Listen To My Latest Podcast Episode:

#665: Trends And Strategies For Membership Businesses In The World Of AI With Stu McLaren

Listen To My Latest Podcast Episode:#665: Trends And Strategies For Membership Businesses In The World Of AI With Stu McLaren

 AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am delighted that you are here. I am so glad you tuned in today because we have an extra special show. 

I call it an extra special show because it is my favorite thing to do a mini training on my podcast. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately. I love getting back to the mini trainings where it’s just you and me. I’ve done my research, I’ve got my notes in front of me, and I’m going to teach you something new today that you can apply to your next promotion. 

Today’s focus is all about adding an upsell to your next promo. As you know, I like to create trainings around strategies that have actually worked for me or I like to talk about areas where I’ve struggled or I’ve seen some obstacles and have since figured out how to move past those obstacles so that I can actually teach you how not to have those same problems I’ve had in my business. 

Today we are actually going to focus on something that’s worked really well and my hope is that you can learn from this and make it your own. 

Before we dive into everything I have to share with you about upsells, a quick word from our sponsor: 

Before we dive in I want to thank our sponsor today, 99Designs. I am such a huge fan of this company because they can take care of all of your graphic needs. We are talking logos, social media cover images, website graphics, and so much more. So visit www.99Designs.com/amy and get a $99 upgrade for free. 

So let’s jump back to our podcast. 

Getting back to the topic of the day, let’s talk upsells. As you know, for every episode I do, I offer a freebie. Sometimes I get really giddy about the freebie when it’s extra, extra good. Today I feel like we’ve got an extra, extra good freebie. What I’m going to show you in the freebie is the actual upsell page we used during my recent launch of my course, Webinars that Convert. 

I just got done with a big promotion. We did a really special upsell that I’m going to tell you about today: What worked, how we did it, how you can do it too. But I want to show you what that upsell looked like. I can’t do that on a podcast. So, in order to see what it looked like, I want you to get the download for today’s episode. Go to http:// www.amyporterfield.com/78download and you can see my upsell web page to get a really good idea in terms of how I set it up. 

If you would rather text me to get the freebie, you can text the phrase 78download to 33444 and we will send it instantly. 

Let’s do this. I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page when I talk about upsells, the definition of an upsell. For today’s training, the type of upsell I’m referring to is this: Someone buys a program or product from you online. They fill in all the credit card details and finish the transaction completely. They are officially now a member of your program. 

Before you take them to the purchase thank-you page that’s when you can offer an upsell. In that case I am giving my new member one more opportunity to buy from me. In that situation, that’s how we are talking about upsells today, there are three things that are extremely important to consider when you are creating your own upsell strategy. 

  1. What is the best upsell you can offer as it relates to the program you just sold? We’re going to get into that. 
  2. How do you price your upsell? We’re going to talk about that. 
  3. The flow of the upsell process. Surprisingly, it’s not just one offer. Or at least that’s not how I created it with my recent launch. So, I’m going to show you how I created it because there’s a certain flow that’s really important to the overall strategy. 

Now, to bring this all to life for you, I want to give you a snapshot of my most recent upsell experience. One little caveat, I am not an expert in upsells. This is the first time I’ve done an upsell and I’ve been in business for a while. 

I want to encourage you to do it way sooner if you’re just getting things up and running in your own business. I wish I had done this a long time ago. So, I’m not an expert, I’m just telling you what worked for me. And I learned some things along the way that you can take into your own experience of creating upsells. 

As I mentioned earlier, I recently launched my new course, Webinars that Convert. I created an upsell for the program. The program is $997 and you can pay that in a one- time payment or you can buy Webinars That Convert in a 12-payment plan and spread it out over the entire year by paying $97 a month or $997 one time. 

I created an upsell that was a pack of five slide deck templates. Remember, I’m creating a course all about webinars. One of the biggest elements of creating a successful webinar is to have a really solid slide deck for your presentation. 

Again, I created five slide deck templates, all beautifully designed by my personal designer, Jessica. The templates came in both PowerPoint and Keynote because I know people use both. I gave both to each person that purchased. And, I’ll tell you later in this training why I chose that as my specific upsell. 

There was a very specific reason and how it tied back into the program, even more so than what I just hinted to right there. We’ll get into why I chose the slide decks, but that is exactly what it was. 

Here’s are some stats that might help you understand this. The slide deck template was $297. In order to get the upsell you had to pay $297. But I created some different phases of that to help people that had a tighter budget. 

