PreneurCast is a business podcast. Each week, author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
This week Pete and Dom talk about increasing the number of items you sell in each transaction (one of the 7 Levers of Business). They discuss why this is good for your business and give lots of examples of how you can do this in your own business.
Pete and Dom talk about why it is good for your business to increase the items you sell
Transcript:
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Episode 135:
Increasing Your Items Per Sale
Pete Williams: Hey, everyone. Pete here with Dom Goucher. How are you, buddy?
Dom Goucher: Very good, sir, very good.
Pete: Awesome. This week, we are talking about increasing your items per sale.
Dom: Woo-hoo, woo-hoo. Always a good topic, always a good topic.
Pete: Absolutely. It is one of the key 7 Levers, so I’m excited to discuss it. But before we do, as usual, what’s been happening? You’re back in the UK again doing some consulting?
Dom: I am, indeed, sir. I am joining the commuters this week. Just understanding how the other half live and making me realize how much I enjoy living in Spain.
Pete: Be very careful, mate. Because I’m sure a lot of people are listening to this right now on their commute, during their commute to the office.
Dom: My sympathies are with you. I join you in your struggle. What about you, sir? What’s going on?
Pete: What going on, just the last week or so, with Easter and Anzac Day here in Australia, it’s a bit of a long weekend. It’s been a bit crazy. So, catch-up with a few projects and bits and pieces. The usual good, high-quality contents continually being pushed out on the blogs. If you, again, are new here, welcome. If you are old here, welcome as well. But hopefully, you are a regular reader of PreneurMarketing.com as well, where we put up the more detailed essays.
The most recent one this week, which, I think, is definitely worth the read, is all about risk reversals. We cover three different ways and strategies to increase your opt-ins and your conversions with putting risk reversals in place. Things like guarantee, money-back offers and stuff like that. I won’t reveal too much, but just go and check out that essay on the side, along with everything else we have going on at PreneurMarketing.com. It’s been the focus this week, as well as working on a few new sales funnels, which we might even talk about in a couple of weeks’ time.
Dom: Cool. I’m really liking these in-depth articles on PreneurMarketing.com, by the way. Last week, in the last show, we talked about the guarantee post. And now the risk reversals is a great thing because it goes beyond just the guarantees. And that’s what I’m liking about the in-depth stuff. You’ve taken the time, sometimes it’s a guest post from a subject matter expert coming in and talking about these topics to spend a bit more time. They rival sometimes even, the depth we’re getting to on the podcast.
Pete: Well, that’s what we’re aiming. Because with the podcast, it’s about you and I, our experiences and our rants and raves, based on the evidence that now I’m testing. But with the essays, what we’re trying to do is give examples beyond our own world, and evidence-based, data-driven research and advice. So if we’re going to go talk about something, we’re going to go off and research and go, “Here is the statistic that scientifically backs up this strategy or this tactic. This is what someone out here has done.” It’s full of rich case study, evidence kind of stuff. It’s a little bit different to the way we present the information here on the show.
Dom: Yes, and again, that’s really good because it is a balance. As you say, the podcast has a lot to do with the real-world stuff that you and I do, the businesses that we run and the projects that we’re involved in. And you could say, to a point, that some of it is opinion. A lot of it is based by our experience and our evidence, and we can give examples from that side of the real world. But yes, the articles, they are a lot more data-driven, data-backed. There’s some excellent research going on behind them. And they’re great for people to take away and study, and well follow up on some of their sources. So I do think it’s a great series that’s going on at the moment.
Definitely, folks, pop over to PreneurMarketing.com, and as always, link to everything we talk about in the show will be in the show notes, which includes — he segues very neatly across, Pete, how are you getting on with your listening and reading?
Pete: Been a bit crazy this week. Haven’t quite fished anything that we’ve mentioned in the last couple of weeks. Got a couple of minutes to go on The Art of Learning, which was a book you recommended a few episodes back. And everything else is up in the air at the moment. So what about you, mate? With the commute, I’m sure with the commute you’ve been consuming a bit of more content. Any good books you have listened to or read recently?
Dom: Yes. I mean, given my new direction these recent months, I’ve been going very high level with my reading. I’ve been reading a very cunningly titled book called The Strategy Book by (I apologize in advance, Max) Max Mckeown. Link in the show notes so I don’t have to say his name again. Excellent, excellent book to give you a solid grounding in strategy.
