test sale under the Sales Tracked section.

How to read Analytics

In the Analytics section for the Campaign, you’ll see a range of data. It’s summarised at the top:

You can change the dates of the data.

Tracking Started: This is the total number of unique people who saw your tripwire offer in the selected date range. Theoretically this many people could have bought.

Sales: This is the total number of people who purchased your tripwire offer.

Revenue: This is the total number of sales x how much you said your tripwire offer was.

Conversion Rate:

So for this example, the Conversion Rate of this tripwire offer over the time period is 3.88%.


So there you have it. That’s how you set up a tripwire offer in Deadline Funnel.

Just a couple of sales a month from a trickle of new subscribers more than pay for the Deadline Funnel subscription.

Let me know how you get on in the comments, and don’t forget to grab my free Tripwire Checklist! ?