We welcomed over 1,000 new members into Webinars That Convert in a little less than two weeks. That is pretty awesome, right? I couldn’t be more proud of these members of the program. They are huge action takers and are already getting results. They are diving in and it’s a really cool thing to witness them jump into this program. 

So I had a little bit more than 1,000 new members. Over 58% of those who purchased my brand new program also took the upsell. So we generated an extra $170,000 just from upsells. That is insane, right? 

Part of that is because the upsell totally complimented the program. I can’t wait to talk to you about that but we will get there in a second. I just want to give you some stats to set the stage in terms of how this worked inside my own business. 

The upsell was actually a three-part upsell. Here’s how it looked. After the initial purchase I offered the template pack for $297. If my new member declined that offer, there was a link saying “No thanks, I’ll pass”, I offered to break that $297 into a two- payment plan to help them out a little bit. 

It was the same price and same five-deck template pack. I just broke it up into a two pay. If they declined that offer then I offered a lite version of the template pack. Instead of getting all five of them, I offered just two of them and I chose the two. 

The template packs are really cool because you can change the font, the color, they were full of different slides inside each template pack so it was pretty power packed. Remember, they get all five slide decks to use forever. But, if they really wanted the template pack but couldn’t afford all five of them, then I offered a lite version where they got two of the templates that I chose. 

I offered that for $97. It wasn’t as good as getting all five but if you really wanted them at least you could get two. As you can see, it was a three-part process with the upsell. 

Based on the three offers, this is what it looked like for my launch. I’m not saying this is typical. I know these aren’t averages, I’m just giving you a glimpse inside my own launch: 37% of people took us up on the first offer, all five slide decks for $297; 13% took the two pay for all five slide decks, there was no discount, we just broke it up into a two-pay offer; and then 23% took the lite offer for the $97 for just two of the packs. 

If someone bought the five decks at full price they would never see the two-pay offer or the lite version. You wouldn’t see the lite version unless you declined the first two offers. That’s how it works in terms of the programming we set up. Based on the behavior, did they take us up on the offer or not? They would see the next page or not. That’s how it worked and those are the results I got. 

Basically, I kind of compared it to some other people that I really trust and who have gotten great results with their upsells. They did say those numbers are really high. That’s unusual so I don’t want you to go out of the gate and create your own upsells and expect those kind of numbers. In some ways, I just got really lucky because the upsell was so dang good and it complimented the program so perfectly. We’ll talk about that in just a moment. 

But I do think there is an opportunity for all of us to create some awesome upsells that not only boost your revenue in your next promo but also offer an enhancement to your audience to help them get results faster. 

Let’s talk about. Remember I said there are three things we want to talk about, what the upsell offer actually is, how much you price it for, and the flow of that upsell. 

First, choosing an upsell for your program. Here’s the secret, you want to choose something that compliments the product they just bought. The question you want to ask is, “How can you help them go through the program faster or easier or streamline the process or support them at a level that they wouldn’t normally get inside your program?” 

Those are the things you want to think about when you’re deciding on an upsell. If you can remove an obvious obstacle they are seeing (they are already aware of it), you’re on the right track. Let’s look at my example. 

I offered five slide deck templates, both in PowerPoint and Keynote to my audience after they purchased a webinar program. Let’s talk about why I offered that. Inside my program, if you took the upsell or did not take the upsell, all members will receive training on how to create a slide deck. 

There’s one lesson inside my training called the 21 magical slides that you should always include when you do a webinar presentation. That’s inside the program. I for sure teach them what they need to know in terms of what to put on your slides to create the presentation. 

I also teach them do’s and don’ts: Not too much text, not too many bullets, use imagery, make sure to choose a font that’s easy to read. All of that is already in the program. And if I didn’t include that already in the program I would be missing a really big lesson that they need to learn. 

So when you’re thinking about an upsell make sure you’re not creating something that they must know in order to get success. Your upsell cannot be the ultimate success factor so that those that don’t get it are totally missing out inside your program. That’s not fair. You’ve promised results in your program, you’ve got to give them the training they need in order to get the results. 

Your upsell is something that will help them go through your program faster or easier or totally enhance the experience at a level that they wouldn’t normally get unless they had the extra support from you. 

Let’s talk about the slide deck. I didn’t create it, my designer did. But I worked with her really closely in terms of the types of templates I wanted to see inside each slide deck. I made sure that out of all five slide decks, each of them had a title slide. I think the title slide is really important on a webinar. 

