Ever heard the terms cross-selling and upselling and wondered what they have to do with email marketing? Aren't these 'marketing things' that happen at checkout? Can you even do cross-selling and upselling with email marketing?

Oh yes, you can.

And when you use these strategies in the right way in your business, you'll start making loads more sales.

So let's find out how, shall we?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:11) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.

(4:05) What's the difference between cross-selling and upselling?

(7:23) How we do cross-selling and upselling in our business. 

(12:33) Sell fast - turn subscribers into customers.

(18:10) Maximise the value of your customers (quickly).

(21:32) The biggest mistakes people make with cross-selling and upselling.

(27:44) Putting together your cross-sell and upsell offers.

(30:47) Create systems to turn customers into repeat customers.

(32:46) Subject line of the week.

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What's the difference between cross-selling and upselling?

When it comes to the difference between cross-selling and upselling, in our business, we use the terms fairly interchangeably. And that probably upsets a lot of people in the marketing world. So here are some definitions for you:

• Upselling is about selling someone a perceivably larger thing – something more expensive or of higher commitment.
• Cross-selling means selling people other things that are around the same hierarchy as what they already bought (or maybe even lower value). And this can also mean different offers of the same product. 

For example, you could sell a full-price membership but also a lower-rung type product for people who don't want to pay the full price. They pay less but also get less content or value. Fair, right?

How we do cross-selling and upselling in our business

So let’s talk about what cross-selling and upselling look like in our business. When people come into our world, we want to sell them our core product, which is our membership The League. We then upsell our members one of two things.

• The first product is our Accelerator programme, which is a higher-ticket, a cohort-driven programme with limited capacity we run live a few times a year.
• The second product is our Agency - limited capacity and much higher ticket price. 

But in all honesty, terminology doesn’t matter that much to us. It’s more about maximising how much someone is able to spend with you. So if people are in a transaction, you want to encourage them to upgrade their order and spend more money with you than they’d originally anticipated (in a totally ethical way, of course). That’s an upsell. But if the transaction is complete, and you’re offering this customer other products over time, that’s cross-selling territory.

What we think makes a difference is that we built a business that's sustainably profitable and manageable where we don't have to create new products all the time. We have a good ecosystem whereby people join our email list (either free or paid) and go through a sequence of emails that maximise their ability to buy something. And then we upsell them to increase their customer value. That’s why we haven’t created anything new (other than for the fun of it) for ages – we don’t need to. What we have is sustainable.

So if you're going to engage in activities such as teaching or speaking (we do because we love it), make sure you do it in such a way that enables you to sell more of what you already offer. 

The practicalities of cross-selling and upselling

Sell fast - turn subscribers into customers

The first thing we recommend is that you never hold off going live with your product or service because you don’t have an upsell or cross-sell offering just yet. If you don't launch, you won't know if you can convert your front-end offer. It's tempting to wait until you've created a bigger funnel, especially if you're losing money on ads. But you're better off spending time tweaking your core offer until you find one that resonates with your audience. 

Cross-sell and upsell offers are great for making the economics work, but they’re part of the second phase. The first phase is to ensure you are converting your core offer. Because if you're not, you're wasting your time and money. Even if you're selling your core product at a loss at first, at least you know you can sell it. And then you can add cross-sell and upsell propositions to maximise your return on costs. 

In other words, sell fast. That's what we do. When subscribers come into our world, for 60 days, they go through an automated system of emails that will turn them into customers. And then in the following 90 days, they get emails that will maximise their value to our business.

And it's all automated! We don't have to be in the trenches on a daily basis wondering where the next dollar is coming from. We’re out there preaching to get people in the system at the front end. But once the wheels are turning, our automated system is taking care of the rest.

Maximise the value of your customers (quickly) 

Something that isn't hugely talked about is that a lot of us business owners end up being out of pocket because of ad spend. Acquiring subscribers has a cost, and it can be hard to get to a point where your core offer fully covers your ad spend. But the good news is that once people are in your world, with the right systems, you can make that money back. And you want to do it quickly!

That's what we're really good at - getting people to buy from us fast and then maximising the value of that customer really quickly. We don't wait around - we want to get people to buy now. Our automated email engine turns subscribers into customers fast so we get our ROI. That's why we have a series of offers designed to get our customers to spend more money with us - we simply can't afford to be out of pocket!

