Increasing Lifetime Customer Value (sales funnels explained) Pt 3

Tools to Make It Simple

Working out upsells, cross-sells, and downsells might seem like a lot of work. For sure, it takes time to set everything up properly, but once you do it will be truly simple.

Visualize Your Product Funnel – This will help you set up your upsells more easily. If you can see your entire funnel at a glance, it’s going to make it easier to ensure that you have the right products at the right time. Being able to see how it all works together is going to keep everything working better. You can add to it as you create more products where you see potential gaps. FusionCharts is a product that helps you create charts to visualize your product funnel.

Marketing Automation – You’ll need email autoresponder software. There are many choices to choose from, such as AWeber.com, ActiveCampaign.com and GetResponse.com, and others. Check out as many as you can to find out which ones have the features that you most need within your budget. You need to be able to change segments based on your customers’ behavior every step of the buying cycle. Most autoresponder software comes with opt-in lead capture forms.

Developing Marketing Strategies – To make upsells work, you need more traffic. Marketing properly is a good way to ensure that you get the right traffic. A good marketing strategy that considers every step of your buyers’ journeys will have higher conversions. You can use tools such as Google Webmaster Tools to accomplish this.

Setting Up Automated Sales Pages – There are tons of different options when it comes to software to help you set up sales automation. You can use Leadpages.net, ClickFunnels.com, OptimizePress.com and many others to help you set up innovative and beautiful funnels that get results.

Shopping Cart Software – You’ll need a good way for people to pay, and a lot of shopping carts offer landing pages and the ability to upsell already. Some of your choices are 1ShoppingCart.com, aMember.com, Infusionsoft.com, and others. You can even use some affiliate software such as ClickBank.net, JVZoo.com, and others for this purpose, but you’ll still need a payment account like PayPal, Stripe.com, or an Authorize.net account.

Website – Of course, you need a good website. Most of these ideas can be implemented on any type of website that you’ve built. But, right now the best software to use to build your website is self-hosted WordPress. It’s not harder than using a builder if you have the right website host like MomWebs.com.

Analytics and Reporting – You can use Google Analytics for this, as well as the analytics native in each type of software that you purchase. If you don’t know how well your sales pages are converting, and you don’t know how well the upsells convert or how well your email marketing messages convert, then you are just shooting in the dark.

Using the right tools will ensure that you have far more success than if you just wing it. If you’re been winging it up until now, imagine how much more effective you’ll be when you can look at your funnel to find out how much traffic you need based on your conversion rate to give yourself a raise. Like we mentioned before, a lot of this is just math.

How to Upsell Successfully

As you know, upselling will make your business more profitable by encouraging your customers to buy the more expensive item over the less expensive item that you sell. But what are some of the ways this can be accomplished?

They Buy – Your customer has clicked your “buy” button to put the product in their cart. At this point, you can set up your automation, using whichever software you chose, to either send them to an upsell offer or send them to the cart to check out.

You Encourage – If you send them to an upsell offer instead of the shopping cart, you need to ensure that your sales page for the upsell offer is amazing. You don’t want to upset your customer.

Also, you want to give them a chance right from the start to turn down that offer and buy right now. Don’t be mean to them about it. Use straightforward anchor text so they know where to click depending on what they want to do.

If you send them straight to your shopping cart, you still have two ways you can offer the upsell. One way, if your shopping cart has the functionality, is to make the offer for the upsell right inside the shopping cart. This is one of the most popular ways to do it, because if all your customer must do is click that they’d like the upsell, then it’s done.

The other way you can do it is to let them make the entire purchase including paying. Then, you can market the upsell to them either on the download page or via email autoresponder. If you do it on the download page, let them know where their product is, but that they have one chance to upgrade their order for just an “additional” cost. If they upgrade, send them directly to a download page without further delay.

If you choose, you can send the same offer via the autoresponder emails that you send to buyers. But, give them just a short time to upgrade to the larger version of your product or service.

One final point about upsells is that it’s important to keep in mind that you don’t want the upsell price to be out of their range. You’ll need to know your audience to know that information but in general, you don’t want to sell them a product for $27 dollars and then upgrade it to $450 dollars. That’s too big of a difference.

How to Downsell Successfully

A downsell is not something you really want to make a habit of offering, therefore consider how you might need to offer a downsell to keep a customer. There are a couple of reasons to use downselling – cart abandonment and clicking away from the sales page.

Have a Pop-Up

To provide a downsell opportunity you need to have the right technology installed. For example, you might use Leadpages.net to set up a pop-up that is shown to the customer when they click away or abandon the cart.

There are several ideas of what to offer:

Percent off coupon
Free white paper
Free webinar
DIY cheat sheet
Inexpensive eBook
Email course

Your item should be either free or considerably less expensive than the first product. It should also relate very closely to the more expensive product. The reason you need to do this is because you’ll get them into your sales funnel by getting them on your email list. There you can educate, inform, and persuade them toward your other products and/or services.

Remarketing

Another way you can handle downsells is to install a special pixel on your website and run Facebook ads directed toward retargeting/remarketing the people who abandoned carts, visited your site and didn’t sign up for anything or buy anything. Remarket to them via the Facebook ads using a free offer or very low-cost offer to get them into your funnel.

You can offer them the same types of offers as in the pop-up. But, it will feel even more personal due to it showing up when they’re not even on your site. They’ll see it every time they get on Facebook until you stop the ad from running.

This is a great way to keep someone interested after they’ve already visited your site. Most people expect to get pop-ups, so if it’s easy to get away from it won’t feel intrusive. The remarketing is something that while people often describe it as creepy, works from a purely mathematical standpoint, so it’s also worth doing. The only other option would be to lose the customer.

How to Cross-Sell Successfully

Probably the most popular form of making other offers is cross-selling. Some people call it upselling but it’s not. It’s offering purchases in addition to the chosen item, not instead of. The items should be related to the first purchase and either the same price or less expensive, with one exception. This is a good time to offer an “I’ll do it for you” option which will, of course, be more expensive.

Targeted

Make the cross-sell laser targeted, such as software to help them follow your instructions in the info product. Or, a “done-for-you” option for what you’re teaching them how to do, such as a private label report that they can use as their own.

For example, when you click on a product to buy a pressure cooker in Amazon, you’re given recommendations of what to buy with it. Usually, it’ll be more lids, parts, or cookbooks for this item. You can do the same type of thing regardless of whether your product is physical or digital.

This is a good place to repurpose content and other products to bulk up their purchase. But, be careful to avoid offering them products they already bought. This will require that you invest in powerful technology. You can find something that works in the tools section above.

What to Do Now

The best place to start is to go over your product funnel and your customers’ buying cycle. Ensure that you have all the right types of content and products to meet your customers’ needs and desires. Then get the technology set up that you need set up so that you can automate everything that’s possible to automate – other than direct one-on-one contact with your customers.

When you start using upsells, cross-sells, and downsells, you’ll find that you increase your profits by at least twice. Some people report even more improvement. Why? Because you’ll increase your customers’ lifetime value, improve customer relationships, differentiate yourself from other brands, enhance customer engagement, build brand loyalty, and build a bigger and stronger audience ready for any new products you offer.