Each of them had different templates for images and bullets and bold statements. I talked in the program about how you want to have some templates that have bold statements (a template is one slide). You want to make sure you have one slide that encourages engagement from your audience. Those are the types of slides I created inside the decks. 

They had all of these options in there. I call my final slide on a webinar my Secret Sauce. There’s a certain way I set up the final slide you see on a webinar you do with me. There’s a timer in it, there are testimonials, there is a really prominent URL where people need to go. There is just a way I do my final slide. 

Each deck, all five decks, had that final slide. They were each different in color and font and just general layout. So, if you didn’t want to change anything you could go in there and make it your own. You would put all of your information in there and you were golden. 

As you can see, they were really valuable. Can you get results inside my program without that upsell? Of course. You could have a designer create  something spectacular for you. You could take the guidelines I teach you inside the program and communicate that to somebody and ask them to create a  slide  deck  with  the elements you just learned. 

You could do it yourself, but we all know it’s a pain in the butt sometimes to communicate what you want to a designer if you’re kind of new at that strategy you’re working on. It can also be really pricey. You can definitely pay more than $300 if you’re working with a designer that’s really good. 

I love it because I got to work with my designer that I use for all of my promotions and she is amazing. Here’s another element that worked really well, I showed my slide deck during my webinar for this course. I promoted this course with a webinar. They saw my slide deck. So, if they liked my style and really liked the flow of my slides, on the webinar, I told them, “You’re going to see one more opportunity and it’s going to be to get slide decks very similar to the one you’re seeing here.” 

It was a win-win situation. So those are some of the elements I want you to think about when you’re creating your own upsell. You want to make it easier for them, more seamless, more streamlined. Optimize or enhance their experience or just help them get the results more quickly. That’s what you want your upsell to be about. 

Here’s what not to do when creating an upsell: Don’t offer more material that they need to go through. A good upsell is not just another one of your programs. That’s more like a bonus you can offer in your program. When we create online training programs, you know how most of us like to offer bonuses? 

Offering entry into one of your other programs could be a really good bonus and I’m going to talk about bonuses and how to use bonuses to offer scarcity in my next episode. Episode #79 is going to talk about which bonuses you offer when you’re creating a promotion and how to turn those bonuses into getting people to take action quickly. 

We’ll talk about bonuses in the next episode. But for the sake of upsells, more content is not a good upsell. I just want to make that distinction. It’s really important, you don’t want to sell them another program as an upsell. 

Here’s another great upsell opportunity to kind of counter that, Russell Brunson was selling a book DotCom Secrets It is a great book and I highly recommend it. I bought the book on his website and then after I paid for it I saw an upsell. The upsell was, “Hey, do you want the audio book of this? I’m going to deliver the physical book to you. It’s on its way and you’re good to go. But do you want to start listening to the book right now? You can buy the audio version.” 

To tell you the truth, I cannot remember for the life of me if it was more expensive than the book or less. I feel like it was more. Now that I think about it, the book might have been free because he was doing a special promotion and the upsell (forgive me, I doubt that Russell listens to this podcast, but if he does and I got this wrong forgive me) was around $30 for the audio book. It kills me not to have those details but I can’t go through the process again because I couldn’t find it. 

Just to let you know, let’s not talk about pricing yet. We’ll talk about that in the next section. But, for the case of the example I wanted to give you, offering an audio version of a book you just sold them is a perfect upsell. It makes it easier for them to get through your material faster. See how that works? I thought that was a perfect example. 

One more thing to think about, there might not always be a clear pain point you can solve with an upsell. My situation was pretty easy. I knew where I could help them out and get them quicker results and make it easy for them. 

Another upsell idea, that is something I’m kind of playing with for my next program, is to offer one-on-one coaching or some kind of consulting session as your upsell. This is going to probably be at a higher price point, we will talk about price points next, but offering your services or your support as an upsell could be really valuable. 

I would only do this if you have a good relationship with your buyers, if you are not brand new on the scene, they know of you, they’ve likely been following you, they’re really excited about your program, and they would love to work with you one on one. This is something you might want to try because a lot of people are always asking for one-on-one support and very few people offer it. 

If you’re offering an online training program, an upsell could be that you have ten spots for a three-pack training program. They get 30 minutes with you for the next three weeks. It’s $1,000 (I’m making this stuff up) and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Not only is that a great upsell, it’s great scarcity as well. 