And the good thing is that it happens predictably because our system is automated. We don’t have to remember to run a promotion - our email campaigns go out automatically, even when we’re busy doing something else. We’re confident and happy to go and speak at events to bring people into the front end because we know our back-end system is predictable. Every single person who comes through our front door will go through that same system. There’s no choice - it's a chain of events (we call it a customer engine) that turns your subscribers into customers.

The biggest mistakes people make with cross-selling and upselling

A mistake we often see business owners make is to present a customer with a lot of different offers at checkout, one after the other. As a rule of thumb, if someone says no twice, that's enough. Let them buy the product they want without having a never-ending chain of offers. As a customer, you don’t want to say no to something just to be offered something else and then another thing and another thing!

Something else we recommend you don't do is to make offers that are not related. We're quite strict with our cross-sell and upsell offers - we want them to be tightly related, congruent, and relevant to the main product. So don't go completely off-piste and end up offering something unrelated. It's really not about shoving stuff into your funnel to make it bigger!

Also, make sure you're not one of those people who are so focused on creating new products that you forget to create a system around what you already have. Instead, build an automated email marketing system that you set up once and runs forever (and makes you lots of money).

Once you've done that, coming up with new products is great. But only do it when you have the freedom and bandwidth to do so - not when you don't yet have a team or automation in place. Build a system around your existing offers first and then focus on new products. There's nothing wrong with pivoting if and when your business has changed. But don't do that every few months! Because otherwise you'll hit a ceiling and won't be able to scale your business. 

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Putting together your cross-sell and upsell offers

We think it’s important to create some sort of congruence with the offers you put together. So for example, let's say your front-end product is a series of videos for $67. You'll need a lot of positioning, marketing, and copywriting to convince people on their checkout journey to spend, say, $97 for an eBook. It’s not impossible because it always depends on how you frame it. But if your core product has more perceived value, the upsell itself will make your core product appear even more valuable. 

People often forget that the actual product you sell is part of the marketing - it needs to have perceived value in itself. So when pricing your upsell offers, think about the perceived increased value that it gives to your core product. If your product is $67, your upsell doesn’t have to go incrementally up. We’ve seen successful funnels where the front end might be $300, but the upsell is cheaper at $47. And that converts like crazy because of the price anchoring that’s offered by the front-end product people already bought. 

The other thing you can do is to go dramatically higher. So your product might be $67, but your upsell is $1,000, for example. That works too.

Be careful when offering your time as an upsell! 

When putting together your upsell offers, we recommend you don't offer your time (such as a coaching call) as an upsell. It’s a really tempting thing to do when creating a funnel if you don't have any other products ready. But offering your time doesn’t always work. In fact, you might find it hurts your conversion because not everyone wants to talk to someone they’ve never met – some people may find that intimidating or like to be left alone!

Create systems to turn customers into repeat customers

Cross-selling and upselling fit in your business in two places. The first place is at checkout, where you want to present your customers with congruent, well-thought-out bump offers. The second place is within your email marketing. That's the place where you use your email engine to turn those customers into repeat customers!

Your job as a business owner is to maximise the value of every customer. So always look at how can scale your business and make it more profitable, rather than only focusing on the front end. When people come into your world, try to sell to them immediately. Use ongoing email automation to maximise that person’s value to your business. Because launching something new all the time isn't sustainable!  

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Ruining your day”. It’s a bit like that subject line you may have seen that says “bad news.” These are similar because they make people want to know what the bad news is. And subject lines like those tend to have a high click-through rate. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Create A Member Onboarding Sequence That Your Members Will Love.

Best Email Marketing Campaign To Get Your Customers To Buy Again (And Again)

Super Cool Member Growth Strategies To Attract New Customers With Email Marketing.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about cross-selling and upselling and how to do it right) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Unknown 0:35

Hey, it's Rob. And Kennedy.

Unknown 0:37

Hello Today on the Email Marketing Show, were talking about what the heck is cross selling and upselling and how can you use it to make loads more sales.

Unknown 0:45

Now just before we dive into that we have put together something really cool for you and it is totally free. So you want to make more sales from your email marketing. We know that that's why you are here, but you can't make sales if no one is clicking on the links in your emails to go and check out your stuff. So that's why we put together 12 really creative ways that you can get more clicks from every email that you send this download that we're calling click tricks, it's yours totally free as a listener to this podcast today. All you have to do is go to email marketing heroes.com forward slash

Unknown 1:09

tricks. He's permanently frustrated by dusting it's comedy hypnotist Robert temple,

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and his favourite scent is sandalwood honey and tobacco its psychological mind reader Kennedy

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Unknown 1:43

like shaving or anything that's like Oh, I'm gonna I'm not gonna shave. I'm also not gonna we're gonna end up smelling at the end of the day. So I'll just smell and let me as well not recycle because it doesn't take

Unknown 1:53

minutes. First a Pyrrhic takes a minute.

