How I Boosted Sales 24.79% Without Writing A Line Of Copy

I hate all the “hocus pocus” that goes on in the marketing world.

You know exactly what I’m talking about…

All those tricks and tactics that make for a great clickbait blog post—but somehow never seem to pan out when YOU try them.

Like the way double optin magically transforms your subscribers from listless louts into energized, enthused superfans…

Or how multi-step signup approaches that supposedly subvert the laws of space and time and INCREASE your optin rates by making it harder for people to get on your list…

In my book, for these kinds of tactics to be valid and worth teaching, they should work more often than not—without needing a seasoned marketing pro sitting in the cockpit and constantly tweaking the dials and levers.

That’s rarely the case.

I’ve gotten so cynical about this stuff that the more I see a technique hyped with terms like “harnessing deep psychology,” the more inclined I am to write it off.

(I sometimes rate these techniques with a “Cialdini Score,” assigning a few more points every time the marketer invokes ideas from Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence. The higher the Cialdini Score, the more likely it is that the tactic is total B.S.)

Occasionally though, one of these techniques shocks me out of my socks by actually living up to its billing.

The most recent example is 1-click upsells.

The idea here is pretty simple:

After you’ve collected the customer’s payment info, but before they finish checking out, you present them with a one-time-only discount on another product.

And (this is critical) the customer can accept the offer with a single click and their credit card gets charged again.

For a while now I’ve wanted to try these 1-click upsells, even though I was skeptical of the claims.

After all how many people would actually say yes and take the upsell?

2%? 3%?

That meant for every 100 units of product A, you’d make 2-3 extra sales and maybe bump your revenue by a few percentage points.

Big deal.

Fortunately I decided to test this tactic out anyway.

A few weeks back I went through all 5 of the Simple Programmer sales funnels and added not one, but TWO upsells to each product.

So now when you buy our $5 product, you get a $49 offer and a $199 offer.

In several cases the upsell products aren’t even really related to what you’re buying—I’m just offering something else entirely.

And I have to say, I’ve been stunned at how well this is working.

Turns out I was wrong about the percentage of people who would accept the upsell—wrong by multiple orders of magnitude.

In the best of these funnels, 18% of buyers take the first upsell—and of those, 23% take the second offer as well.

That turns a $199 sale into $327.

Most of the other upsells are converting at 5-10% too, much better than I expected.

And they aren’t even close to optimized.

With this kind of thing I like to do a “quick and dirty” test first to see if the tactic produces promising results before I spend a lot of time fine-tuning the machinery.

I literally threw these upsell funnels together in a few hours.

So like I said the products aren’t necessarily even logically connected.

I just checked our numbers for the last 2 weeks.

And the upsells have increased our revenue by 24.79%.

A permanent 25% raise—not bad, eh?

And this is without creating any additional products or making major changes to our autoresponder sequences or sales pages.

My suggestion to you:

Find a way to offer your customers a way to give you more money AFTER they’ve made the decision to buy.

Maybe that’s 1-click upsells like I’m describing here.

Maybe it’s a related add-on to a service you provide.

Do it TODAY.

It’ll make everything else you do in your marketing that much more profitable.