Now, I did that podcast a while back to show my own about strategy versus tactics. But this book really is great because first of all, it gives a proper grounding. It’s a bit like one of your articles, actually, Pete, in that it brings together a lot of resources out there. He’s done the research. Him and his cohorts have done the research, brought their experience, also referenced a lot of external texts, articles, books to give you, as you want to go and read on the topic in more depth. It’s a book full of frameworks and checklists, so you would love it. It’s a great recommendation for the audience to go pick this thing up.
Because if nothing else, it actually fits really, really well with the 7 Levers because it makes you look at what you’re doing. The book, it’s got some little workshop sections there. It makes you look at what you’re doing, makes you question the status quo, makes you question how you operate, how you go through your day-to-day stuff, which is what we doing in the 7 Levers. We’re trying to get people to see things differently and see those opportunities to grow by those 10%.
So it’s a great book just to make you look at things differently, even if you think, “Oh, strategies are a bit too high level for me, a bit too big and highfalutin, or whatever else. It is a pretty much an everyman book. It’s written in very sensible language, very straightforward stuff, lots of easy checklists, and a lot of background. It doesn’t really expect anybody to know anything before you go in. So, it’s a great introduction to strategy. I definitely recommend it. Pete, if you want, I think you’d enjoy it. But it’s definitely for the listeners, I recommend The Strategy Book. And again, link in the show notes.
I actually have been reading it on my iPad. I haven’t been listening to it, so I haven’t checked up yet to see if it’s available on Audible. But most of the ones that we’ve mentioned in recent shows are available on Audible. And Pete, what do we know about Audible?
Pete: They are a fantastic service that support the shows. So hopefully, listeners out there have been or are going to support Audible in return. If you head over to AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, that’s A-U-D-I-B-L-E-Trial.com/PreneurCast, you can get a free trial of this service, which means a free audiobook of your choice. You can choose anything from, some of that — what was the grey book? The one that everyone went nuts with? Fifty Shades of Grey. You can get anything from Fifty Shades of Grey, all the way through to the business and strategy and marketing books that we recommend on the show here. You can definitely check it out. If you are out driving to the office, you can use this time to, not only listen to PreneurCast, but listen to audiobooks, while you’re running, while you’re doing the dishes. You can use it in a whole different manner of ways. So AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast.
Dom: And again, link in the show notes, folks. Okay. With that, why don’t we get over to our core topic for the show, which is increasing your items per sale.
So we’re talking about increasing your items per sale. Now, Pete, what does increasing your items per sale do for you, and why is it important? Why does this stand out as one of the 7 Levers of Business?
Pete: Well, to answer the second part of that question first is, there are seven key things that drive profit in the business. As we talked about before, there’s traffic, and there’s opt-ins and conversions, and all those elements. One of them is, how many items you sell a person when they transact with you. The more items you can sell somebody, the more items they have in their shopping basket, in their shopping carts, or whatever it might be, that generates more revenue for your business, which at the end of the day, drives and increases the profits.
It’s just one of those very easy things you can do to increase the revenue for your business, which directly affects that profit and the bottom line. It’s a thing that a lot of people probably not think about. They’re too busy focusing on gaining that first sale. They don’t think about how easy it can be to get that additional transaction or additional item per transaction. If you think about it, someone’s already opened up their wallet and they’ve gone through all the heartaches, so to speak, to trust you and believe you and take you up on that first offer. It is very easy to do the McDonald’s, “Would you like fries with that,” type questioning to increase those items that they accepted at the time of purchase.
Dom: Now, let’s not skip over that because this is the interesting thing, and in some ways, one of the things we like to do is highlight the fact that you’ve seen people doing this stuff. You just don’t think to do it for yourself. So your example there of in McDonald’s (or some other fast food restaurant, but McDonald’s is famous for it), you are often asked, ‘Would you like fries with that,’ that is an additional item per sale. You might hear that in many, many, many different places and I’m sure you’ve got some great examples of how people can do this in other places where you’ll see it, but you will see this around where people are doing this. So there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t in your business. It’s not an icky thing, which is something the people might think. Perfectly reasonable, and it can even be seen as very, very helpful content.
Pete: Well, absolutely. I think, if you position it correctly (which we can talk about that — different ways to position it and make these additional sales), you can be seen as helping someone and giving them a much better solution. And the thing to think about as well is that, when it comes to increasing the items per sale, just like every lever, all we’re aiming for is a 10% increase. Every cycle, every time it goes through the 7 Levers and we cycle through that, all we’re looking is a 10% increase on where you were before.
