Sell again after the first sale 5 of 25 in this group
SOP 63
Design a buy-X-get-Y-free offer
What this page is for. Use it to turn a discount you were going to give anyway into a free offer, which is the whole trick: the customer pays the same money and hears something much stronger. The page carries how that swap is made, the rule about which side should be larger, what to do when the free thing is not the same thing as the paid thing, and the cash-handling conditions that decide whether you are allowed to run it.
SOP-63-Design-a-buy-X-get-Y-free-offer.md
1. The shape
The customer buys something and gets other things free. The more free things they get, and the higher the value of those things, the better it works. Buy one, get two free beats buy two, get one free — the same three units either way.
2. Why it beats the discount it replaces
Free offers get far more attention than discount offers. The limit on that is stated immediately: if you have only one thing to sell and you give it away, you go hungry. So businesses with one thing tend to lean on discounts instead, hung on a holiday or a season as the reason to drop the price for a while.
Selling more than one unit at a time is what breaks that. Make the discount large enough to cover the price of additional units and the same money becomes a free offer. A one-third discount becomes buy two, get one free — which is the stronger of the two, and is the reason you would never advertise the third off.
3. The two ways to use it
Reframing only, with no discount at all. Three shirts at $10 each is $30. One shirt at $30 with two free is also $30, and the same three shirts leave the building. The money is identical; the first version is unremarkable and the second gets attention.
Reframing plus a discount. The same three shirts at $6.67 each is $20 — a third off — and can instead be sold as one shirt at $20 with two free. The customer still gets a third off; you never say so.
| Version | How it is priced | What is said |
|---|---|---|
| No discount | Three at $10 | Buy one at $30, get two free |
| With a discount | Three at $6.67 | Buy one at $20, get two free |
Raise prices before you give things away. The caution attached is blunt: if you can only afford so much margin, do not give it away.
4. The physical worked case
Boots at $200 a pair, marked down to $600 for one pair — at least in the pairs that were looked at — advertised as buy one pair, get two free. Three pairs of $200 boots leave the store for $600, and the cost of the three was baked into the price of the one. What the frame produced was group buying — one person paying and two people walking out with free pairs.
Where customers buy once, load the first sale. The structure suits a business whose buyers are not coming back, because there is only one transaction to maximize.
5. The time worked case
Three versions of the same eighteen months of service, all reaching eighteen months:
| Version | What is said | Months delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Good | Buy twelve months, get six free | 18 |
| Better | Buy nine months, get nine free | 18 |
| Strongest | Buy six months, get twelve free | 18 |
The price is identical across all three and so is the service delivered. The third is the most compelling because it has the most free in it.
Flag: one of the three prices does not match the other two. The second and third versions are both priced at $1,800, and all three are also put at eighteen months for $1,800. The first version is priced at $8,800. A second account of the case puts $1,800 on each version it prices, though it repeats one version and lists a buy six, get six, which comes to twelve months, not eighteen. This page does not settle which reading is right.
6. Why the time version is a cash play
The problem it solves is named with a number attached to the old state: for some of these service businesses it took a whole year to earn back what winning a customer cost. Running buy six, get six on the front end — or as an opening promotion — brings in a batch of customers who each prepay six months at full price.
The wrinkle that protects the price. Add one small, high-margin extra to the promotional version so that the promotional offer is genuinely more than the ordinary one. What that buys is the ability to say the promotional service was higher than what will normally be offered later, which is what justifies the higher price on it. The worked extra is direct access to the owner — named as something that would probably have been given to early customers anyway, just not promised in the sale.
The other use is equipment. Where the business is healthy and you want to buy something, prepay ten customers and fund it, rather than opening a credit line.
7. When the free thing is not the paid thing
The free items do not have to match the paid item. What matters is that the free side still makes the offer compelling.
- One shirt at $10 with $20 of socks free may read as the better deal.
- A $20 shirt with a second shirt free may read as worth less than the same shirt with two pairs of socks free, because the customer translates it into one thing for two things rather than one thing for one.
More cheap free things can beat fewer expensive ones — sometimes the cheaper pairing converts better — and the instruction is to test it rather than to assume it. The worked test holds your cost constant: one free shirt against three free pairs of socks at the same cost to you, where the socks version is buy one, get three.
Whether the cheaper pairing wins is conditional on the buyer: two pairs of socks may outconvert a single shirt, depending on whether socks are the next thing that buyer happens to need.