Unknown 1:57

Yeah, no, I don't get frustrated frustrated by seeing dust. That looks messy and I hate it. So

Unknown 2:02

and then dusting is weird, isn't it cuz you take a piece of material and you wipe the dust off and it ends up craggy. And maybe yeah, and then the dust is now all over your yellow dust or whatever you use and you know put that in the drawer and then get it out again another time and use it again. It's very strange. I find it very people

Unknown 2:14

some of us clean that that dust and throw it away.

Unknown 2:18

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Unknown 2:28

what it is. I put this down was one of my facts to mention on the show a little while ago and I can't remember whether that was whether that's a bath, like a bubble bath type scent or if it's the wax melt that we use in the living room. I can't remember I do

Unknown 2:43

have a sandal with honey and tobacco meaty when I was a child.

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you bought them at the bath bombs. I just switched them around. I wasn't swishing hard enough.

Unknown 3:14

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Unknown 3:17

Stocking filled filled. Anyway, every week on this show. We talked about talk to you about how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We're talking about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and share what's working right now. To make more sales online and making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday. Make sure that you hit subscribe on your podcast player.

Unknown 3:42

They went on a bit

Unknown 3:45

of content, one star too much fun.

Unknown 3:47

That'd be a fact. That just carries on with all that was like you're desperately trying to show it though. Anyway, as you threaten at the beginning we're going to talk about the difference between cross selling and upselling. What to do, what not to do, how to use them, why to do them, why not to do them and how we do them. My guess is an interesting thing

Unknown 4:01

I think be quite interesting. I think every time we talk about what we're doing in our business for some reason people really like hearing about what we're actually doing and the process. I think understanding a lot of people out there are sort of sharing theoretical, this is what you could do, this is what you should do. Whereas everything we do everything and the reason actually we stopped any of our programmes was because we found a lot of the conventional marketing wisdom wasn't working for us. I mean, really it looked like tripwire offers what a horrible name first of all, but you and I neither have a one day we sort of had an awkward conversation. Well, what we've always been a conversation but I've never I've never made a trip to work. You were like Me neither. But I was a bit embarrassed. There's a lot of stuff that is widely taught and widely shared and chat on about that we didn't get to work. And so I think it's why people like even what we're actually doing because we're taught from luck, which drive this thing. It's soft, we can't make that work. We've tried a different thing. And so let's talk about the difference between cross selling and upselling. For me, it's one of those things I don't get that hung up on the difference between them. Like I'm like, No, we don't need for terms interchangeably. I mean, I do I do which is you know, and I get frustrated people doing that in other places like when people mix up scarcity, urgency, I'm like, That's not urgency, and I get right on my soapbox, but when I'm sure what I'm interchangeably interchangeably talking about costs are the same as somebody else with their own soapbox going. That's the wrong word. But for me, I bet they're listening to this give us a fucking one star review and go on.

Unknown 5:18

So let's talk about the actual real sort of proper definition effectively upselling is taking somebody and selling them a sort of perceivably larger thing so more expensive higher commitment it's something it's probably traditionally always more expensive but could just be a higher commitment thing like it might be a cheaper month cheaper price but every month for the rest of their isn't theirs and their children's lives, you know, like it's just it's either more expensive, it's more commitment or something along those lines, or it's cross selling is effectively selling people other things that are on the same if you think what you promised like a hierarchy or they're on the same rung of the hierarchy or there abouts they might even be a little bit lower than you know, you could consider Well where does downscaling come into this? I was thinking of diamond selling as being if they didn't buy a product A you sell them product B which

Unknown 5:53

is a bit cheaper. It doesn't actually just have to be different parts because it just it's I think it's important to say that it can be different offers for the same product. So for example, you might have a full price thing, which is I don't know $1,000, right, that you're seeing on your sales page. And then when they click No, I don't want to buy that or they they go to leave or you know, whatever. You might say hey, would you like it for three payments of X? Yeah, and we see that payment plan in production as almost a down sell. Really? Yeah, exactly.