So if right now, you don’t make any additional item sales per transaction; maybe you’re an online retail, selling information products like an e-book or something like that, and you don’t have an offer on the thank-you page where you can offer them an additional item or anything like that, or someone walks into your retail store to buy a pair of shoes and you don’t offer them some socks or some inserts, or some shoe cleaner, or anything like that right now (so your average items per sale is simply one, because you sold one item per sale), then to increase that by 10%, we’re going to 1.1. We’re not trying to get heaps of people, just 1.1, which means only one in every 10 people that you ask, “Would you like fries,” have to say, “Yes,” for you to achieve your goal. It’s a very easy increase. It’s not saying, every single person has to now buy 2 or 3 items. It’s just every 10th person has to buy a second item.
So that, again, the freedom from knowing that it’s only a 10% increase we’re aiming for, gives you that freedom to take action. Because for a lot of people, they get so scared and overwhelmed with, “Oh, I’ve got to double something, I’ve got to triple something, I’ve got to quadruple something,” to be effective, that causes paralysis. Where we’re simply saying, “If you just make an offer to everybody who transacts with you of a, “Would you like fries with that,” style offer, then all you need is one in 10 people to say, “Yes,” and you’ve hit your goal, and that’s very easy to do if you do it well.
Dom: Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s get back to that. You started to give some examples of what an additional item per sale might look like, because I think that’s another thing that people struggle with. When we talk about the 7 Levers and we identify each one, people always have friction points. Very traditional. It’s not unusual. It’s very common things that we hear people talk about with each lever, and we like to overcome them.
The first one is always, “Oh no, it’s a huge step.” And that’s why we always focus on that 10% increase, because it’s not difficult. I think your example that one in 10 people have to say yes to that extra item makes it really easy for people to visualize and achieve, which is great. But the other friction point that people have is, “What would that look like in my business?” You gave two examples there, one was an online thing, and it was a little bit mechanical. It was how you might do it, not what you might do. Can we give some examples of what people could give as additional things? Maybe some examples from the real world that you’ve already seen as to what people might give us an extra item.
Pete: Yes, well, there’s different categories I’d love to cover as well. But to give some just rough examples — if you bought a new car, you go into the dealership and you buy your car, and then they send you to sit down with someone else, usually a very pretty lady to then sell you window tinting, and special car mats, and the extended warranty, and all those extra add-ons that happens after the sale. That’s a perfect example of the car yards and the dealerships doing that, increasing items per sale process very effectively. That happens all the time. McDonald’s with their ‘Would you like fries with that,’ scenario.
Claude Hopkins, the godfather of advertising and marketing who wrote My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, two great books that are a must-read. They’re in the 1920s, 1930s, but they are a very easy read and are the people’s bible for advertising and marketing. In one of the books (I can’t remember which one, unfortunately), he talks about when you go in and you buy a sports coat. Probably not as regularly as you would’ve back in the 1920s and 1930s, but you go in and buy a sports coat from a menswear shop. You buy a sports coat for $100, and then they’ll turn around and sell you a tie that matches, or a sweater that matches, or other things that go along with that.
If you walk into a The Athlete’s Foot shoe store which, as an example, I use all the time. While you’re sitting there, trying on your shoes, it’s, “Here are some insoles to make the shoes last longer. If you change over your insoles, it increases the life of your shoe, which increase the investment you’re getting there. Some shoe cleaner to keep the shoes cleaner.” Those types of examples.
The other day, I went and got a new bike fit with my triathlon bike. I got a little bit stiffer in my old age. I got the seat readjusted and the settings, and all that sort of stuff done. And as part of that process of the bike fit, I was upsold or sold into some cycling orthotics, so some arch support to ground my cycling shoes. That was a very easy item that was sold.
My old masseuse used to give me a massage, and then would suggest bath salts or special ointments, and he’d try something after every single massage that he pulled off the shelf and talk about how this could work. And quite often, he’d actually use that during the massage to presell me on it, which is a whole another tactic that we can talk about where you embed the upsell through the actual sales process. But he delivered the massage, used special cream, and then say, “Didn’t that feel great? You can use this at home yourself. Buy this cream for $15.” So that is just, two or three very basic examples of ways you can increase those items per sale that happen all day, every day.
Dom: They’re really good examples. Very general ones people, I think, can relate to. I just want to pick up on a couple of things out of that though. One of them is a couple of times you said upsell, and upsell is one of those words that has got a bit of a bad reputation.
