Supplement Funnel Upsell Secrets That Health Supplement Marketers Never Share

Supplement funnel secrets are very rarely talked about in depth because they work. And no one want’s other people to steal what’s working for them because then it won’t work as well once it becomes common place in the market. With one exception, health supplement businesses do share what’s working with a select few, behind a $20,000+ closed door mastermind.

Unfortunately, all sales funnel are just one funnel hack away from everyone. It’s unfortunate because when marketers funnel hack, they always miss the strategy and underlying secrets that make a funnel work. Instead they COPY supplement funnels, and like to call it “modeling” to make themselves feel smarter. They ALWAYS get it wrong even if they think they got it right. The upside is that when you get it wrong you can still make money. The downside is you left a ton of money on the table and don’t even know it.

The Buying Frenzy

A common strategy for a supplement funnel are OTO’s or One Time Offer upsells. The very first upsell in your funnel is critical because it creates the buying frenzy state of mind that acts as a cascade creating multiple yes’s to upsells in your supplement funnel.

What’s very common as a first upsell for a health supplement funnel is to sell more of the same as the front end offer, at the same discount or cheaper.

Here is an example of an upsell that’s doing a horrible job (from some funnel hack modeling, I’m sure). I can tell because we work with a lot of clients that have supplement funnels and I see the resulting sales numbers.

Although this upsell looks fine, and you may not see anything wrong with it, this upsell just totally misses the mark when it comes to underlying strategy. And that’s what we’re going to talk about here because health supplement marketers never share that.

First, this upsell is selling 8 more bottles and only shows 3. So there is a mismatch of what you’re buying with what is offered in the image.

Second, the jump to 8 bottles breaks rule number 2 of value based upselling, (which we’ll get into later in this article).

This is a classic example of copying without understanding the strategy which is what we’ll get into in this article.

What this upsell is trying to do is sell value. Which brings us to…

The Value Based Upsell Strategy

As we talked about in the last article, there is no one upsell strategy that always works. But there are several upsell strategies that you can employ in your supplement funnel.

Let’s go deep into one type of upsell strategy- The Value Based Upsell Strategy. By the time you finish reading this article you’ll be an expert in this one upsell strategy, but there are many more.

The value based upsell strategy works very well for health supplements, since you usually need to take more of the supplement down the road. But this strategy can also be used for other consumable products. It even works for a variation of it, which we’ll see later, as long as the offer makes sense. It does not work for an information product however which is an important caveat.

The offer here is all about buying value. You have to offer a deal so good it’s tough to pass up.

We all know those people who will buy anything if it is on sale, and that is the psychology you’re tapping into here for this type of upsell. You’re presenting such great value that it’s hard to pass up. The other key part to make a value based upsell work is not to change the product.

You can do this in two different ways

First you simply offer them more of what they just bought. So if they just bought three bottles of your supplement then offer them more bottles at a better deal than they just got.

The offer on this type of upsell is simply a lower price for more volume. So if they bought 3 bottles of your supplement at $49 per bottle on the front end your first upsell would be- buy 6 more bottles at $39 per bottle. As long as the price per bottle is lower on the upsell than what they just paid per bottle on the front end offer it’s a value based upsell.

There are other ways to sell the value as well. Economically, one additional bottle at 50% off is the same as offering a buy one get one free (BOGO) offer. I can not stress enough how important it is to have a solid handle on your funnel economics. If your numbers aren’t where they need to be, not only on a conversion side but also on a cost of goods side, a BOGO offer could ruin your profitability.

For example offering a Buy 3 Get 3 Free will more than likely increase your upsell conversion rate, but your average ticket may go down if you’re not careful. This is not necessarily a bad thing if your cost per sale can absorb that. But if you’re in a cost per acquisition (CPA) market, you live and die by your average order value.

For anyone that has tried a BOGO offer in an upsell and said it didn’t work, you can bet they didn’t have a solid grasp on their numbers and where they needed to be before they tried it. Which could have saved them a ton of money and time.