Unknown 6:18

We've both done a thing in the past where we've had a membership. And we've also had like a lower rung of the membership. So people who didn't want to pay the full price, there was a lower rung of that and they could get a bit less stuff like they didn't get your newsletter or you know, whatever. And that meant that that was a cheaper price as a sort of downside of effectively is effectively the same thing. So let's talk about how that looks in our business then. So people come into our world. We want to sell people our main course first and we work really hard to sell people that and then if people buy it over time, we will upsell those people into one of two things really well. Yeah, one of two things really. We will upsell people into either our accelerator programme which runs a few times a year. It's a small intake based cohort driven programme that opens and closes and because it runs live has to and then we also I guess, have agency too, which again, is limited capacity, much more expensive, much higher ticket shouldn't say expensive, people buy much, much higher ticket and that is again an upsell. I think that's probably all we've got. Now we consider until this conversation we consider loads of other things in the business of sales, but in reality if we look at the nuts and bolts of it, that's really what upsells are, right? Yeah.

Unknown 7:14

Where would you put where would you put yourself for example, somebody joins our blueprint and as they're enrolling, we offer them the chance like a bump offer, right? So we might we have a bump offer on that which obviously we're testing different ones but where would you see where would you put the bump offer? Is that an upsell because it feels like an upsell to me.

Unknown 7:28

I think that's I think that's location based right? So if it's a bump offer with a ticket, check it so just for pure thing as you said the checkbox on checkout, they haven't paid yet. I think that's an upsell because it is an upgrade to your existing you're reading what you're actually buying now. If they buy it a week from now, then you've crossed again, the vernacular doesn't matter. Does it like the actual words don't matter?

Unknown 7:46

The whole point of this is really to look at the fact that you want to maximise how much someone is able to spend with you during that time. We'll get to that in a minute. But then to open up another can of worms on the next page say that offer another opportunity to buy. We naturally will call that an upsell. I believe it is an upsell.

Unknown 8:03

Yeah, so I think for me, the way I get there is if they're in the if they're in the transaction, therefore we're upgrading stuff like you wanna upgrade your order with this and upgrade your order that that sort of upselling thing. Whereas if it's overtime, somebody bought a thing today that transaction is complete and over the next six months, we're going to try and sell them five or the comparable things, then that is cross selling. Now of course if you were in the Econ world, which we're not but if we were in the Econ world, then this might be a wholly different thing because what you might have is you might have five different like I can't tell you how many identical coats Alfie has put in different colours because every time Rachel sees a dog coat you know in different coordinate getting the purple one they look regal in purple. I think that that's a you know, that's That's true cross selling, if you like so yeah, I think again, the words probably got mad at that. But what this does allow us to do is talk about what we sort of recommend, I guess this allows us I always get frustrated and feel a bit sorry for people when I see what I think of as quite an unsustainable business. I'm always very proud of how sustainable our business what I mean by that. I don't mean in the eco friendly sense. We're not you know, we're not planting trees for every buck we sell or anything like that yet, but what I mean is sustainably profitable and sustainably manageable. Because what are the economics here? Just the fact that like not having to create new stuff all the time. So like what we've built is a really good ecosystem of stuff. When people join our email list either free or paid, they go through a sequence of stuff that maximises their ability to buy something and then be up sold and across all the million other things about the 9 million a few other things that makes our customer value high. And we do it every three minutes. I have to go fuck let's make something else because that's what I see people posting on Facebook when I'm thinking about doing something we teach. I'm thinking about doing this class on x y Zed thing. I've just done a class on you know, ABC thing, I think on how many of those they sold what however many was it wasn't enough like they could have they could have taken that if it was any good and they liked it and turned it into a bigger part of their business. Whereas we haven't created anything new other than for the fun of it for ages. Yeah. Yeah, I think the way that we can talk about all kinds of flow of somebody joins the list today. They go through what the what we'll go through in a minute is really sustainable and we're not every three minutes create something new because we need it. How else can we do well is can we do? We're not running live classes all the time and like trying to cut it trying to go unused. Although

Unknown 9:48

we love teaching like we love teaching, I love going to events and teaching our keynote and all that.

Unknown 9:54

That is a challenge because if you enjoy that stuff, you're inclined to do it. But in order for every for every minute of teaching, you've got to do that you love and benefits people. There's probably an hour of copywriting and graphic design and funnel optimization and other stuff you've got to do in order to get to that point, you know, for every minute of teaching that you want to do. There's a bunch of other crap that comes along with that. Whereas if you built