Pete: Yes, not only does it have a bad reputation, but it actually has a very misunderstood reputation too. Because a lot of people, when they refer to adding additional items to the sale, which is what we’re talking about here in this particular lever, they refer to anything as an upsell. Any extra item I sell that person is an upsell, and technically, by definition, that’s not true. This is the category thing I alluded to earlier. An upsell is generally selling someone a more expensive item. They come in and they buy Product A, and then what you try and do, as they buy Product A, you try and sell them Product B. This is very prevalent in the online information marketing space.
You go and you buy an e-book for $17, and on the thank-you [page], they’ll sell you something for $47. If you buy that, then they hit another offer that’s $97. If you buy that, they hit you with a $547 offer. They’re continually upselling you in that true definition where they sell you something more expensive along the way. Don’t get me wrong, it is very effective, and it can absolutely work if they’re positioned properly. But that is what a technical upsell is, when you are selling them something that is more expensive.
There are other categories that are worth chatting about and talking about that are also interchangeable too. For example, an add-on could be and upsell in that an add-on is something that makes the original product better. Price point is irrelevant, so you can have an upsell which is an add-on. You are adding on additional items to the product at a more expensive price. Let’s say, for example, (I’m going to use my cycling analogy here if I had a bike shop), that you go into a bike shop, and I will go and purchase a speedometer, like a Speedo that gives my speed and my cadence. While I’m cycling and on the road, I can track and measure some stuff. What they can do is after I agreed to purchase that item, they can then try and sell me something that’s more expensive that makes that product better though. That would be something like a device that would track my watts, how much power output I’m doing, the actual crank of the bike (and I’m getting technical here), but it can be very expensive, quite often much more than the actual device that tracks all the data. But that’s something that could make my speedometer work even better, or little bike computer even better because it gives you more data, that’s more expensive. That’s the way you can do an add-on that is more expensive.
You can almost argue that McDonald’s fries are an add-on, in that it’s going to make the meal enjoyable by having some fries with it. So, upsell is more expensive and can be any sort of product that’s being sold after-the-fact, whether it’s related or not. But an add-on makes the first original purchase better, and it’s price-point irrelevant. Do those two first categories make sense, Dom?
Dom: Yes, they do. They are drilling down to very good ways of thinking things through, coming up with ideas, what you could sell.
Pete: If you’re in the information space, for example, and you sell an e-book, or a course of some description, your add-on on the backend could be swipe files. Let’s say you sell a course on publicity, how to get publicity could be a course that you sell. Your thank-you page, item-per-sale increaser add-on could be a report or another e-book (whatever price point is, is relevant), that has a whole bunch of press release templates or swipe files. So, they get the course on understanding how to do publicity and the concept of writing a press release, and getting in touch with to the media, but then the add-on is, “We can make the use of this course much easier for you by buying this swipe file and templates you can use when writing a press release.” That’s a way that an information marketer can use that add-on style additional item sale.
Dom: I just had to say, I tend to gravitate towards the add-on as the most positive way that I can communicate this idea because it comes back to this idea of consultative selling, being helpful to the customer and adding value; not just taking more money off them, or it’s value exchange, right?
Pete: Yeah, and I think that is what I alluded to very briefly earlier, that the best type of sequence, where you are increasing the items per sale, is where you are working to consciously make sure that everything you offer makes the original purchase better. So, what you could do is you could do a publicity course, then you sell them an add-on, which is this swipe file resource. Then if they take that and you want to try a third item-per-sale offer, you then offer them a done-for-you service, or done-with-you service where you say, “You now have the resources to understand this and do this long-term. If you want to get started quicker, pay this premium price and one of my in-house team will work with you for your first three press releases, or whatever it might be.
Davey J [David Jenyns], who we had on the episode previous to this one, we have a program where we do outsourcing done-with-you. So it’s a product, or a service really, where we’ll work with people, and they can have a VA hired by us and trained by us but employed by them. We have our ads, we know where they can get virtual assistant applicants by the dozen. We have a process that they go through to self-select and put their hand up. We do then hand over some of those preselected applicants to the people we were training. And then once they hire the person they want, they then come back to us and go through our training and improvement process. It’s like outsourcing done-with-you.
What we could do, we actually are working on this, to give a real example, is we’ve got our outsourcing course, and then on the thank-you page of that we’re going to sell and upsell, it’s going to be a higher-price package but it’s like, you want to hire a new VA. You now have the course to understand how to do it, how to train them and manage them long-term. But if you want to get started really quickly and not have to go through the hassle of hiring, come and join our done-with-you service, and we’ll do all the hard work for you. Then all you have to do is worry about working with them once they’re trained up. That’s how you can have the done-with-you service as an add-on because it makes that first solution you’re trying to solve, or the first problem you’re trying to solve with the purchase, even better and even easier.