8. Extending how long a customer stays
Where customers normally stay three months, buy two, get two keeps them four. The instruction is to take your own normal duration and extend it by a structure of this shape. The figure attached to that extension is 33 percent.
Flag: the 33 percent is stated against the money and worked against the months. Three months to four months is a third more time. The gain in money depends on how the pair is priced, and the pricing step is asserted rather than worked. Not established on this page is what the customer pays under that structure.
9. The conditions on running it at all
These are stated as conditions, not as cautions.
| Condition | What it says |
|---|---|
| You can manage money | Spending the prepayment as it arrives is named as bad ownership |
| The cash is kept separate | One bank account for it; pay yourself out of it monthly, as you deliver |
| The business is not on the edge | Where you need this cash to stay alive, running it is stated as a risk to the reputation |
| A cap on the recurring base | 10 percent of recurring customers, so a hundred recurring customers means ten |
The cap is declared as what it is: a psychological solution rather than a mathematical one. Putting everybody on an annual prepayment is granted to make mathematical sense; the reason for the cap is that a lot of owners cannot handle the responsibility of holding that much delivered-later cash, and that far more businesses are reported to have succeeded by keeping their recurring cash flow.
10. Keep selling the people who prepaid
The fear named is that a customer who has prepaid for a year should not be sold anything else. The observed opposite is stated as the point: a year's prepayment marks out the buyers who are the most likely to buy again afterward. Prepaying self-selects them, and having paid long ago they stop feeling the cost at all, so later offers land on somebody who feels they are paying nothing.
11. The condition underneath all of it
Making more offers to a customer is named as not unethical in itself. What makes selling unethical is deception — lying about whether somebody qualifies for something, or about the quality of what will be delivered. The test given is a household one: a customer who knew everything you know should buy the same things you would recommend to somebody you love.
12. What this page does not decide for you
- How many free units to give. More free than paid is the rule; no maximum is named.
- Which free item to pair with which paid one. The instruction is to test it.
- What the promotional extra should cost you. High margin is the property named for it. This page gives no figure for it.
- The cap for a business with no recurring revenue. The 10 percent cap is written for recurring bases. Not established on this page.
13. The checklist
| Question | The answer |
|---|---|
| What the customer does | Buys one thing, receives others free |
| The rule on proportions | More free than paid |
| Which is stronger | Buy one get two, over buy two get one |
| What it replaces | A discount of the same value |
| The worked conversion | A one-third discount becomes buy two, get one free |
| Reframe with no discount | Three at $10, sold as one at $30 with two free |
| Reframe with a discount | Three at $6.67, sold as one at $20 with two free |
| The physical case | $200 boots, one at $600 with two free |
| The time case | Eighteen months, three ways, most free wins |
| What to do before giving things away | Raise the price |
| What the promotional version needs | One small high-margin extra |
| Duration extension | Three months becomes four, at 33 percent |
| Cash conditions | Segregate it, pay out monthly, do not run it to survive |
| Recurring cap | 10 percent of the recurring base |
| Who to sell next | The people who prepaid |
| What a given free pairing will convert at | This page gives no figure for it. |
14. What this page does not cover
The order this offer belongs to is built on SOP 59 — Assemble a money model from four prongs. The four that share its job, which the page does not rank: SOP 64 — Design a pay-less-now-or-pay-more-later offer; SOP 60 — Design a win-your-money-back offer; SOP 62 — Design a decoy offer; SOP 61 — Run a giveaway as an acquisition offer. Standing outside that set of five is SOP 65 — Convert a free consumption asset. Where this structure is used to roll a customer into an ongoing payment rather than a fixed block of time, that is SOP 74 — Price continuity against upfront cash, and giving free time against a commitment is SOP 75 — Apply a continuity discount and the three-plus-twelve rule. Selling the prepaid customer again is SOP 66 — Run the classic upsell and choose the moment. Setting the price the free units are measured against is SOP 2 — Set a price from the value gap, not from competitors, and the reason a promotion may run at all is SOP 9 — Split scarcity from urgency. What a customer returns across their whole life, which is what the duration extension moves, is SOP 55.
Bookkeeping for deferred revenue and bank selection are not covered on this page.
Terms defined on this page
- Buy X get Y free
- The customer pays for something and gets more things free. More free items, and more valuable ones, work better: for three units, one paid and two free beats two paid and one free.
- Reframing (one paid, rest free)
- Selling the same units for the same money but presenting them as one paid and the rest free, with or without a hidden discount, because free draws far more attention than a discount.