Again, I want you to get my download to see how I talked about the upsell because you’ve got to give them just enough information so they really understand what it is. So if you go to http://www.amyporterfield.com/78download you can see the first page of my upsell, the $297 slide deck template, just to see how I initially introduced it to them on a web page. 

As a coaching program, they need to really understand what they are getting. You don’t want to be too wordy or too lengthy. But you do want to give them just enough. For a one-on-one coaching program might want to give them a little more information than I did in that example that you can get as a download. 

I just wanted to give you some ideas in terms of what to offer as an upsell. It’s very different than a bonus. Next week we’ll be talking about bonuses and scarcity and really ramping up your promo with offering more but not offering too much that it overwhelms your audience. That’s next week in Episode #79. 

Let’s move on to the next section. We already talked about what to offer as an upsell. The next thing is how to price your upsell. Pricing is something that you want to experiment with. I actually don’t think there is a right or wrong here because I’ve seen it done in many different ways. 

As I mentioned, I’m not an expert at upsells but I do now know what’s worked for my business and I’ve seen enough upsells to know how some of the top marketers are using them as well. 

The first thing you want to be aware of is what people just paid for your program. If they only paid $97 for your program, making a jump to $1,000 for a coaching session might be tough. But that’s why I wanted you to create some scarcity around it. You only need ten people to take you up on a $1,000 coaching package in order to feel really, really successful. At least most of us would feel that way. 

If you only need to fill ten spots, making that jump from a $97 program they just bought to a $1,000 coaching could be doable. But I do think it’s a tougher sell. 

As you saw, I like to just jump a little bit. You may be wondering if you start high first or do you ramp up to something higher. Again, this is something you need to experiment with. As you’ve seen from my examples, I have a product. I am going to remind you what it looked like. 

Either people paid $97 or they paid $997. They took me up on the 12-pay offer for the first installment of $97 and then 11 installments to follow each month; or, they took the full pay of $997. Let’s say someone took the 12-pay offer. They just paid $97 and now I offered them a $397 template pack. 

That was really manageable. I didn’t jump too high but it wasn’t really low either. It was extremely valuable so it was worth the $397. 56% of those that took my 12-pay offer also took the upsell. That’s pretty good. Here’s something to think about: 80% of the people that took my full-pay offer took the upsell offer. 

When we are looking at percentages, more people bought my upsell if they paid full price. Interesting, right? I am just speculating but when someone pays full price for a program they tend to have a little bit more money in the bank and in their budget in order to buy training programs. So if they already have the $997 then taking the upsell probably wasn’t a huge stretch. They are feeling good about their  cash  at  that moment and their budget allows it. 

But, not everyone, but most people that take the 12-pay offer, might have a little bit of a tighter budget. They don’t want to part with all that cash just now and want to make it a little easier. Because maybe their budget is a little bit tighter, fewer of those people took me up on the upsell. On all three of the upsells, more people passed on it if they took the 12-pay versus if they took the one-pay. 

Here’s something to think about, four times as many people took the 12-pay offer than did the full-pay offer. So, that 12-pay offer was a lot more popular with my audience. But, as you can see, if more people had taken the full-pay offer more people would have taken the upsell. It’s just something to think about in terms of behaviors and how that works. 

This is very personal to my own audience too. So you’ve got to experiment. But look at it this way, we made a lot more revenue because we showed that offer to all of my 12- pay members. If we never showed the upsell offer to the 12-pay, we would have made a whole lot less with that. It became a numbers game. 

I want to reiterate that and then I’ll get off this topic. More of the full-pay people, percentage wise, took us up on the upsell. But because so many more 12-pays bought my program that meant so many more people actually saw the upsell and that generated more revenue for us. I just kind of wanted to throw that out there and hope I am not confusing all of you. 

That’s how it looked for me. But, to sum up the principle here of how to price your upsell, I don’t actually have a right or wrong answer for you. I want you to think about the initial offer and what your members are getting with that. 

From there, what is the perfect upsell offer that will make their experience easier, faster, or more enjoyable? Then, ask yourself how much would that be worth for them? How much would your members pay for that type of upsell? It’s really individual. You’ve got to think about what works best for you. In my case, I started higher at $397, broke it up into a two-pay if they didn’t take us up on that offer, broke it up into a lighter version. 

I went higher to lower. You might want to go lower to higher. If they take you up on a $37 upsell you might want to offer one more thing at a higher price. I don’t particularly like that strategy. I don’t like offering more and more and more after they bought. I just wanted to offer them one thing after they bought and give them a few options in terms of how to pay for it. That’s how I went about it. 

