Why You Should Delay Upsells in Your Product Funnel

Most people immediately try to upsell their customer from one product to another. Here’s why you should consider delaying your upsell for 7-10 days.

In this example, we’ll say someone purchases a $97 item, and they use it: read it, listen to it, whatever. They begin to get results.

In 7 to 10 days later, I can offer them something that is a much higher ticket item than that first, initial item. At this point, there’s a great chance that they’re going to make that purchase. In fact, they’ll invest more with me after 7 to 10 days than they would have invested on the up-sell. What this does is this gives me an opportunity to market a $2k coaching program. Or a $1k online course.

The psychology here is, let’s say, 10 topics in your niche that someone could learn about. And, really, they could learn about all 10 of these topics. Now, they could learn 1 topic from you. One topic from your competition. One topic from their competition. And literally buy products to learn from 10 different people.

Give Your Customer a Chance to Trust

People are not going to like everybody’s teaching style. Some people like my teaching style, some people probably don’t like my teaching style. Now, that’s okay! Because the people that do buy from me. And the people that don’t, it’s okay. They’ll buy from my competition and that’ll work. That’s the right teaching style for them.

Again, someone buys your initial product. Let’s say it’s a $97 2 hr recording. They like it! They got great value! They were really excited about the fact that it was 2 hrs instead of 10 for the exact same content. They learned a lot. They were able to go out and implement it immediately.

7 to 10 days down the road they’re thinking, “I need more information on this topic. I want to do more.” Maybe they’re looking at your competition. NOW you offer them a complete online course that contains advanced information on all 10 topics that they need.

Because of the fact that they’ve just purchased from you, and they like what they’ve gotten from you, they’re very likely to be open to purchasing your much larger program than they would have been willing to trust you to provide on the up-sell.

Because, remember, they were buying a $97 product because that’s what they trusted you, to be able to purchase from you. Until they consume that, their trust hasn’t grown. Sure, there’s some psychological evidence, I mean, there is psychological evidence that shows that somebody’s got their wallet open, and they make 1 purchase, then a percentage of them will make the 2nd purchase. Again, going back to the psychology, I’m really leaning towards you lose more in trust than you gain in total revenue over the life of the customer. What I’m concerned with is that life of the customer.

Offering the Upsell

Now we’ve got this $997 product that we’re going to offer 7-10 days later.

Now, this is going to be the up-sell. Instead of on the download page for your initial product, this is going to happen in your email sequence 7-10 days later.

This online course can be based on the same outline as your initial product – it just needs to be much deeper. Go into more depth. Give more practical information. Give more of a “system” for them to implement. What you’ll do exactly depends on your niche, but people like “step-by-step” and “drop-it-in” systems and information.

Offer this product through your autoresponder sequence and see how that works for you. I highly recommend testing – both the immediate upsell and the delayed upsell. Sometimes you can do a combination – offer directly on the thank-you page. Then have an email sequence that launches a few days later.

See what works for you, but I think you’ll often find that people buy through the upsell sequence after they’ve had a chance to use your product, find that it’s excellent, and build more trust in you.