what if instead of going right okay, we you know as people who love teaching love sharing your expertise and that kind of stuff, which I think we all do, but fundamentally, at our core, we got into this because we like doing that. But what if instead of saying naughty slap your hands, you're not allowed to do that anymore. You have to just focus on the marketing and selling that thing. Well, what if instead we just focus on re channelling that teaching? Re channelling that into okay, how can you learn to teach in a way that sells more of the cool thing? So anyway, that's a discussion for another time I want to go down that hole but I just wanted to order people that so and so is what we actually think we should do it. What's the practicalities of going out there and adding cross sells and upsells The first thing I would say is don't get carried away. I think this is the thing we see loads as people hold off on putting their thing live their calls, their coaching programme, their membership. Hold on, I'm putting it live, because they're like not going I can't put it live yet, because I haven't got any upsells I haven't got any profit maximisation. And the thing is, you don't even know if you can convert that one core thing at the front yet. Yes, initially, you might lose money on ads on it because you haven't got the economics weighed up. But you want to make sure that that thing on its own will sell there's no point in going deep into creating additional programmes offers getting assembling all these additional programmes that you can upsell and cross sell to create a whole funnel. We don't even know who can get into the front door with the core offer. So the first thing I would implore everybody to do, I say this a lot is get that front thing covered because a lot of our job really is just testing new offers until we find the one that resonates with the people we're in front of and in our tone and the way we're able to express it and our angle on it. So really, I would say focus on not adding cross sells and upsells to begin with because for me cross sells and upsells are about adding more value making it so that the economics work. Well. That's the second phase. The first phase is can I get the core thing to convert to want to do conversion first, so even an ad, okay, yes, usually it make ads work. You're gonna need to have them go from an ad to a thing that they're gonna buy. And then you're gonna have to have a bunch of bump offers checkboxes on the on the shopping cart upsells or to make economics work. That's phase two, you really because what you want to do is you don't want to waste a lot of time, invest weeks and weeks or days and days on creating those products that you can cross sell and upsell if the front end doesn't work. So instead you want to be flexible enough to be able to go right I'm going to run this off and see if I can get people to buy it within a range that I think is acceptable. I think I can make back on some reasonably good upsells and cross sells, so your front end might be $37.67 We've got threatening management now. If you were the front end of $67 You're gonna add into the $67 item and you've got nothing else you're just testing the $67 item if it's costing me $88 To acquire that $67 person. Yes, I'm losing money today. But I know that the damn things convert. So now after that run for maybe a month and that the newness has worn off, if that's still bringing people in for $88 or maybe even $95 Something like that, for my $67 thing I'm acquiring buyers great. I am in the negative, but I'm now in the background because I can see its work and I can now be working on writing the course putting together the programme for the upsells. So the recommendation another what you think we've already told that as well. But my recommendation is because if the front end doesn't work, let's say the front end is that $67 and just people are clicking on buy in, you're making you know, you're just making massive losses on it, you're spending it's costing you $350 To make a $67 sale, getting that and even out with with the economics of a funnel is much much trickier. Like it's way off Mark really. So if you try to dial it in to dial in. The good news is you've already created one product you can now go solve this game of soldiers. I'm gonna go and and and come with a different front end. Yeah, I didn't do that for a month. Oh, that one didn't work either. Cool. The good news is you're using the least amount of time because the reason we all keep going with an offer that's not working is because we've invested so much time the whole down funnel.

Yeah, for sure. And you know, there's a bunch of benefits to doing this. You've already touched on some of them there's things like you know, you get to make more of your ad costs back the truth is that when somebody is in it, especially with like a live funnel where you know there's a string of products in a row people are in like a buying trance, you know, they're in the process of buying they got their card out, especially in a world of one click upsells where you just click a button and it builds the next thing obviously got to be done ethically got to make that obvious, etc. But we do it and we don't have we very rarely have anyone get in touch and say I didn't know that was going to charge me like one in a million customers probably do it. So yeah. So like, it helps to liquidate ad costs, maximise return on costs. It helps you to again get people to buying fast because they go through this sort of buying trends. It also is a real thing, like whenever we go and speak at an event or do a training facilities group or do something where you and I are involved in it and at the end we get a flood of people come and join our email list. There's something really satisfying for me at least I don't know you about knowing we all we've done is we've turned on for our we've delivered our best possible stuff throughout it. We've told them about our lead magnet and then our Facebook group or whatever. And then some people have gone and joined that thing, which means they're now on our list. And now in the next 60 days. We've got this incredible system that's going to turn those people into customers very quickly. And then within the 90 days following them becoming a customer, there's a really great system that's going to maximise their value to our business, not quite maximise it in that time, it's going to make significantly more and then over time as we do other things and those people will die. Those are the things like we were on the accelerator and agency and all those other things that we're going to be and you and I are not in the trenches every day going where's the next dollar gonna come from? You and I are out there just preaching and delivering and get people in the system at the front end. And then it is the wheels are turning and it's taking care of the rest. Yeah, it's

