Moving on to the next element in the sales funnel – Upsell. Upsell offer happens right after the front-end offer. Hence, Upsell relates closely to the front-end. If you remember, I’ve mentioned that Upsells are your main source of revenue. That is why you must have a high converting Upsell that will bring you large amount of revenue.
Upsell could be the core of the whole sales funnel. Take note of everything that is important. You’ll love it if you can master the skill to create a high converting Upsell. This would be the best part of the sales funnel.
You do not have to wait for the revenue to come in down the road. It comes almost immediately with the implementation of Upsell in your sales funnel.
Upsell is an immediate offer to the buyers once they’ve completed their purchase from your front-end offer. Of course, if they didn’t buy your front-end product, they will not buy the Upsell as well.
The price of an Upsell must be higher than the front-end product. This is one of the criteria for an Upsell. It is usually twice the minimum price of the front-end. I am going to tell you more about the criteria to create an Upsell later in this chapter.
So, what makes an Upsell worth a higher price than your front-end? It is because an Upsell is an upgraded version of the front-end. When you are writing your sales copy for your Upsell, write it in a way where you are offering them an immediate solution or an in-depth course to enhance the front-end product.
Why you will need Upsells in your sales funnel? The answer from most of the Internet marketers would be because it brings instant revenue to the business. In the past days, the Internet marketer relied only on front-end sales.
However, in the sales funnel concept, your front-end offer will not go to you, the product vendor,a single cent. You’ll give 100% commissions to the affiliates that promote your front-end.
Now that you may be wondering, if you were to give away 100% commissions to your affiliate, where are you going to gain profit from? The answer is from the Upsell. Your Upsell can probably bring in 30% to 50% of the revenue. From this, you could see that Upsell is actually the main part of the whole revenue.
Apart from this, Upsells increase the satisfaction of your buyers. Let me ask you this: Did you ever experience that after you’ve bought the first product, and you find that the product works but you can’t find the next product from the same vendor anymore? Serious buyers will want to buy the Upsells to study and understand more about the topic.
The same scenario happens in your business as well, if you are offering the Upsells to the subscribers, serious buyers are actually looking forward to more products from you. Hence, your Upsells are actually for the benefits of your buyers as well.
One more thing about the Upsells – incompleteness. This is one of the buyers’ mindset, the selling versus the consumption. Marketing is all about incompleteness, but your product is all about completeness.
When they start the buying loop by purchasing the front-end product from you, they are already giving you the opportunity to push them further to buy something. When they are still in the buying mode, they’re in that incomplete mode and now your Upsell offers serve as the product to make them feel complete.
This is all because of the concept of content-focused and sales-focused; the product focuses on the content, while the marketing focuses on doing the sales. The Upsell is the combination of both.
The sales funnel works because we understand the buyers’ mindset and created this funnel. First thing about the buyers’ mindset is the incompleteness.
Moving on, it is the buying trance of the buyers that contribute to the creation of sales funnel.
While the front-end product plays the role to start the loop of the buying trance, Upsells, down-sell, and the Backend must be there to complete the loop. People have made the first commitment with you when they make the first purchase, so now they are going to follow through with the sales funnel.
Same mindset when you are going to do your daily groceries shopping. You go with your own shopping list on hand. However, sometimes when the buying trance started, you’ll end up buying things that are not in the list. I believe every one has experienced this.
Moreover, the impulse purchase mindset in the buyers contributes too! Sometimes, they just do not intend to buy this, but at the end of the day they’d still buy it. This is all because of marketing.
The concept is the same theory that the shops will place some goods in front of their cashier, you’ll be attracted to the goods in front of the cashier while you are lining up for the payment.
Upsells have the same function as this. While the buyers are waiting to download the front-end product, you offer them the Upsells. While the buyers already have something to buy, you strike while the iron is still hot.
Mistakes of an Upsell
Despite the large amount of revenue that Upsells can bring to your business, some of the Internet marketers can make mistakes to an Upsell, because they do not know the right way to present an Upsell. Hence, leaving big opportunities behind.
Mistake #1: Convert at lower percentage
The first mistake is that they do not focus on the sales copy of their Upsell offer, causing a low converting percentage in their Upsell. Usually what they don’t take as an advantage is the use of scripted video. Some use only boring and short ad copy. The conversion rate can be increased by just the use of scripted video or live video.
You need to know that your Upsell video is just as important as your front-end sales letter, they are equally important to get people to continue the buying trance. The only difference between the sales copy of front-end and Upsell is Upsell video script can be shorter than the front-end sales letter.
Remember that your Upsell is an immediate offer to the buyers to upgrade or enhance the front-end. So, basically an Upsell related closely to the front-end. The buyers should have known and understand what the front-end is all about when they land on the Upsell sales video page. Your sales video can be just as short as 4-5 minutes, to tell them the importance of having the Upsell.
So, what you are going to write in your Upsell sales copy is a short powerful message that recaps the messages in your video. They hear it in the video and it gets them excited and now they have something to read about the product you’ve mentioned in the video.
The short video gives them more reason to purchase the product. The presence of a video itself is already enough to enhance the chances of making sales because the buyers would hear your pitch while reading it and the video will make your page more bona fide.
Nonetheless, some of the Internet marketers did not pay much attention on creating a high-converting sales copy.
Mistake #2: Mistreat Upsell as a lower priced add-ons
The second mistake is that they mistreat Upsell as a lower priced add-on. We look at the example of lead generation course:
Front-end product is the video course training with the price of $9.97. While the Upsell is the checklist and mind map as add-ons to the front-end priced at $5.
