Good morning 🙂

Today, I want to close the loop on all of my blog posts about Average Order Values.

If you’re new to my blog…

Here’s the quick background:

I have a health supplement sales funnel with a business partner…

It’s converting extremely well and doing several hundred front-end sales today.

And so, I’ve been on a quest to increase the AOV (Average Order Value).

To this end…

The first thing I did was to modify the “close” for the sales letter.

And, in case you don’t know…

The close = the end part of the sales letter, where you’re telling the prospect to buy.

In total, these modifications added about 400 words to the copy…

But it’s made a massive difference and increased the AOVs by about $30-$50.

Cool?

Okay, so like I also mentioned yesterday…

We had a large mailer send traffic to our offer a few weeks back…

And, before I updated the close…

Their AOV was $112 over roughly 220 sales.

Not great.

Well, yesterday that same mailer sent to our offer again…

And over 183 sales…

Their AOV was $163.

That’s a $51 improvement to the AOV thanks to the new close.

But, that’s only PART of the story…

Because we tested something else yesterday too.

And it has to do with Upsells and Downsells.

Here’s how the test went:

Version A of the funnel had our original upsell in it…

Which gave the buyer the option to add either 6 or 3 additional bottles to their order at a discount…

But it didn’t have a down-sell.

Version B of the funnel had an Upsell AND a Downsell.

For Version B…

The upsell gave the buyer the option to add 6 more bottles to their order…

And, if they said no…

They saw the down-sell…

Which offered them the chance to get 3 more bottles instead of 6.

Also, for Version B…

The copy and design were based off the template that I’ve used consistently in the past for all of my other offers…

Whereas for Version A…

The copy and design were not based off of my template at all.

Got it?

Okay, so here were the results…

For Version A…

7% took the 6 bottle option…

And 7% took the 3 bottle option…

So a 14% take rate total.

For Version B…

14% took the 6 bottle upsell…

And 18% took the 3 bottle downsell…

So a 32% take rate total.

This was over several hundred sales…

And, just to really point out the obvious…

What the results show is that Variant B increased the total take rate by more than 100%!

Pretty crazy, right?

—

Now, why do I think this happened?

A couple of things…

I think not giving them an option on the first upsell made a big difference…

Because as soon as you introduce optionality into the upsell…

The buyer also considers an unstated third option…

Which is to say no.

It’s classic “decision paralysis”…

Where the consumer can’t decide…

So they become overwhelmed and take no action at all.

In addition to this…

A lot of it also comes down to design…

Because the new up/down follows the same design I’ve used for years.

It’s very clean and well laid out…

And I think that increases clarity for the customer…

Making it easier for them to say “yes.”

And lastly, there’s the copy…

The new upsell and downsell are very short…

Less than 500 words each.

But, the way the copy is written…

It increases urgency and scarcity…

And gives the consumer a really compelling reason to stock up on more bottles now.

The original upsell copy didn’t have that level of urgency…

So the prospect didn’t see a big reason to buy.

—

I’m pretty happy about the performance of the new Up/Down…

But, I know we can get the take rates WAY higher too.

Right now…

I have one of my copy cubs writing a much longer Upsell script…

Then we’re going to give it to our doctor spokesperson…

And record him reading it on camera.

We’ll then test that longer video upsell vs the current control…

And my guess is that this new one will increase the take rate by another 30% or more.

—

Okay, so that’s about it for today.

To be honest, I was actually going to write about something entirely different…

But this data is just so damn interesting…

And I had to share it with you.

– SPG

P.S. This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list using this link.