really, really nice. I think one of the things that people do get worried about is like, how do they maximise the value of somebody quickly enough? That makes

sense? Yeah, and this is super important, because what you're talking about there about, you know, sometimes people are out of our pocket on adspend. And things like that is that you may always be out of pocket on adspend you may never be able to get it to the point and it's gonna get harder to get it to the point where your funnel like the initial thing somebody buys from you and the upsells to it, cover adspend it might be that your acquisition thing keeps you out of pocket on ads permanently because you just can't make the economics work like that is a thing. And some businesses, people we don't do that by design, but like we want to be losing money on the front end because I just need to inquire faster, we'll make it back. You know, we can't sell them the $20,000 thing on the funnel that we can a week later. So we'll do it then we'll make do with it for a week. But the challenge with that is that those businesses are very well funded and because they may have made a lot of money a long time ago, they can afford they've got the cash flow to sort of say out of pocket for a period of time. I think one of the things that's worth bearing in mind and is one of the things we're really good at just to toot my own horn for a minute. We're really good at getting people to buy quickly and get them to maximise their value quickly. There's none of this later in around waiting for them to finish what they're doing last week before we sell them the thing we want them to look at next week like it's literally we'll sell them it well we think it's important to them and then they'll figure it out as they go. They'll look at it when they've got time to look at it. They'll have the stuff but we will make them want to buy it now in the nicest possible sense will make them realise the importance of buying it now. And so what that means is that, you know, people join us today, there's an incredibly email system that's all automated that turns people into customers and it does it fast, which means we get a quick return on investment. But then likewise, when people have bought something like somebody's just bought the account down here, there's a whole series of stuff designed to get them to take the next step and help us make our ad spend. But again, if you don't do that quickly enough, you'll quickly find that you're spending more on adspend than you are in money coming in. And that means that you've got a problem if you don't do it within the next 60 days. Can you afford to sit out of our pocket on adspend for 60 days permanently? Probably not. Most people can't if you spend in any volume of ad spend.

Yeah and I think one of the things that we have to think about is this only happens predictably. If it is automated, like if we have to remember Oh shit, we've got to run a promotion to our list this week. Because we've had a bunch of people come in, or oh, we haven't done a promotion for a while because been busy on holiday and we've been taking a break or we have friends visiting or we've been doing something else in the business or whatever. Then these things fall through the cracks. The only reason it's predictable that we bring people in the front and it turns into customers. And we're confident in that and we're happy to go out and speak at events and stuff and do online events as well is because we know it's predictable. We know that every single person who comes in goes through that system, like there's no there's no choice. They don't get to come in and go Oh, where did they go next or where are they going to receive that next promotion? It's going to be as soon as that happens. As soon as they have joined the list. This is what happens until they buy and as soon as they buy this thing. There's now a whole series of chain of events, which is happening in what we call the customer engine. Right. So you've got a new subscriber engine, which is the one that turns your subscribers into customers the first time your customer engine which is designed to maximise that journey. So and that includes important in past episodes includes onboarding people getting to consume stuff, see the value and stuff and of course upselling them crossing them onto onto other other things. But we also want to make sure that we don't make some of the mistakes that we have seen. But one of the things that is a personal pet peeve of mine and I spoke to a few people about this one is when you're making offers to people hate this when you're going through someone's funnel right and the you by the format that you're so lovely. That's a great thing. On the next page it says oh do you want this other thing actually just I just don't want it. I go no, the next page. Do you want this thing and your little one? That one? No, that's fine. What about this? And then you've got 567 things deep and you go, I've said no man I've said no. For me if someone says no twice, I want the funnel to end now I realised that it's technology dependent. If you can't do it, you can't do it. But ideally, in most platforms, it's great if you can just if you've got the ability, if the same note to upsells and cross sells in a row then take an end of the funnel say attend to a thank you page. Show them how to login. And even if that's a thing, that's what we call a pseudo thank you page, right, which is like it's a thank you page that says hey, I'm gonna, here's how you get your login details and then it turns into an offer as well, but they can and ideally, it's what we would call a softer offer, like also register for this free webinar, which is gonna be a webinar with an offer and it's something like that, that works really, really well at the end. So that's one of the biggest things I think people say doing is they think needs to have this never ending chain, especially on the downsells I do hear people complaining about God every time I said yes, they offered me another thing. And I'm like, Well, you kept saying yes, and I'm kinda like I'm postally okay with if we had an upsell, which were 20 deep. I think I would be okay with that. If they were converting obviously that will be depend on conversions. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever think about that? I mean, are you happy with them saying yes. And just keep going? Are you like, at some point? You need to like stop. Yeah,