Dom: And that’s why I really like it. People may have come to you. The information marketing business is the easiest one, I think, to describe this into, which is why I like it when we give examples from different contexts because some people can’t map one to the other. But this idea that somebody comes to you with a problem or is looking for something, at The Athlete’s Foot, it’s just the same. The come in, they’re looking for some training shoes or something like that, and genuinely, the advice that replacing the insoles in a training shoe can make the shoe last longer, give you the same level of support for longer, that’s a really helpful piece of information that they may not have known. And it’s not a lot of money to buy a spare set of insoles. So you’re not taking a lot of money and a lot of extra expenditure, but you’re increasing your items per sale, and things like that where you’re educating the customer.
I’m sure that when the guy sold you the orthotics for the insides of your shoes, which honestly, if somebody had said to me just randomly, “When you’re cycling, you need arch supports inside your shoes,” I’d probably have raised at least one eyebrow, but I’m sure that he explained it. And at your level of your own personal education, you’re already going in there, talking about having your bike adjusted because you’re competing at a certain level, so you’ve got a bit of information. He talks to you on a level and says this can help you. It’s really easy, you go, “Oh, thank you very much. Put that on the pile,” and it can be that simple.
Pete: Well, absolutely. Those two examples, the insole examples are beautiful examples of the next category, which is a downsell where you’re selling something at a lower price point. Now, traditionally, Internet marketing community, which I know a lot of our listeners are from, traditionally, the term downsell has been used when someone doesn’t take your upsell. So you try and make them an offer, and if they don’t take that first offer, you then offer them a downsell, which is the cheaper version of that product.
One definition of a downsell is not only that is a cheaper alternative, but traditionally, the Claude Hopkins example where someone buys a sports coat, and then you sell them a tie or a sweater, makes much more sense as a downsell and it’s much more effective. This is exactly what Claude Hopkins writes about in his book, in that he talks of increasing items per sale in an intelligent way. If you sell someone a $200 sports coat, turning around and telling them, and trying to sell them $110 sweater is much easier to do because they’ve already said yes to the $200 over here for the sports jacket. A $110 sweater, by comparison, looks cheap, because it is a reduced price from the original investment. It’s a downsell, so it’s more likely to be accepted. As opposed to just try to sell them the sweater by itself at $110, and they say, “Yes, I’ll buy a sweater,” and then say, “Hang on, let’s go and buy a sports jacket for $200.” You are asking people to spend more money and reach further to their pocket. It’s just the perception has changed significantly when you offer downsells as opposed to upsells, and I think, generally speaking, downsells have a much higher conversion rate.
Now, I’m going to get these numbers slightly wrong because I don’t have them in front of me directly and haven’t asked permission to tell this. But a friend of mine recently did a launch. You may know his name, but I don’t have permission to tell his story. So at least I’ll give you the numbers that I’ve heard, but I won’t go into detail. The course was $997, did a launch to an internal list. It was a home-study course, and sold a couple of hundred units of that product. It did very well for an internal launch, a couple of hundred grand. Then on the thank-you page, they offered a downsell solution. So right then, saying, “You bought $1000 product. Let’s try and sell you something for $2,500,” like most people do. He said, I’m going to do a downsell offer here, and offered something around $147. So people already spent $1000, and then the people who saw that, they were then presented with a downsell offer for an additional course for only $147, which looks, by comparison, ridiculously cheap, and got (from memory) a 68% take-up rate. So, of the 200 people who bought the original course, just under 140 of them (or what’s 68 times two) bought that additional offer. Huge, because it was a downsell price point, and I think that is really important.
Other examples today, which didn’t happen, but I would’ve absolutely taken it in a heartbeat is we had a gardener come to our house today and clean up the Jumanji jungle that we had in our backyard. It took him about four and a half hours to clean it all up. If he turned around to me and said, “For an extra $50, I will re-tanbark the garden area,” which is not as nice as it was previously. I would’ve said, by comparison, yeah, extra $40, $50 to do that, no problem at all, happily sign that check. He didn’t make a second offer to me, but that’s a very easy downsell that he could have made. He did a great job on the garden, but that’s a perfect, easy little downsell, he could have made to, again, get a little bit more revenue out of me on that visit to our house today.
Dom: Yes, and it’s those things. I guess the next thing to go on to is how you can present these. But just to check back on that 68% thing, because that’s quite outstanding. People are already paying $997 for something, was it complementary or an add-on style sale, that one?
