Copy My Digital Upsell Strategy (Courses, SaaS, Memberships)

Today I want to share with you one of the simplest ways to make more money in your business without finding new customers, without running more ads, or trying to get more traffic, without changing your product. It's upsells and downsells. Today I want to show you what upsells and downsells are, how they work, and how to apply them to your own digital business, your own online business, without annoying your customers, without making them feel like you're being pushy. You're actually being helpful with this strategy and I'm going to show you step by step. Let's get into it. Can I get 30 seconds of your time? We love guiding you on your business journey and we want to help even more people build their dream lives. So if you could hit the subscribe button, it would be greatly appreciated. It's completely free and it helps us out more than you know. Thanks. Let's start with what they are and why you want to use them. Let's start with upsells. Upsell is offering a higher priced or additional product after a customer commits to buy. So for example, you order a burger at a fast food restaurant and they ask you, would you like to make it a combo? Your intention was to buy a burger, but then they offered you, hey, you can get fries and a drink for an additional $4. You can obviously refuse the upsell and say, hey, I just want a burger. Or you could say, no, that's actually a pretty good deal. I'd love fries and drink with that for just $4. You're giving the customer optionality. In the scenario, they don't have to buy, but by giving them the option, by presenting it, you're actually making yourself more valuable to them because now they know that, hey, I could have gotten that if I wanted to. I've made a decision not to. Or I've made a decision to go ahead and buy it because it's a good deal. Or it's exactly what I was looking for. A downsell. A downsell is offering a lower price alternative when a customer says no to to your main offer. This is like Netflix offering you their basic plan, which is their cheaper plan that allows you to use, you know, a limited number of devices or maybe it's not full HD when you cancel. Maybe a premium plan. So hey, maybe you don't like this premium plan, but maybe you want to hold on to Netflix, pay a little bit less if you go with the basic plan. Again, you're giving the customer optionality. There is a good chance that they're canceling because they don't want to pay that much money, because maybe they don't see the value in what they're getting, but maybe they would see the value in the lower plan, okay, that's much cheaper and I can afford that or I can see the value in that. Of course they can cancel and not take the downsell. But by giving your customers options, you're actually serving them better. So why do upsells and downsells work? Well, the hardest part in sales in business is getting someone to say yes the first time to get the actual yes yes or the buy or the transaction. Once they've decided to buy, they're in the buying mode. They already have decided they're going to go with you, right? They trust you. Psychologically, it feels like a small step to add or to adjust the purchase. So just even think about your own psychology. When you go to a store or a restaurant or you know, McDonald's for example, and they offer you that upsell. That's why businesses from Starbucks to Amazon, from your local supermarket to SaaS, startups, they use this constantly. It's called average order value aov. They're increasing the average amount of money you are making per order without adding in new customers because they're just spending more with you. This is why your corner store, your supermarket have gum and chocolate and candies and little items you might want gift cards, right? You see that at the checkout line, these are called point of sale upsells because hey, you're there already, you're scanning things, you're putting things on the conveyor belt. So it's an easy upsell and increases the average order value for each customer. So I'm going to give you some rapid fire real world examples of this in action. So we talked about fast food and would you like fries with that? But even fine dining, right? They have like a chef's menu or a tasting menu. And then there's the option to have the wine pairing, right, where you pay X amount of dollars more with your degustation to get the wine pairing. That's an upsell. Airlines, they are the king of this, right? They have economy class and even within the economy class there's different classes of tickets that allow you to do certain things like refund or change, you know, the dates or luggage and all that kind of stuff. Then they have premium economy, then they have business class and they have first class. So they have all different upsells that you can look at. And of course you know that when you check out in Any kind of like especially low cost airline, they have add baggage, add travel insurance, add seat selection, add your meal if you want an exit seat, that's an upsell. So they have that process in the checkout because they're giving the customers optionality and now people just gotten used to this. Another example is like when you buy shoes at a shoe store, they suggest socks that go with it or shoe cleaner or the protective spray that allows it to be like water repellent. These are upsells, gyms, they have a membership. You can also add personal training sessions, you can add nutrition coaching, you can add buying, you know their protein shakes and their creatine. These are all upsells. There's also downsells of course in the gym they say hey our annual price is XYZ or you can go monthly. That's considered a downsell. Some gyms and some reoccurring like shared spaces, like coworking spaces, they allow you to like have a really cheap membership that only allows you to go to the facility three times a week or two times a week and that's a downsell. Hey, you don't want the full membership, fine, but we got this option that's less expensive but limits your membership. Now the funny thing is is that often down sells increase the value of the actual flagship offer or your main offer where they say oh actually yeah, I do want to go every day. I see the value in that now that I'm looking at this other plan. So as you can see, you are experiencing upsells and downsells every single day. But most entrepreneurs don't realize they can use them in their own playbooks in their own digital businesses. So let me give you some examples in the digital product world and you could do this tastefully without being annoying with just giving the customers the option to get more value or make the best decision for them when it comes to maybe getting something that's a less expensive offer and exactly what they need. So for example an online course, you have a main product, maybe the course is $200 and then you have an upsell to have a one on one coaching call for $99. So a lot of people will go for that upsell just because they want one on one coaching. They want to speak to you and ask some questions and get some tailored advice and for $100 for an hour session, say for example is pretty reasonable for them and they can see the value. Now some people are not going to see the value and