as long as it's all feels congruent and relevant and you don't don't sometimes I see ourselves like, we're always quite strict on how tightly related our episodes have to be following our blue and island framework. If you've studied that from any of our trainings, but equally at the same time, I've seen a lot of people who have these things and suddenly it's quite good to begin with. And then suddenly it goes way off piste and ends up being about some sort of, you know, in the same niche, obviously, but like different and I think, why do you think I might be interested in that way we put this together because now you're just shoving stuff on for the sake of putting ourselves on the end and making the funnel bigger. So I like it as long as it makes sense and it's congruent and I think that's fine. Yeah, I think the other thing you already touched on it a little bit. But the other mistake I think people make with this stuff is that they don't have they don't have a system that they build once and just let it run forever and make them put in for a long time and make it make it make them lots of money. I think most people's approach to upselling and cross selling which I think is fine to begin with just making sure I really believe that's true, but not for very long because it quickly gets in the way. The problem is when people do this, if it's usually the stage of their business when they can least afford the time to do it. And that is again, creating new stuff all the time. So like, you know, I want to make some some fast cash, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna do I don't I'll do a four week class, and then suddenly, they've got to rally around making sales pages, putting the stuff together making it happen, and then they sell that to their audience. And then once that thing is dead, it's largely dead. But three months later, they're doing another one on a slightly different topic. And I think for me, when I what I like to do is to continue to build out an otherwise already automated system, rather than and that's not to say you should never do what I just described, but you should do it when you've got the bandwidth and the time and the freedom to do it. The truth is in our business, we generally don't but we do have the bandwidth, the time and the freedom to do that sort of thing, because we have a team because the rest of our business is largely automated, because you and I take a lot of time off and if we just run we're gonna take one day a month less off, we could we could do one of those quite easily. So again, most people are doing that at the stage of their business where they don't have a team and they don't have a thing. That's why they're doing it. It's like a catch 22 They're doing it in order to make a bunch of money because they haven't automated the stuff they've already got that works and isn't going to be in sales every day. But actually it's when you've got all that stuff that you can most afford the time and the mental freedom to do a good job of it so I think yeah, that's it for me is not building out the system you've already built you know it's working but rather than you know, just dragging your business off course you and I saw a comment on it how many people we come across on a day to day basis now people we know all that well, but you people see on social media or wherever. I think what are they doing now like they've suddenly gone from being you know, an expert in this to suddenly the expert in that suddenly, like their business has changed. There's nothing wrong with pivoting over time. But like we see people who think we're doing it every six months, and I can't help you. You can't be doing a good job of building out any of this.

At some point. You have to you have to commit and I think it's all about getting that balance between committing to a thing, but also knowing when to let go and you're that thing is not working. And that's that's a discussion that I mean, it's probably one of the questions I asked almost every entrepreneur I meet is how do you know the line between tenacity sticking with the thing and making the damn thing work and seeing it through versus stupidity which is which is knowing that actually this thing is just not going to work? I think.

I think what I see on that is people who who who we know because we've seen the inside the business or we've talked them or whatever, have launched a thing and they've sold I don't know $20,000 worth of 800 that we got that definitely works like that is 100% proven, then rather than rather than do what we do, which is automate and scale it. They hit a ceiling and go alright, that's that done. Then I'll come and pick something else. Because they got that done then, rather than you know,

I still sell to more of those I need to know that's actually the proving point. Unless I think for me unless you've got a thing which is like a machine that sells on a let's say daily weekly basis or you know every time you open the doors basis a couple of times a year at least French Door Door the front door I love them. Every time you open a door money in your account, do you have every time you open a door bang, you go tell it straight in your pocket. Your pockets will be big enough for how much money this is gonna make you

Yeah, the only thing you have to worry about is how you're going to spend the money that all the money that you make. Yeah, you're

gonna have to figure that out. I'm afraid sorry. You have to buy up you're gonna have to buy a bigger mattress.

Goodwin sales pages that sort of thing. Yeah.