Pete: No, it was a complete cross-sell, which is another category.
Dom: Wow, so that really is quite powerful then. Because 68% for a relatively unrelated thing, but just kind of, “While you’re here, here’s this other thing.”
Pete: You can argue that it was an information business-building space. So you could argue that, with a bit of a bow, that it was an add-on because it helped grow their online business, which is what their primary course is all about. But it wasn’t a direct, related product. It was more of a cross-sell, which we can talk about as well.
Dom: Yes, but my point is even though it wasn’t done as an add-on, it wasn’t done as a complementary, as a ‘this will enhance your use of this thing,’ kind of thing, and they still got that 68%, it shows you the power of just simply making the offer or asking the question.
Pete: Yes, absolutely. It’s all about just making that offer of some form. And as I just alluded to, they offered a cross-sell. What a cross-sell is, is a product that is not related to the original offer. It’s something completely different. For example, a very bad example but one you can think of in this scenario, is when you go to the grocery store and you buy your vegetables and your dairy products. Then you get to the checkout, and at the point-of-sale, they got all those chocolates and confectioneries and really bad magazines about celebrities doing silly stuff. That is a form of increasing the items per sale. Those are, you can argue, cross-sells. You’re buying your meat and potatoes, and suddenly you’re buying chocolate. That is the cross-sell. It’s something that is not really related to the first. Yes, it’s food, but it is not really a direct related thing. You’re not going to put chocolate with your mashed potatoes, that’s not something you do to make that potatoes better like an add-on would. It is a cross-sell. It is something different.
Dom: That makes sense. Funnily enough over here in Spain, they started doing that as an actual ask thing. The people in the checkouts have like an Offer of the Day. Everything’s going through the checkout. You’re putting things in the bag. You’re trapped. You’re still at the end, putting things in the bags, and they’ll reach around and show you whatever the Offer of the Day is. It might be a pineapple, it might be a cake. It could be anything. But again, they probably get a better than one in 10 hit rate on that.
Pete: Yes, they do. Here, very strongly, at the petrol stations, they have 2-for-1 chocolate bar deals. And as you’re paying for your petrol and they’re swiping your credit card, they’re like, “Would you like a free chocolate bar when you buy one today,” or whatever the saying is that they use in that particular day. Surprisingly, you’ll go, “Do you know what, yes, I will,” because it’s a special deal, but it’s not related. Chocolate bars and fuel don’t go together. That is a perfect cross-sell that happens.
Dom: I’ve seen it actually as well. There’s the automated checkouts that you get in some supermarkets and stores where you go and scan your own things. On one of the particular news agent in the UK, their checkouts have that Offer the Day on the screen as you go into checkout. So even though you’re doing it yourself, there’s no one there to speak to you, the machine asks you the question, “Would you like a random chocolate item with that,” with your newspaper, so that’s a cross-sell.
I think it does segue quite nicely into the wrap-up for this. We’ve dotted throughout this conversation, ways you can do this, but can we just grab them together in one chunk, different ways that you can introduce these extra items to people?
Pete: Yes, there’s a number, depending how you’re selling. This is the thing, it all comes down to how you’re doing the sale. If you’re selling information products — you’re selling e-books or home-study course online, then you can easily make this offer on the thank-you page. You are going to probably experience this at least three times, where you purchase a product, and then on the thank-you page, it’s ‘Thanks for buying your login details, your downloads. Whatever it is that you purchased is on its way to you. But before you go, check out this additional offer.’ It’s a very easy way to do it. There’s no real, high and technical service or solution you need. All you need is that on the thank-you page, make another sales offer with another purchase button. You don’t need to incorporate the checkout where it’s one-click upsells. Yes, that helps conversions a little bit. But realistically, someone checks out with PayPal, they go to a thank-you page. If you make another good offer, they’ll check out with PayPal again. That’s a very simple way to do with.
Dom: I want to highlight there as well, because some people, again, with those friction points, “Oh, no, it’s really complicated to add two items to my shopping cart,” insert-complicated-technical-stuff. You really hit the nail on the head there. They bought something, you send it to a page that says, ‘thank you for buying something.’ You offer them something else and you send them back through the process. It’s just another button. It’s no more complex than that.
Pete: Yes. The thing is, for the first cycle of the 7 Levers, just put a real basic offer on the thank-you page. The next time you cycle through the 7 Levers framework, you can decide to do a different offer, or spend that time second time around working out how you can make it one-click, all-encompassing type of thing. It’s up to you. But don’t let the technology stop you from going forward.
