“Would you like fries with that?”
Back in the late 80s that was the question that Sarah was trained to ask every customer who went through her line at McDonald’s®.
The burger that was the initial order had very slim margins. But if she could get people to order french fries which had much bigger profit margins, then the restaurant suddenly got a whole bunch more profitable.
So many businesses today run on the first sale. They are constantly churning through new customers and runing after the next sale.
But that usually isn’t where the money is.
The money is almost always in the second item, repeat customer, or higher end service.
On the Internet, however, this has been notoriously hard to do.
Setting up systems where you can get a second sale after the first one, or where you can get multiple sales for the same customer is tougher than in the physical world sometimes.
Usually, marketers use things like bumps, upsells, and downsells – but the technology to achieve this has traditionally been incredibly expensive and out of reach for brand-new startups.
Recently though, that’s all changed.
What we’ve seen develop recently is a bunch of “cart” software.
With cart software – my favorite is Thrive Cart – you can easily set up the same kind of “funnels” that you would see in brick-and-mortar stores, and that sophisticated marketers use.
And most of these interfaces are easy enough for tech newbies.
Let’s check out what a good cart software can do, and how it can help your business thrive.
1. Let’s do the bump.
This is one of my favorite (and easiest to use) tools in my cart toolbox. An order bump is a form that you put on your cart page that suggests another product for sale.
You can offer nearly anything you want on an order bump, as long as it’s fairly closely related to the original product. We’ve offered a $497 bump on a $197 product. But some people offer a “double your order for a discount” or a lower end item to accompany what they just bought.
And get this… the “take rate” for the bump? Usually between 30% to 60%. That’s AMAZING.
It’s a super simple way to get way more money out of any offer you are running. Here is an example of one of our order bumps:
2. Would you like fries with that?
This is a classic McDonald’s tactic. It requires a cart with something called a “one click upsell”. This means that you can make another offer after they put in their credit card number, and all they have to do is click one button to take the offer. They don’t have to enter the card number again.
Most good carts will offer this option – including my favorite – Thrive Cart.
A good upsell will be directly related to the product on offer. It could be the same product (this often works for physical products really well), or an upgrade to something like coaching or a recurring revenue piece.
There are many people who do a low-end subscription model here. They get tons of people in at $5 or $9 dollars a month for a subscription service – like a membership or newsletter.
$5 or $9 dollars month may seem like peanuts, but people don’t cancel these small subscriptions very often – and if you can run volume then that money can really add up quickly.
3. How giveaways can make you money.
If people don’t take your upsell, that’s OK.
You can often bribe them with a free gift to take what you have to offer.
Cosmetic counters do this all the time – it’s called a gift with purchase.
They offer a sample kit worth $75 or $100 with the purchase of $50 bottle of perfume.
This works in cosmetics really well, because the margins are super high. And they’re betting that if you try the product once, that you will come back and get more.
Downsells can work this way too. If the customer can decline an upsell offer, then you can offer them a bonus to take it.
They only see this bonus offer if they take don’t take the upsell offer in the first place, and often the bonus can be a digital product that they can instantly download and has minimal cost to you.
4. The automated secret to recurring revenue.
One of my favorite features of a good cart software is how they integrate with different email service providers.
They take every lead and sale I get and put on a specific list that I specify in my email provider.
For this combination, I particularly like ThriveCart combined with AWeber. They work together seamlessly.
Then I can set up my email list to automatically send a follow-up sequence and get my new customers enrolled in one of our other programs. This can often boost my revenue by up to 15%.
And once it’s set up I just had to check the analytics once in awhile and otherwise leave it alone to do its thing.
5. Your business’s secret super-power.
Every business has a secret superpower. Even if you don’t know it yet.
And that is developing a recurring revenue stream.
There is no business in the world that can’t do this. Recurring revenue is the golden ticket when it comes to business.
It evens everything else out.
And it makes everything work much better.
If your sales are down on the front end for some reason, and you’ve set up recurring revenue, then you know that you still have money coming in that month.
ThriveCart is particularly great at recurring revenue offers and makes them super easy to set up.
Make sure you use the power of the second, third, and fourth sales to boost the productivity and profitability of your business. If your business relies on single sales – from single customers, without encouraging the repeat orders and recurring revenue, then you’ll always be running on a treadmill trying to catch that next sale.
By using these methods you can be much more strategic in business, and have a much higher success rate.