This is a wrong example of an Upsell. The Upsell should be something that is worth twice the front-end offer. The incremental value of the Upsell in the example may be bringing in a small increase in your revenue, but the value is not big enough to compete with the other competitors in the market.
You must think in terms of how to generate larger amount of revenue, and eventually increase your profit.
Criteria of Upsell
I’ve created a list of criteria for an Upsell. Follow the list to avoid making the mistakes. The first criterion of an Upsell is to put the price tag at least twice the minimum price of the front-end. You should’ve known this by now. The value of an Upsell goes higher instead of lower.
This is so important that you must be realized that I’ve mentioned this several times, because your main revenue generator is the Upsells. Now that you’ve put the price of your Upsell twice the worth of your front-end, you must create a product that worth the price.
This will be the first criterion you must think through when you are getting ideas for your Upsell. When the price is higher, people would expect higher value from this product. So, remember to ensure the value of the Upsell is equal or higher than the price they’ve paid.
Moving on, your Upsell must be congruent with your front-end. For example, if your front-end is lead generation, your Upsell must be something related, such as a done-for-you follow-up emails pack. The Upsell in this case is congruent, because people who own a list definitely will need to send follow-up emails to their subscribers.
The Upsell must be something that makes sense to the buyers. If you were the buyer, imagine that after purchasing a lead generation video training course, and then you are being offered with a graphics pack. Isn’t that odd? Would someone who’s interested in a lead generation course be interested in making graphics?
One last thing on Upsell criteria is the One-Time Offer technique. The Upsell 1 is always a one-time offer to the buyers, meaning if they do not grab this now, and the offer will not happen another time. This is a technique where you’ll create the sense of urgency.It creates a thought that if they don’t grab the chance today, they’ll miss it forever.
When you are setting up your sales funnel, you must always put yourself in the shoes of buyers. Think like how they would think.
Small tip: Offer your Upsell with value-enhancing bonuses (VEB) in short. You need to understand the mindset of a buyer, the price distortion where you build up the price by adding bonuses. In addition, with the One-TimeOffer technique, you are making this other irresistible offer.
Format of Upsell
The format of Upsell is basically more or less the same as the format for front-end. Your Upsell product can be in the form of video training courses and transcripts because it is an upgraded version of the front-end. In this case, your Upsell will serve as an enhancement course to the buyers.
Make sure what you offer for the Upsell do enhance and complements the front-end, because they will know whether the Upsell worth the price or not right away.
Same as front-end, apart from being just video training course and transcripts, your Upsell can be in the e-book format as well. Createing an e-book enables you to talk further in-depth on topics that are related to your front-end. For example, for lead generation, you can offer an in-depth course that explains how Search Engine Optimization works.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is something that every Internet marketer would like to learn. It’s valuable, congruent with the front-end, and very popular.
One thing different from front-end is you can offer a software system in Upsell. Creating a software program takes a longer time than the other two formats. First thing you need is a professional programmer to create the software’s coding for you.
Because it’s a difficult format to produce, it’s really an optional thing. You don’t have to go well out of your way to create a software program.
There are many other formats that you can offer as your Upsell, such as a membership site access, or you can even promote other people’s product and put it as your Upsell.
You can put the membership site access in your Upsell 2 or 3. If you are able to maintain the membership site, you are in fact making some passive and recurring income to your bank account every month.
For your membership site, you’ll need to upload contents to the site every month in order to keep the membership site running. They will expect something new to learn every month. A small reminder here, send the reminder follow up emails about the new training video is up every month to your members.
You may not have your own product that you can offer as Upsell right now. So, instead of scratching your head and do not know what to offer to your buyers, you can go out to the marketplace and find somebody else’s high-end product that you can go the rest of the Upsell process.
Methods to Get Upsell
There are two methods to get your Upsell done, same deal as the front-end, which are: (1) Create it yourself, and (2) buy PLR products. I hope that you still remember the methods I’ve taught in the chapter about front-end, but let’s revise a bit on the method.
The first way is to create the Upsell by yourself, regardless it is based on your own experience, research online, or gather PLR products and rewrite the content. Start with brainstorming ideas for your Upsell, take note that the ideas must be congruent to the front-end.
And then, draft the outline. Put everything in order before you start writing, especially those practical tasks that need you to lead them step-by-step. Keep things as simple as possible that even a beginner can understand. Once you’re done with the outline, you can start writing the Upsell.
One thing you need to take note on creating the Upsell is the content must be more solid than the front-end. Make it clear that the front-end course is going to give the buyers only the key concept of what the whole business should be like. However, if the buyers want to go into detail, they must then buy the upgrade version of the front-end.
This will be the main direction for you if you are going to brainstorm on what you are going to offer as well. But, there is a drawback here with Upsell. Some of the buyers would think that if your front-end product is good enough, why would they need to buy the Upsell?
In this case, you must make it clear that what they buy from the front-end is totally okay but if they’re really serious about the business, that they wanted to expand their business empire, they would want a more in-depth course than the front-end.
Second way is to buy PLR products. There are plenty of PLR products available in the marketplace that you can repackage and use it as the Upsell product that you’ve created. There are 2 ways you can utilize the PLR products you’ve bought:
- Gather information from a few PLR products, add some of your own stories into it.
- Rewrite one PLR product.
For the first way, by adding in some of your own stories could be an advantage if you are to build up your credibility through the Upsells.