If you have an e-commerce site, to give another example, as you add products to the checkout, pop-ups. We did this in some of our e-commerce projects where you go to buy headset and you add it to your shopping cart. We have a pop-up that pops up saying, “Did you know you’re probably most likely to get connector cable for that headset to work with your phone system,” and we make that sale as part of the checkout. Amazon do this really well. We see them all of over their sites, ‘buy this with this’ and other options, or package deals and things like that. If you ever bought a domain off GoDaddy.com, you would’ve absolutely experienced their upsell sequence. That’s another way to do it.
If you’re a retail store, and I explained this before. If you are a retail store where you have people trying on outfits, if you sell clothing, when they’re going into the dressing room to try on a dress, why not have some jewelry right next to the dressing room and you can say, “Try this necklace, and it goes really well with that dress.” It’s a very subtle way for them to experience that additional item when they get to see it.
If you’re doing consultative of selling, whether it’s in a bike store where you’re going through the process selling a bike. You can absolutely have a checklist. What are you going to be doing? You’re going to be riding triathlons. Well, you need to make sure you a bike. You need a helmet. You need a track pump. You educate them on other things they need to make their cycling, training and racing more effective. You can very easily show them other options that they should be purchasing as well.
If you are quoting on products, whether it’s a phone system or it’s a decking, or anything like that. Going through a checklist and saying, ‘here are the things that most people choose. You came for one thing. Here’s four or five other things I’m just going to ask you about as my usual check sheet so it doesn’t look like I’m selling hard.’ It’s just like this is the usual process and you’re enlightening the customer on other things they might not be aware of.
Dom: Cool. Just some really good examples there spread across lots of different industries and types, products and services. I think that was helpful just to wrap it up in one place, and it is. The big thing that I’m taking away from this, and I’m hopeful that people are taking away as well, is that first of all, let’s go back to the basics of the 7 Levers of Business. We’re looking for a 10% increase. At the moment, many of you may not even be doing this actively. You may not be actively looking for that additional sale. So, getting that one person in 10 to say yes is going to be probably one of the easiest wins you’ve ever had. You just ask, in one form or another, and that really is what it’s about. All those examples do come down to one way or another — it’s let people know there’s something else they can have in addition to the thing that they just bought or just about to buy. That’s really what it is, right?
Pete: Absolutely, it’s about making a very subtle, supportive offer for additional item that they may choose. We just want that slight 10% increase, as you said.
Dom: Yup, and don’t go overboard. Start with something relatively easy, like the add-on where it’s complementary to the item. It’s a lower price point than the item they’ve just bought. Don’t try to be clever about it. Just say, ‘you bought this,’ like the headset example, is a great one. ‘You bought this headset, you’re probably going to need a cable.’ That’s it, as simple as that. That works in almost every environment easily, whether it’s online or offline, people talking to people. Just having a sign or a box of things next to each other is another way of doing it. Buying one of these? You might need one of these.
Pete: If you’re selling things that people would use more than one of, package deals. I think one of the very first way I came across this being used was someone who was selling muffins at a weekend store. It was buy three, get one free. Buy one like this, or you buy three and get one free. So essentially, you pay for two and you get the third one for free, or however you want to word that sort of promotion. That’s a great way to get people to buy more. ‘If you buy two, you get one free,’ for example, that’s the offer. You’re going from someone buying one item to buying two items. That’s 100% increase. Not a 10% increase, a 100% increase instantly like that. You could easily, depending on the products you sell, stop selling one item. It only comes in packs of two. Depending on what you’re selling and what the price point is, a very easy way to force that increase is just by changing the packaging of how you deliver and sell the product.
Dom: That’s a very slightly sneaky, and possibly also quite advance for some people. But definitely, the simplicity is there. And that’s the other thing — don’t try and make a massive leap when you can make a small step. And that small step can make a difference, which again brings us back to the core message of the 7 Levers.
So folks, as you know, each show, we run a competition of one kind or another. Recently, what we are running a competition on is feedback from you. We enjoy your feedback. We want to get more of it. And so as a little bit of an incentive, we’re looking for you to comment on PreneurMarketing.com. Anywhere on the site, any of the articles that Pete’s recently mentioned, these fantastic articles that we’ve been putting out. It could be a post from the podcast episode, whatever it might be. And Pete, we have our first winner.
