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The Not-So-Secret Guide to Upselling and Cross-Selling

How to Increase Sales Velocity In Your Sleep

It won’t take you long as a digital marketer to start hearing about upselling and cross-selling. They’re wonderful tools to increase your sales velocity in your sleep, or while grocery shopping. How to do it seems like “common sense” … but we all know how common that is.

In a nutshell, we’re talking about responsive tech-driven sales pages you’ve probably come across before. You find a product online, you consider buying it, but then you decide, “Meh. Maybe later.”

Instead of simply letting you go, however, the page seems to “know” you’re leaving and makes you an offer of half-price, or a cheaper item than you were looking at.

Or, they take you in the opposite direction, by up-selling you more items on top of what you’ve already paid for. You feel a little foolish, but you’re getting so much extra value! You only intended to spend $25, now you’re paying $400.

If you can put together the right Market, with the right Idea, with an effective Launch, you should expect some great Ka-Ching! Especially if you have upsells and cross-sells to go with it. I spell this out for you in this FREE guide to starting your online business, The M.I.L.K It Method.

IN CASE YOU DON’T SEE WHY YOU SHOULD DO THIS …

The example I just gave is not an extreme one. It’s routine; it happens every day in thousands of places. When you see successful digital marketers display spreadsheets that show one purchase after another, going on for what looks like days … that’s part of what they’re doing.

It goes back to the old logic: if you earn $25,000 a year for 40 years, you have one million dollars. Or you could earn one million dollars in one day … which one do you prefer? Savvy digital marketers rake in the dough because they program their pages to leave very little money on the table.

I’m a firm believer that “more” doesn’t necessarily equal “better.” However, you’re going to have to earn enough in revenue to outpace expenses, taxes and enjoy the fruits of your labor. 

The two best tools you have for doing that are price and volume. Upselling and cross-selling are convenient, simple ways of increasing both at the same time. In the internet space, we often speak of this as “average cart value.”

The M.I.L.K It Method teaches you everything you need to know to make a bankable offer online, so you can increase your sales and your average cart value.

How to Increase Sales Velocity Through Upsells and Cross-Sells

Everything comes down to “congruence” in internet marketing. The fact that you have more than one product doesn’t automatically mean you should try upselling or cross-selling one with another. 

They have to complement the original offer. Here are some examples of items that “sell” when you upsell or cross-sell them:

  1. More of What They Already Bought

If you’re selling fitness products like workout or exercise programs, you’d be silly not to include a guide to nutrition, or perhaps stretching and recovery.

In the world of digital marketing, you want to give them a few extra handy tools when they buy a power saw. So if you sell a training course on how to do effective e-mail marketing, you might add a done-for-you suite like “seven prospecting e-mails in 5 different niches.” 

If they go for it, you might want to include another one, to give them a grand total of 14 prospecting e-mails.

  1. What They Want … FASTER

The age of the internet has ramped up our expectations for the ability to implement quickly. Money loves speed, and if you want people to consider spending more money at your checkout page, offer them a pathway to quicker results of what they’re buying.

We offer “marketing power packs” at Offline Sharks when people purchase our courses. They’re a series of information tools people can use independently, to move ahead of others in the marketplace.

You can market these easily by setting up a short video message on your “Thank You” page. You film yourself on camera and say, “Thanks so much for purchasing our product. You made a wise choice. You have everything you need inside this package … BUT … if you want to get results even faster, you need to do xyz.”

Get your free guide to help you craft a compelling offer, and start your own online business using The M.I.L.K It Method.

  1. Automatic For the People

The other offer people find appealing, particularly with digital marketing packages, is automation. No one wants to get stuck doing a bunch of tedious work.

So if you’re selling a course that teaches people the process of social media marketing, and you offer a separate program that shows them how to automate it, don’t be surprised if you pick up extra cash when you do it.

A Couple of No-No’s

It would be good to mention a couple of things you should NOT do when upselling and cross-selling.

  1. Bait and Switch

Please, for the love of all that is decent, don’t offer an upsell by saying, “Thank you for buying my product, but the reality is almost no one succeeds by using it. To REALLY get results, you need XYZ.”

You can probably expect several people wanting their money back, some bad reviews and low to zero traffic on your sales page if you pull stunts like that.

  1. Irrelevant Cross-Sells

Don’t try to sell travel packages along with your digital marketing training system, or custom apparel with your business coaching services. Keep your offers aligned and congruent.

The entire buying experience for your customer should show a verbal and technological attentiveness to their primary concern. 

It’s fine to attempt to offer other, loosely related products or services once they’ve been in your e-mail list for a while. But at point of sale, your messaging should revolve around the things they’ve expressed interest in learning about, by navigating to the page.

As The Most Interesting Man In The World would say, “Find out what it is you don’t do best in life … and then don’t do that thing.”

For creating an offer and starting your own online business, however, there’s The M.I.L.K It Method.

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About the Author
Tom is the host of What's the Secret podcast and co-founder of Offlinesharks.com

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