Some general rules for structuring this type of value based, more of the same upsell.

RULE #1 – For a value based upsell, where you’re selling more of the same, it should always comes as the first upsell in your one time offers.

RULE #2 – The offer doubles the amount they just bought on the front end offer. So if they just bought 3 bottles on the front end then offer them 6 bottles on the first upsell. But the offer doesn’t have to be so rigid. You can still offer them 6 more bottles as a BOGO, Buy 4 Get 2 free or even Buy 3 Get 3 free. In this way you you’re customizing the upsell offer based on the economic quality of the front end buyer.

And if they just bought 1 bottle on your front end, offer those buyers a Buy 1 Get 1 Free, or just straight up 2 more bottles at a discount.

The other way to leverage a value based selling upsell strategy is to sell them a bigger version of the same thing they just bought. Again this only works well for a physical product rather than an information product because you’ll create the feeling of your front end product being incomplete.

So if you sell them a 2 pound tub of protein mix on your front end, then offer them a 5 pound or a 10 pound tub. This is the supersize method to upselling.

It all sounds very counter intuitive, but just offering more of the same product at a discount on the first upsell does work in certain markets, like health supplements.

However, there are a couple of tricks to turning up the fire and making the value based upsell strategy work even better.

Overcome the feeling like a fool syndrome

First, you want to overcome the feeling like a fool syndrome. Think about it this way, since they just bought 3 bottles of your supplement and now they can buy more with the value based upsell opportunity, the immediate thing you don’t want them to think is… why did I just pay $49 per bottle, when now I can pay $39?

To counter the “feeling like a fool syndrome”, you want to include a believable reason why you’re offering them this discount in your upsell copy.

One way to do this is by building in scarcity on the front end offer. I’ll reserve other more advanced ways to do this for our health supplement clients. But let’s unpack the idea of building in scarcity on the front end offer to sell more on the upsell and get a higher average order value on your supplement funnel with an example.

“The secret to selling more of the same product on an upsell is to do a good job creating scarcity on the front end.”

First of all we never advocate fake scarcity. Customers are smarter than you think and fake scarcity will only erode your trust with the customer.

Built In Scarcity for Marketing

So let’s say your supplement product actually has scarcity built in. There are other ways to do it but this is the best example.

So lets say you have a supplement that ages like a fine wine. The older it gets the higher the potency because of the fermentation process. And because of this, your inventory of the highest strength bottles are limited due to the sell through of mid range potency bottles.

This is built in scarcity. The key is to build this story into the front end sales page so that by the time the buyer lands on your upsell they have been pre-framed with the reason why they are being offered 3 more bottles of your high potency stuff.

The Downside of Continuity Loss In a Supplement Funnel

Of course as with all supplement funnels as mentioned before, your economics have to work. If the cost and or shipping fees on a bigger version make it so that you could make more of a profit by selling them another type of upsell or no upsell at all then that’s the right thing to do for your particular supplement funnel.

So we would be remiss without mentioning…

The downside of the value based upsell is that, for a health supplement company, the buyer who bought 1 and just took 3 more bottles, now has 4 bottles. The front end bottle and the 3 they just bought as an upsell so it will take them about 4 months if not more to consume them before they need more.

That’s not such a bad thing until you realize those buyers now have an aversion to get on continuity because they have enough to last them quite a long time. But of course you’ve got more money out of them up front vs. over 3 or 4 months.

In general, 20% of hyper responsive buyers are not going to be willing to be on subscription continuity right off the bat. So you need a follow up sequence strategy for how to treat your 4 bottle and 8 bottle buyers differently than your continuity buyers and your one time single bottle buyers.

So there you have it, you now know what the top selling supplement companies know about this one particular supplement funnel upsell strategy. Which you could never learn by funnel hacking.

If you’re ready to move the needle in your health supplement funnel, drop us a line. I can help.