Pete: Yes, so every week, we’re going to be giving away a personally signed and posted a copy of my first book, How to Turn Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality. This week, Greg E. (he didn’t put his surname in the actual post) wrote a fantastic reply, almost like a cheat sheet to the essay that I wrote recently called How I Plan to Give My Son, Eli, a Million Dollars. It was basically the essay, for those who haven’t read it yet, at PreneurMarketing.com. It’s a pretty in-depth system that I’m putting in place for my son so that one day, he will be a millionaire. It’s not about inheriting my money or anything like. It’s a system for him to teach him the Wealth Foundations that I believe are important as someone living in society. If you’ve got kids, check this out. Or even if you don’t have a kid, you can absolutely apply it to yourself. It’s a very good framework. It’s a little bit in-depth.
What Greg did is he wrote a bit of a cheat sheet for people in Australia, saying he’s 10 times lazier than Pete. He says this is a no-brainer, idiot-proof, implementation plans. And he wrote down some bullet-point steps which I think is fantastic. Because I couldn’t go to certain depth in my essay, purely because I’m not financial planner and I can’t say certain things. So I had to leave a few things out for people to investigate. Now, Greg has a comment (he can write fundamentally whatever he wants), so he wrote this post up, a feedback, with a few more in-depth suggestions that I’d want to do. So, I really appreciate that, Greg. Thank you so much for contributing to the community, and I think it’s a very helpful takeaway for the readers and community members. So Greg, you have a book coming your way. Lookout for an e-mail from our team, which will be asking for your address. I’ll sign that, personalize it and post it to you this week.
And if you’re interested in either giving your child a million dollars, firstly go and check out that post on the site; but secondly, if you’re interested in getting a free copy of my book and helping and contribute to our community, make sure you do head over to PreneurMarketing.com. Check out anything, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s the show notes. If you leave a comment that we think is of value, of interest, made us laugh, whatever it might be, every week we’re going to pick one commenter and send them a free book. So, please contribute to the community. What we’re doing here is helping build a community of like-minded marketers. That’s what it’s all about and this is just an easy way to bribe, encourage and support you guys for supporting each other with the comments.
Dom: Absolutely. And as always, folks, we want your feedback. We want to hear from you however you give us that feedback. Do remember, there is also the audio comment you can make on the site if you visit PreneurMarketing.com. There are lots of other ways that you can leave feedback as well. One of the ways we would really appreciate is, however you’re listening to this, because we know you are listening to it potentially anywhere at anytime, and if you are listening to it on a device like an iPod or an iPhone or an Android device, probably there’s a button somewhere on that says, “I like this,” or “I recommend this,” or “I want to share this.” Take a second, in about a minute’s time when the show ends. Take a second and press one of those buttons. Just let somebody else know about the show, and just share. Because that’s what we’re really trying to do. We try to reach people, build a community and help people like you grow their business through the tips and information that we give across. So, share that with somebody else. Share the love and let somebody else know about the show. Pete, just to wrap up, what are we talking about in the next show?
Pete: In the next show, we’ve got Joe Cross who’s an Australian documentary filmmaker that most people may be aware of from the documentary Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead. We got Joe in here to talk about how he runs that empire that is now Reboot With Joe. He’s got a range of fruit juices and stores here in Australia, DVDs. He’s speaking around the world. He’s got some new documentaries coming out, so we covered a lot of ground with Joe about how he’s built the business, and built the brand, and built the movement, how he runs all of that, how he originally marketed and promoted the documentary. It’s really a conversation about a whole range of things, about him starting a movement and managing the movement.
Dom: Cool. Looking forward to that because that’s one of those from-scratch-to-huge stories really, isn’t it?
Pete: Absolutely. I think everyone should watch the documentary for its own content, let alone just understand who Joe is and how he’s built the empire. But I really believe in his message as well.
Dom: Excellent. So folks, we will see you on the next show. Thank you for joining us this week on the show, and speak to you all soon.
Pete: Bye.
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Links:
Online:
Preneur Marketing Internship – http://preneurmarketing.com/essays/preneur-group-internship-opportunity/
Article: How Pete Will Give His Son $1million – http://preneurmarketing.com/essays/teaching-kids-finance-million-dollars/
Article: What Really Matters for Conversions – http://preneurmarketing.com/essays/look-really-matters-conversions-happy-customers/
Books:
The Strategy Book – Max Mckeown
Amazon: http://preneurmarketing.com/strategybook
You can try out a lot of the books we recommend in audio format with Audible:
http://audibletrial.com/preneurcast – Free trial with a free audiobook download for PreneurCast listeners
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