The Extenders

With your core well defined, you now have the chance to increase your order values. The purpose of the extenders is to bolster your average order value, and possibly your customer lifetime value. Extenders tap into buyer momentum. Once you’ve crossed the hurdle of getting a stranger to send you money over the internet, you can use these techniques to increase your revenue without having to chase new leads or spend more money on ads.

Element 4: Order bumps

An order bump is a small, low-priced product that a customer tacks onto the purchase before they finish checking out. Think of it like dropping one more item in your cart on the way to the register. It’s the simplest of these three elements and the easiest to say yes to, because their card is already out and they’ve already decided to trust you. The bump just asks one more small question while the door is open, and most of the people who take it would never have gone looking for it on their own.

On a course checkout, a good bump is something small and obviously related to what they’re buying. It could be a printable workbook, a swipe file, a recorded walkthrough. A useful pricing target is around 20% to 30% of the core price, low enough to be an easy yes.

This is just a rule of thumb, though, not a hard and fast rule. I’ve seen a $300 bump work on a $100 workshop, but only because the brand was so strong. The pricing depends on your transformation and positioning. Most of the time an order bump stays cheap enough that a buyer can add it without much thought.

The strategy of the bump is important to remember. You’re not trying to double the sale. You’re catching the slice of buyers who’ll happily grab one more useful thing while their card is already out. On 100 sales, a $30 bump that one in four people purchase is another $750 you didn’t have to earn twice.

There are two things make a bump work:

• It complements what’s already in the cart. Bump something unrelated and you only add friction at the worst possible moment, right before they click buy.

• It’s simple to market. You don’t have the room for a full sales page at checkout, so the value has to be self-evident in a sentence or two. If you’d need to explain it, it’s not a bump.

Element 5: Upsells

An upsell is a product or service you offer right after the purchase. They’ve already said yes, they’re happy, and buyer momentum is in full swing. If you wait a week, then the moment is gone.

This is different from a cross-sell, which offers a related but separate product rather than more of the same result. Both have their place, but the upsell is the more natural move right after a purchase, because the buyer is already pointed in one direction and you’re offering to take them further down it.

The best upsells continue the journey the core started. Anytime someone learns something new, they run into a new set of questions. A new set of problems. Problems they didn’t know they had. A guitar teacher gets a student playing their first songs, and by the end that student is asking how to improvise and how to play with other people. A good upsell meets them right there, at the question the core just created. When your next offer takes people past where they thought the core would leave them, you have a strong offer.

You don’t have to stop at one upsell, but be careful here.

I’ve gone through funnels that had upsell after upsell, and it wears away good will fast. A second upsell earns its place only when it answers a real next question, not because there’s room for one.

Whatever you offer, keep it tight to the promise of the core. The moment an upsell wanders off that promise, it stops feeling like the next step and starts feeling like a pitch.

Element 6: Downsells

This is the element almost everyone leaves empty. A downsell is a smaller product for the buyer who turned down the upsell. That no is rarely “never.” Usually it’s “not that much, not right now.”

A downsell hands that person a smaller yes instead of letting them walk.

Picture how it plays out. Say the upsell was a live intensive for $2,500 and the buyer declined. The downsell is the recording of that same intensive for $525. It’s the same content, but there’s no live seat to hold and no calendar to clear, so the person who flinched at the price, the commitment, or the time can still say yes to something, and you only had to build it once.

There are different ways you can approach a downsell:

• The same offer in a lighter form. The recording in place of the live seat, the self-paced version in place of the cohort. They get the same content for less.

• A smaller piece of the whole. A genuinely scaled-down offer for someone who wasn’t ready for the full commitment. They get less of the thing, at a price that fits.

Either way you’re meeting a real budget or a real hesitation instead of treating their first no as the end of it.

Leave this element empty and you paid full price to win that customer, then collected a fraction of what they were willing to give you.

How the Extenders work together

Bumps add to the yes at checkout, upsells reach for a bigger yes, and downsells rescue the no. All three work on a buyer who has already decided to trust you, which is why none of them cost you new traffic.

Fill all three and the same launch, with the same number of buyers, is suddenly worth much more.

The next group, the Motivators, taps into buyer psychology and goes to work on what moves a buyer to take action.