that's because that's not what they need. And they may even see the core product, the main product, which is a $200 course, to be out of their price range and maybe too much of a leap for them at this moment. You have to remember that your customers are on a spectrum. Some people are ready and prime, ready to buy and ready to pay whatever you are asking them to pay. And some people not so much. So a downsell is if they say no to the main offer. You can offer for example, a $49 workbook or template or a mini version of the course or maybe the first module of the course or even the course without lifetime access. So you're like, hey, you're not going to get lifetime access. You can have access to this course for 30 days. If you want to consume it and take it, it's $49. But after that it'll be gone. And some people will take that and be like, hey, I will consume it. And that's perfect for me. I'll pay $49 for that. Let's go into membership sites. Your main product might be a monthly membership of $49. An upsell could be an annual 40 for 490, which allows them to get two free months. And a downsell might be a light version of your membership for $29 a month with fewer features or benefits. SaaS software. I ran a software company for 10 years, grew it to over 30,000 users. I learned a ton about pricing and packaging through the process before we sold the company, exited to proprofs. So what can you do with software? Well, upsell, you can upsell extra storage, premium features, premium plans, concierge, onboarding, white glove service, whatever it might be. Premium support. Some people offered that. We didn't do that because we felt like we wanted to give premium support to everybody. But these are options. A downsell could be a lower tier plan for those who don't want to pay full price or just want to try you out. What about E commerce? What if you sell like physical products on an online store? Let's say you sell cameras, right? You could buy a camera and the upsell is a lens bundle or a downsell is a cheaper tripod than the one that you're recommending in the bundle. And Amazon does this a lot with you, see it frequently bought together. They know that people want to accessorize, want to have options to improve their experience with this new product. But quick pro tip, digital products have the best margins for upsells because the cost of delivery is basically zero. So how do you add These upsells and downsells to your funnel. Well, right now. Okay, step one, map your customer journey. What's the natural next step after the main offer? Whatever your main offer is, what's the next thing that your customer wants to solve, wants to do? Create that offer and create a one click upsell. Don't make them re enter their payment information again, use a checkout tool that supports one click add ons so that way when, when they're in the checkout process, it makes sense for you to add on the template or add on the coaching call. Step three, decide on your downsell. Ask yourself, if they say no to my main offer, what's a smaller version or a starter option of my main offer? Again, this could be the offer itself or the product itself, but with limitations, maybe a limitation of time or content or support. And then step four is to test the placement of these offers. So you want to test if you want to do it pre checkout with the upsell or post checkout after they say thanks for your order and you want to add this to your cart. So you want to test these out in your own system or follow up or cart abandonment emails for downsells where you email them and say, hey, I saw you checked out this offer but didn't buy. We have another option that's a little less expensive but have these limitations. It might be up your alley. And lastly, step five, you want to track the impact. As Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. So you want to watch what your average order value is and the conversion rates. So even 10 to 20% take rate of an upsell can transform your revenue incredibly. So when you're getting started, look at what your average order value is right now so that you have a benchmark to measure against. Before we wrap up this episode, I want to give you some parting advice, some last tips to help you out. When you're thinking about building your upsells and down sales, think about building like a menu. Like you have a restaurant and you're building out your menu. The burger is your main product. The fries, the drinks, the desserts, that's your upsell menu. And a smaller burger, you know, instead of the big Mac, just a cheeseburger is your downsell. So how do you make money with upsells and downsells? Stop thinking only about the sale and think about the total order and how I can solve more problems for my customers and give them more value. Because. Because if I give them more value, they'll be willing to pay for it. This is the thing that a lot of people don't comprehend when they're starting out in business is that people are willing to pay for more value. And we just think, who's gonna pay more? Lots of people. Okay? There's a lot of people that have enough money to spend to get more out of what you offer, meaning that they want you to help them with other things. Do this right and you'll boost your revenue without spending more on ads or chasing new customers. Now, if you wanna continue to get business building advice from me right in your inbox, you're gonna wanna sign up to our Three Things newsletter. It only takes about 5 minutes to consume every week. But every week I give you three things. Something to think about to improve your mindset, Something to do so that you're taking action, little activity, and number three, something to learn so that you're leveling up. It's pretty cool. We've been doing this for over a year now. Over 800 people have signed up just last week. So just go to 100mba.net newsletter to sign up. It's free. Go ahead. I'm sure you will not regret it. Now before you go, I want to leave you with this. If you, if you ever have the feeling like I don't want to know my customers, the customers are going to get angry. Ask yourself how you feel as a customer. The airline example of checking out and buying an airline ticket is the worst example. And the other side of the spectrum. But on these other side of the spectrum, where upsells and downsells are great, are like, you know, for example, the company Apple. Apple has a ton of products in this product line, right? It has the AirPods, which is kind of their starting line product and they have, you know, the watch, the Apple watch. And then they have iPhones and they have imacs and they have iPads and they have AirPod Maxes and you know, like I can go on and on and on. And the reason why they do this is because they know that once you consume one product, you're going to be like, hey, actually I love their products. They're high quality, they work perfectly. I might want to consider buying my next tablet from Apple. I need a new laptop. Maybe I should look at Apple since I love their other products so we're not so inconvenienced by it. We actually love the fact that we can get more value from a company that gives us value in the first place. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll see you in the next episode of the $100 VA show.