Once the prospect has turned into a customer and purchased your main product offer, he/she has entered your sales funnel.
This means that you should be offering the customer an opportunity to “upgrade” his/her order. This is done through a value-enhancing upsell that is related to the main product offer he/she just ordered.
The upsell can be an enhanced version that offers more information if the main product offer was an ebook/audio course/video course or more features if the main product offer was a software program, etc.
The upsell can also be a related offer that provides additional value to the main product offer. For instance, perhaps your main product offer was a traffic generation course; your upsell could be an email marketing course designed to improve the conversion rates of the traffic you get to your site via the main product offer.
The key with any upsell is to provide additional value to the main product offer the customer just purchased.
The upsell should NOT be a mandatory purchase in order for the main product offer to provide the value it was promised to deliver; that would not only be unethical, but it will damage your reputation because many consumers will look upon that as a dirty marketing tactic because you weren’t forthcoming in what your main product offer needed in order to provide what you said it would.
Thus, never make the OTOs or upsells mandatory to purchase; the main product offer must provide the value it was intended to provide by itself.
All upsells and downsells must be optional, never mandatory.
If the relevant upsell is valuable and enticing enough to the customer (taking into account value and price), he/she will likely purchase it, thus increasing the amount of profit you gain from this customer.
Once he/she has purchased the upsell, he/she can be taken to the download page to access both the main product offer and the upsell or he/she can be taken to another valuable upsell offer related to the main product offer.
If the customer decides to decline the upsell offer, you can have the funnel take him/her to the download page for the main product offer, you can have the customer go to another upsell offer for him/her to consider, or you can have the customer go to a modified version of the upsell he/she just rejected, usually for a lower price.
This modified version of the upsell is normally referred to as a “downsell,” partly because the price is lower, and oftentimes, the downsell has one or more elements missing from it that were in the corresponding upsell.
Note that a downsell can be the exact same upsell for a lower price, although this is rarely the case.
The reason why the downsell is presented immediately after the upsell that was rejected is because, research shows that many consumers don’t want to miss out on an offer entirely, so if they get a second chance to pick up the same or similar offer for a lower price, they will often jump at the chance to do so.
This is why Internet marketers will often include corresponding downsells with their upsells, so they have a greater chance of earning conversions and more money from their sales funnels.
Most Internet marketers will present a series of upsells and downsells throughout their sales funnels, all related to the main product offer and enhancing its value in some way. Some buyers of the main product offer will not purchase any upsells or downsells, others will purchase one or more upsells, and others will purchase one or more downsells.
Having a combination of upsells and downsells in your sales funnels will increase the chances for conversions and additional profits, and as it has been said before, most Internet marketers make the bulk of their profits on the back-end of the funnel (i.e. upsells and downsells), not from the front-end of the funnel (i.e. main product offer).
