Hello, welcome to Episode 156 of the Marketing for Owners Podcast with me, Jon Butt. The place where small business owners, and medium size business owners, and large business owners, and people in marketing teams can learn one simple tip every day of the week to improve sales. It makes life easier.
Today we are going to talk about sales bundling. A while ago, I mentioned that there are only three ways to increase your sales. There really are, only three. One is to increase the price. This is to increase the type to sales value, or revenue by the way.
One is to increase the number of customers. Another way is to increase the frequency that customers buy from you; repeat orders, etc. And the other way is to increase the average amount they spend each time they buy. Now that is your average sales value, your basket value, whatever you want to call it and that’s what we are looking at today.
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The way to increase that is to bundle product. I’ll give you examples: bundles are all around you and you don’t even notice. For example in the UK I use BT, British Telecom for my internet but I also pay them extra to have some TV systems and sports stuff come through it. It’s a bundle.
When you buy a mobile phone with a package they use to bundle in texts and things like that, a cell phone, of course it changes all the time, but they would bundle in amounts of calls, amounts of texts; they would include calls to so and so, long distance numbers that kind of thing. That is a bundle.
Have you ever bought a hamper, a basket, a basket of wine or a basket of food, or flowers, or fruit to send to someone. You don’t order them one at a time. You get the bundle, and you would get the bundle that is $30, or $50, or a $100.
Have you ever take in time to actually add up the value of the individual pieces of fruit in there? Exactly, it is bundled together. You buy them, you buy extra you think, “Yeah, I won’t have the 50, I’ll have the $80.” Is that another $30 of value? Who knows but you spend extra.
And when we sell fire extinguishers we encourage people to buy a little safety sign to put above the fire extinguisher. Now these safety signs are required but I can guarantee when we tested it and left…and mentioned people that you should by a sign, “Go to this page” the percentage that did that was tiny.
When we added it in for an increased price, the percentage that took it up was over 90 percent. That’s a simple bundle. Really, really simple.
Another example is the supermarket with “Buy one get one free.” “Buy X for £2, or get three for £5.” They are encouraging you to buy more, spend more, and the funny thing with supermarkets of course, they get in trouble because we have never thrown away so much food, fresh food as now because we are buying these, “Buy one get one free”, we don’t actually need it.
But we can’t resist. This applies to your business. Think about it, when was the last time you bought a printer ribbon for your printer and you buy one, or buy two, or buy three. Generally, the price for buying a few extra is less than buying them all individually.
If you’re clever like Amazon, Amazon has a suggested, “Frequently bought together”, and it puts three items and it adds them up. Those prices are exactly the same as if you buy them individually most people think they are getting a discount for getting the three together. Oh no you don’t.
We offer office bundles of types of fire extinguishers, a couple of fire extinguishers, a couple of signs, a first aid kit, a stand to put them on, and we will bundle it together. I think it cost a couple of quid less than buying them all individually, but people certainly want the ease.
So this will apply to you and your business as well. It will raise your sales. It’s clever. I bet you there is a ton of ways you can do it.
Chris Guillebeau bundled his books together and made a killing in sales. So he has, say for instance you can buy his book for, I’m just making this up $30. You could by a book and the videos that go with it, as a bonus, for say $50, and you can buy the book, the videos and an instant download version of the book for $60.
Now if you think about it the instant download is just the PDF version of the one you’ve bought. You think, “Why do you?” However, when he sold just the book people bought just the book at $30; when he gave three options he found that the vast majority of people actually took the top option and a lot of them took the middle option and a bunch took the smaller one and his sales, if I remember rightly, went up by something like two and a half.
Nathan Barry also tried this experiment with his purchase based on Chris’s information and the same happened for him and he will only ever sell in that way.
There you go so bundle your products. There’s going to be a way, no matter what you sell, or no matter what you service, there’s some way you can offer something else that makes them spend a bit more and makes you more money.
Monday Book Recommendation
Today is a Monday. It’s time for the book of the week and today this is a doozey, as John Lee Dumas would say. It is ‘Inbound Marketing’ from Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.
These are the guys who own HubSpot who’s the founders and owners of HubSpot. They are brilliant. They practice what they preach. Inbound marketing is content marketing but the HubSpot term is inbound.
They have conference called inbound. Quite simply normal marketing, as we tell you at Marketing for Owners, ’cause this is the heartland, this is what we preach. Normal marketing is where it’s interruption, interruption, interruption.
Imagine if half way through this podcast I say, “But now let’s just take the time to listen to our sponsors.” What do you do? You lean forward and press the skip button, skip forward because I’ve interrupted you because that’s when you…if I said, “Don’t worry we’ll have sponsor’s messages at the end”, would you listen?
No. We have to interrupt you to make you listen. By the way you notice I don’t have sponsors because they’re annoying.
Inbound if you wanted to ask me, “Oh, do you recommend any ex-services that is inbound?” You ask for the information so by putting out great information you find it, you find the content and then you ask to be sold.
We don’t have to interrupt it. It’s a fantastic book ’cause it goes through all the aspects, everything we teach because these guys are geniuses. You don’t have to go and order HubSpot don’t you worry. Brilliant book, Inbound Marketing. Highly recommended.
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What could you bundle to sell together?