The third thing we are going to talk about is the flow of the upsell process. If you’ve been following me for a while, you already know I truly do care about the members that join my program. I really care about their experience when they become a new member for any of my programs. 

To me, user experience is the most important factor with your upsell process. You cannot trick people. You have to do this at a full integrity and there’s no shadiness allowed. I offered the upsell at $397. If someone declined that I said, “Okay, to make it easier for you, I can do a two pay.” 

I didn’t discount the price and tell them that if $397 didn’t work how about paying only $297, “do you want this for $297?” Then they are questioning what would have happened if they didn’t pass up on the first offer, would they have had to pay more? You can’t do weird pricing things like that. 

If they pass on $397 then I broke it into two payments. I didn’t discount it any, I just said I would make it easier for them to pay for it. The third offer was to give a lite version of the product. I wasn’t going to give it all to them and discount the price, I took three of the templates out, only gave them two, and that was $97. 

For those that had a really tight budget and I knew they really wanted it, I gave them two versions. But that gave them fewer options. The five versions were the best templates I have ever had created and it was a really, really good pack. But I thought I would make it a little easier by providing a lite version but I took some out because I would never discount just because someone passed me up on the first two offers. 

You’ve got to change the offer if you’re going to lower the price in your upsell sequence. That is really, really important. 

With the flow, you don’t have to have all of the pricing options. If you’re brand new at this and you are thinking that it feels overwhelming, I could have just offered the upsell at $397. If they passed, no worries, I would take them to the thank-you page and we would be done. 

I had the capacity and technology to allow me to offer three phases to an upsell and, obviously, it proved to be really successful. But if you don’t have a team behind you to help you out, consider just one upsell. I think it makes a huge difference. If you already know, “Wow, if I offered this it would enhance the experience and make it easier or faster, this is a no brainer,” then I think you really do have to figure out how to offer an upsell. 

There is a lot of technology out there that will help you do this. Two of my favorites are Sam Cart and Kajabi. I am going to link to both of them in my show notes because other people I’ve worked with have used both Sam Cart and the newest version of Kajabi in order to offer these upsells. If you want to get some tools to help you do it, those are the two I would recommend. 

However, I will say that we did this all custom. I am lucky enough to have access to a tech team (they aren’t all full time, they are all contractors) that had done this for other people before and I use them regularly for all of my promotions so they were able to customize my entire upsell experience. 

That is more pricey, for sure. It’s trickier. I don’t know all of the technology by any means. So, if you have a really small team, if you are a one man/woman show, look at Sam Cart or the newest version of Kajabi. I’ve heard great things about them. They will be linked in my show notes at http://www.amyporterfield.com/78. 

Lastly, we’re coming into the final stretch, if you want to see what the initial upsell offer page looked like in my last promotion, I have included it as the freebie for this episode. To see it in action go to http://www.amyporterfield.com/78download  and I’ll send you a jpeg of the upsell page. You can see what images I used, how I explained it, all that good stuff. 

Thank you so very much for being here with me today. I have to tell you, I absolutely love these mini trainings. So, if you love these mini trainings too, please give me some feedback. Tell me what more you want to learn about. You can put it in the comments underneath this episode. 

Give me some feedback. What are some areas where you are feeling that you are struggling and you want some more online marketing training in those areas. I would love to hear from you. 

And, if y ou w ant t o share this episode, y ou can go t o http:// www.amyporterfield.com/love and you can tweet about it to all of your friends and peers. I would really appreciate the share as well. 

Finally, I want to thank our sponsor, 99Designs. You know when you market online it is really difficult to stand out from all of that online noise clutter. How do you do it? I think you do it through impeccable branding. That includes your logo, your social media cover images, your website, and everything in between. At 99Designs you can get anything designed in just a week for a startup-friendly price. 

To give you a little something extra, when you go to www.99designs.com/amy you will get a $99 upgrade for free. That upgrade makes your design contest stand out from all of the others and bumps you to the top of the list so more designers can see your contest. So make sure to check out www.99designs.com/amy. 

Thanks again for being here. I hope you have an amazing day. I can’t wait until next week. Real quick, next week is all about how to add bonuses to your offer, how to add scarcity and urgency to get people to buy before a deadline. We’re talking all about scarcity, urgency, and bonuses in my next episode which is #79. I will see you next week. Have a great week. Bye for now.