Imagine you’re shopping for an iron skillet, so you head over to Amazon to check out your options. After a few minutes searching and reading reviews, you find the perfect pan: a 13.25″ cast-iron Lodge skillet… and the price is right too.
You add the pan to your cart, go to check out and…
“Wait… what’s this?”
You see another amazing product…
…a cast-iron care kit designed to keep that pan in pristine condition forever, ready to be passed down to the next generation.
“Hmm… I’ll definitely need that.”
So you add it.
“Oh! and they also have a spatula that withstands high-heat and won’t scratch my new pan!”
So you get that too.
Boom.
You just paid twice as much as you intended… and you liked it.
A Strategy You Can Use In Your Funnels To Boost Cart Value
What Just Happened?
You just experienced one of the best revenue-boosting techniques–something you can use in any business to boost the amount your customers happily spend with your company.
“How do you do this?” you might be asking?
We’ll talk about that in a second, but first let’s talk about what just happened (and why it’s so effective).
The Power Of More
Or better put: the power of shopping momentum.
You see, the hard part about selling is convincing someone that your pile of benefits is more valuable than the prospect’s pile of money.
Once the prospect agrees with you, a major milestone has been reached and “buying momentum” is created.
What does that mean?
People who just bought something are more likely to keep buying.
This was demonstrated during an experiment conducted by researchers Uzma Khan from Stanford, Ravi Dhar from Yale, and Joel Huber of Duke.
What they found is that there are two stages to the buying process:
- Research. This process is more “deliberate” as the prospect weighs the benefits versus the cost.
- Buying. The research hurdle has been cleared, and the buying floodgates have now been opened.
As Khan puts it, once people decide to buy, they stop thinking with their brain and start “thinking from their cart. The cart takes over. Once that happens, a roller coaster of shopping can begin.”
This Is Where Amazon Is A Master
Khan and the other two researchers call this “roller coaster of shopping”, “shopping momentum“.
How does this translate to Amazon?
They make buying add-on products that complement the original purpose extremely simple and easy.
Here’s an example of Amazon recommending Lodge iron-skillet “add-ons” to continue our shopping momentum:
What Amazon does here is very subtle (and effective)…
They place complementary products in front of a buyer who just cleared the research hurdle…
They also introduce social proof, by saying “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”… which is like a veiled testimonial.
But that’s not all that’s happening here…
Once Someone Is Buying, Get Out Of Their Way
Another piece Khan and the other researchers touch on is how fragile this shopping momentum is. If there is even slight resistance or cause for pause, the momentum can be broken and the buying will stop.
Amazon is brilliant at keeping up the momentum with their one-click purchasing feature.
They also make buying the recommended add-ons equally simple.
Basically, once someone decides to buy, Amazon throws products in their path and gets out of the way.
And this is where the funnel discussion gets really interesting, because with some new, dead-simple technologies, you can insert the same Amazon-style add-ons to your own sales funnels.
Let’s talk about how to get this done.
How To Convince Clients To Spend More Than They Want… And Like It
This is where I get really excited for you, because it is so easy to put upsells, downsells, and one-time-offers in front of your clients after they’ve decided to buy.
It’s like inserting an Amazon-style order bump into your sales process… and do you think that’s effective?
Darn right it is.
The system I use with my clients is Clickfunnels, but there are a number of competing SaaS solutions out there. I’ve found that Clickfunnels is the easiest platform to understand, and works really well with add-ons and order bumps. (Click here for a free trial.)
Scratch Their Next Itch
Once you have a funnel software in place (you do don’t you?), you need to decide what to offer your active buyers.
Here’s where most people slip up…
A lot of sellers make the mistake of offering a product that’s similar to what their customer just purchased.
In our iron skillet example, an average seller would offer another type of skillet: maybe a smaller one, or a specialty pan.
A different example might be selling weight loss programs, and then offering an advanced version of the program. The buyer is already imagining their problem being solved, so offering a product that solves a problem the buyer already took care of is not the way to go.
What most people don’t realize is that the customer just scratched that itch: they had a problem (no iron pan, or a squishy mid-section), and now they’ve solved the problem.
So what should you offer?
Think back on the Amazon example…
Instead of offering different pans, Amazon offered complementary products:
- Cast iron lid
- Silicon handle cover
- Cast iron conditioner
- Cast iron cleaner
- Scrub brushes
- And more…
The trick is to offer the “next right step”.
For our cast iron example, that might be a lid, or a scrub brush, or perhaps a cast iron cookbook.
If you’re selling a series of weight loss videos, perhaps the next right thing is a group of supplements that support joint health, muscle growth, or boost metabolism… all products that enhance the original product and make it more effective.
Types of Add-Ons
I usually create two add-ons in a funnel. I’ve seen three add-ons work well, but I don’t want the funnel to seem too pushy… in my mind that takes too big of a “trust withdrawal” to keep selling after two add-on attempts.
There are three types of add-ons I add to my clients’ funnels:
- Upsells
- Downsells
- One-Time Offers
Upsells
Upsells are products that complement the product your client just bought, but are more expensive than that product. For our iron skillet example, an upsell might be a Cowboy Cooking video series that teaches how to cook amazing meals using your iron skillet.
Downsells
Downsells are products that complement the product your client just bought, but they’re cheaper. For our iron skillet example, this would be silicon handle covers and an iron skillet lid.
One-Time Offers
One-Time Offers are my favorite, because by their nature they include two of the most powerful marketing tools: scarcity and urgency.
One-Time Offers (OTOs) usually offer an amazing deal: something of tremendous value, perhaps at a discount–but don’t misunderstand, this doesn’t have to be a cheap product.
Your OTO may be a $2,500 discount on your $12,000 coaching program.
For me, the OTO might be copywriting added to a funnel-build at no additional charge (which can be a $15,000 discount).
The trick to making OTOs work is that you have to mean it.
You must only offer it once.
If you say it’s a OTO, but introduce the same deal 3 months down the road, you’re training your clients not to take immediate action.
You want your clients to believe what you say.
If you tell them it’s a OTO, then take it away from them… then later they reconsider and decide they want to buy…
Don’t sell it to them.
It’s hard, but the next time they see a OTO from you, they’ll jump on it.
How Will You Use This Strategy?
This is a really simple idea, and I hope you’ll try it in your sales funnels.
If you don’t have a funnel software, click here to get a free trial of Clickfunnels and try this method out. It’s pretty incredible.
If you have a funnel software, take a look at this to see a number of funnels deconstructed and diagrammed.
Remember…
Building “shopping momentum” is the hard part.
Once you’ve created it, throw some add-on buys in the path of your clients and get out of the way.
What add-ons will you insert into your sales funnels?
