MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Ulti­mate Upselling Strategy 

Upselling is a great way to sell infor­ma­tional prod­ucts. This is a case study show­ing how you can pur­sue an upselling strat­egy to gain in the long term. We’ll then let you in on an ulti­mate upsell that works — all the evi­dence will be there too.

Sce­nario

David Mur­phy runs a suc­cess­ful offline con­sult­ing com­pany that helps out small busi­ness entre­pre­neurs. He offers his ser­vices for 2000 dol­lars a month and has 30 clients. He wants to expand online but is strug­gling to pic­ture how he can sell his pre­mium and star per­form­ing prod­ucts to this wider mar­ket and poten­tial customers.

Does this sound familiar?

Sug­gested Strategy

We sug­gest that David should give away a free ebook with mind­blow­ing infor­ma­tion that will pro­vide an upselling plat­form which will even­tu­ally lead to the sale of their star prod­uct — get­ting 2000 dol­lars a month from the rela­tion­ships that form.

This is called the REVENUE SCALE FOR INFORMATIONAL PRODUCTS

If you give away mind­blow­ing free infor­ma­tion you are essen­tially run­ning a loss leader … BUT this has the effect of devel­op­ing trust and a rela­tion­ship with poten­tial clients who will reward you in the long term by buy­ing more of your pre­mium prod­ucts over time.

Sounds Sim­ple?

Here’s what we mean…

 

• David could give away an ebook for free
• then upsell a course of audio CDs for around 90 bucks
• from this upsell an online course or a sem­i­nar to the full value of 2000 dollars.

It does sound very sim­ple, BUT how can David imple­ment this strategy?

Imple­ment­ing the Strategy

The 2 stages of Upsell

1. UPSELLING THE AUDIO CDS WITH THE FREE EBOOK

The pur­pose of the ebook is to gain an audi­ence. The idea is that when peo­ple open your ebook, they read the knowl­edge that you have and you astound them with mind­blow­ing infor­ma­tion and you cre­ate a viral mar­ket­ing campaign.

This can eas­ily be done using Viral PDF. It allows you to turn your ebook into a viral mar­ket­ing mechanism.

The Ebook should contain . . .

• killer con­tent
• phi­los­o­phy of the company
• tes­ti­mo­ni­als
• cus­tomer successes

From this plat­form David would upsell to the next level of the rev­enue scale — the audio CD sales. He would pro­vide a link to a sales page for the CDs sell­ing for around 90 bucks.

Here’s where the cam­paign will truly get viral …

Why not use an Affil­i­ate Mar­ket­ing Campaign?

David could buy an affil­i­ate soft­ware, then he could tie the affil­i­ate pro­gram in with the sale of the audio CDs. For exam­ple he could offer 45 dol­lars com­mis­sion for every sale of 90 dol­lars and get peo­ple to mar­ket his prod­ucts for him.

We would rec­om­mend post affil­i­ate pro. Com­bin­ing post affil­i­ate pro and viralPDF is a very pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing tool. Not only will it cre­ate a viral effect, it will also mean you can cap­ture no end of email addresses.

2. UPSELLING THE SEMINAR OR ONLINE COURSE WITH THE AUDIO CDS

Using a One Time Offer

After some­one has pur­chased the CDs, for exam­ple, a great tac­tic that many inter­net mar­keters use to upsell is the one time offer. As soon as some­body pur­chases the CDs David would offer his sem­i­nars or access to his online course with a 200 dol­lar dis­count voucher as long as they bought there and then.

If you’ve truly hit peo­ple with grip­ping and entic­ing copy and stun­ning infor­ma­tion they are more likely to buy straight away.

Email Mar­ket­ing 

Hav­ing cap­tured no end of email addresses David now has a mail­ing list which he can use to sell his online course or sem­i­nars. He could poten­tially send out an email every 3 months sell­ing the sem­i­nars and then towards upcom­ing sem­i­nars send emails more frequently.

If David fol­lows this strat­egy he could get rapid results in sell­ing his pre­mium prod­ucts online, and grow his busi­ness to expo­nen­tial levels!

I’m sure you’re won­der­ing by now ‘where’s the evi­dence of this strat­egy working?’

SO … here’s the proof

Wealth expert, T. Harv Eker,  has used this strat­egy to remark­able effect. He sells a book fairly cheap for 13 bucks on Ama­zon; from this book he upsells emphat­i­cally his fol­low up seminars.

 

Left: Secrets of the Mil­lion­aire Mind by T. Harv. Eker

 

 

 

T. Harv Eker gives a bonus when you pur­chase his book, shown in the red box:

“FREE BONUS — 2 Tick­ets to the Mil­lion­aire Mind Sem­i­nar worth $2,590 — details inside”

 

From this a Mil­lion­aire Mind sem­i­nar draws in about 1000 guests. At this stage T. Harv Eker is still not very high up the rev­enue scale … BUT WAIT … here comes the ulti­mate upsell.

A One Time Offer!

Of these 1000 peo­ple he then offers them a com­plete pack­age of 5 pre­mium sem­i­nars for 16,000 dol­lars, but only if they buy it there and then.

Let’s say only 50 peo­ple in the room sign up for the sem­i­nars T. Harv Eker is walk­ing away with a cool ( yet stag­ger­ing)  800,000 dol­lars in his back pocket. That is truly ulti­mate upselling!

Learn More about Upselling Tech­niques

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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