I've one of the things I also want it before we wrap this up is I just want to talk about the types of upsells and stuff like that, that you can have one of the things I think is really important is to create some kind of congruence as well and and increase the perceived value. So for example, look at what's happening in your market, what did they see as more valuable and what is less valuable? So for example, if your front end product is $67, and it's a video calls, I think it's gonna be you're gonna do a lot of positioning, a lot of marketing, a lot of copywriting to convince people on the next page to spend $97 for an e book now, it's not impossible, like it depends on how you frame it but it's gonna be marketing whereas if at the core of it the thing that the the the media which is being used has more perceived value, then it becomes another selling point of why it's valuable and about every single element of your product. And the marketing of what it does is part of that messaging. So people you know often I think, forget that the actual product sells is part of the marketing, right? Like the fact it's a six part video programme, or it's an eight week coaching programme that has perceived value in the fact of itself. And one of the things I think people get, so that's the first point I kind of want you to think about what do you do your costs and your upsells thinking about what is the perceived increase in value and also, let's not get stuck into the fact that you have to have a cheap thing so $67 and that it has to go you know $100.03 $100 Like it doesn't have to go incrementally up. In fact, I've seen some really successful funnels where the front end might be 300 then the upsell is like 47 because it really because and what's really nice is those $47 upsells the cheaper upsell converts like crazy because of the price anchoring that's offered by the front end thing they already bought that like what an extra few dollars would have already invested this. The other thing you can do is you can go dramatically higher you can go from 67 and then on the next page, you could offer $1,000 thing we've got some friends who then colleagues who it goes I think the exact I think it's 37 on the front end and it's 1500 as the upsell. Yeah, that's why the things that you think about the other thing I want to talk about is it's really easy, especially when you're putting a new funnel together to offer your time as an upsell. And I just want you to send chat whether that's something you really want to do. Or

are you doing anything else to upsell like that's terrible?

Exactly. And people have to do this with bonuses. Oh, and you also get a 40 minute call with me. And often we've seen people suffer conversions because of offering time with them as a bonus because people are nervous about talking to people they don't really know or that I haven't really got time for that. I want just to do my own pace. I just do my own thing. Leave us alone. I'm kind of that person Rob that person definitely. Yeah,

for sure. And I think and the interesting thing the interesting thing I think to wrap this up is just at the end of the business stage of the podcast is just the fact that remember this upsell and cross sell thing happens in two different ways. You definitely want to have it so that when people buy a thing you immediately put them through bump offers upsells downsells that all that stuff in a in a congruent well thought out funnel which is a whole episode in its own right and then as soon as that's bought your job is not done, your job is just started. The next job is to use things like our email engines to turn and ongoing email marketing to turn those customers into repeat customers of other things or somebody comes in through a free lead magnet. They don't buy anything in your immediate funnel. Then you've got to work even harder to get those people to buy stuff down the line. Because you need to you need to maximise your value of every customer both ways so when you look at it right now, what you've probably got is somebody who can join your list really badly or through a product or whatever. The next bit really to look at if you want to scale that business is not how do I drive more people into that front end? The next bit if you want to scale that business and make it more profitable. For every one person who does or every 100 people that do every 10 people that do from wherever I'm currently getting them, what can I sell them immediately. That's going to make sense in this whole funnel process, which is largely actually what Kennedy has been talking about. And then what can I do with ongoing email automations and ongoing stuff over time to maximise that person's value. Again, without feeling like every three minutes, I've got to launch a new thing, because that's not sustainable, which largely what I've been talking about. So there's two different bits of this that you've really got. People really have to sort of grip onto and if you do,

we do what you're talking about Robert is a little cool extra bonus tip is how do you turn everything you're already doing into an opportunity to create a product right? So if we are asked to speak on stage, if we are asked to give a talk somewhere, give a training somewhere run a bonus day for somebody. Well, like awesome Are you filming it? If you're not can we you know or if it's online can we get the recording? So there'll be stuff you're already doing that you can probably leverage as well. Yeah, cool. That was awesome. That was very interesting, because I know that now for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. This

one This one was just the words ruining your day. And basically it's a bit like there's an old subject line that's going around for years just bad news full stop all in lowercase because it's like you know, people want to know what the bad news it's all has the same ring to that to me I think but it got a massively high click through rate but basically I like the idea that people know what's happened, you know, sort of like and when they get it has nothing to do with that. It's something to do with somebody ruin my day. But I think if you just get if you get that sort of negative sense in the subject line people do all this

week's check night of the week subject line of the week. Awesome sauce. Well first listen to the whole show this week. I hope you enjoyed it. If you haven't already, make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player. We'll be back next email marketing Wednesday next week with a brand new episode. We'll see you then.