Selling your products and services via ConvertKit
As a feature of ConvertKit’s subscription plans (free and premium), you can sell your products and services via their ‘Commerce‘ platform.
It’s simple to set up, just clicking along as ConvertKit hooks up your ConvertKit account to your bank account, via the Stripe payment merchant.
Once you have your accounts hooked up, you’re good to go – start creating your offerings.
I created a separate article that takes you through the steps of creating products, which you access below; in this article, I’ll be focusing on how you can incentivise your subscribers (and social audiences), using ‘bump’ sales (‘Upsells’) and discounts.
Check out this article to see how you can create your products to sell and to check if ‘Commerce’ is available in your region.
|
What’s a ‘bump’ sale?
You’ve probably been offered one; you know when you get to that point in the checkout process and you get asked something like… “Would you like to add A4 paper to your order?“, having just added printer cartridges to your basket.
Well, that’s what I’m referring to when I say “bump sale”.
Using ConvertKit’s vernacular, these are known as ‘Upsells‘ and can be helpful to increase the average transaction value when your clients are buying from your range of ‘Products‘ (this is what your products and services are called in ConvertKit)
An example in my business is when someone is buying one of my digital courses, I’ll offer them an opportunity to book a 1-hour Zoom Strategy call with me.
I’ll most commonly offer this service at a discounted rate since they are buying my course too.
A lot of people find this helpful as it helps to frame what they’re about to do and I can give them bespoke advice and recommendations, based on what they share about their particular business and the challenges they have.
To add an ‘Upsell’ to our Product, we click ‘Edit’ on the Product we are selling to begin with, and then click on the ‘Settings’ button inside that Product;
Inside the ‘Settings‘ option, select the ‘Upsells‘ link;
From the ‘Product‘ drop-down menu, select the product that will become your ‘Upsell‘ (or ‘bump’) sale – in the example above, it’s my “ConvertKit: 60-minute accelerator session” product.
You can then apply a discount if you want, either as a fixed amount (e.g. £50) or as a percentage of the regular price (e.g. 40%). ConvertKit will calculate the discounted price for the client.
Remember to click the ‘Save‘ button here, otherwise, the upsell will be discarded.
Displaying your ‘upsell’ product
Once you have configured your ‘upsell’ product, inside your core product that the client is already buying, it will appear as an optional product on the checkout page, under the heading of ‘Add to your order‘, as you can see in the example below;
You can see in this example, that the ‘upsell’ product has been discounted by 40%, down to £118.20 (from £197) and is available to be added to the purchase by clicking on the ‘+‘ icon. Before being added, the purchase button shows “£97”, the price of the original product.
Once the ‘upsell’ product is added to the purchase (i.e. the ‘+’ icon is clicked and becomes an ‘x’ icon), the overall price increases to include the upsell product, as shown below;
After clicking the ‘+’ icon, the upsell product is added to the basket and the purchase button changes to include the additional cost of the upsell product – in this example, “£215.20”.
Currently, only standard products can be added as upsells (up to two). It’s not currently possible to use recurring ‘subscription‘ products as ‘Upsell’ products.
Applying a discount
Discounts can be great ways to incentivise subscribers to buy your products, as long as they don’t become expected. If you use them all the time, nobody will ever pay your regular price.
You can apply discounts to your regular Products, and your ‘Upsell’* products, but just be aware that you cannot combine discounts. Let me explain what I mean, and why this is the case…
*Side note, just in case I’m confusing you – a ‘Product’ is a product, is a product. There is no separate entity called an ‘Upsell’ Product, however, any ‘Product’ can be used as an ‘Upsell’ Product.
Discounting an individual Product
If you would like to offer a discount on one of your ‘Products’, you can simply enter the discount amount when editing the Product. The form below shows a discount of 50% being applied, and available to be used an infinite number of times (see the infinity symbol ‘∞’ in the text box entitled ‘Limit’).
If you want to limit the number of sales (e.g. first 10 clients) in which the discount can be used, simply add the maximum number to the ‘Limit’ field.
To share the Product with your subscribers and social audiences, you need to click on the ‘Publish‘ button (top-right corner of the Product page) and then copy the unique URL that’s created.
The URL that gets created by default will NOT include the discount, you must select the radio button of the corresponding discount code so that ConvertKit can create a unique URL for each discount code you create (you can create a maximum of 7 discount codes per Product).
Once you’ve copied the unique URL, you can use it to place under a button, linked text, or even a menu option. You can tell which URLs have a discount code applied as it’ll be appended by characters similar to this; “?promo=EASTER50“.
Embedding your Product
If you wish, you can use the code snippet provided by ConvertKit to embed a button on your website – when embedded, it will look like the button shown in the image below.
Pro tip: If you want to modify the look and feel of the button, you can edit the HTML code that ConvertKit creates for you. For example, where it says ‘Buy my product‘, you can easily type different text if you like. And if you’re feeling adventurous, you can even change the background colour of the button and the text colour etc.
Discounting a ‘Product’ that you’re using as an ‘Upsell’
When you discount a ‘Product’ that you’re using as an ‘Upsell’ Product, you can only add a single discount rate (unlike the up-to-7-discount options you get with a regular Product) and can be either a monetary amount or a percentage of the regular price.
Any discount you apply to a Product when it’s being used as an ‘Upsell’ Product does NOT apply to the main Product itself, so no need to worry that your main Products are being discounted inadvertently.
Summary
Check to see if ConvertKit’s Commerce platform is available in your region to sell your products and services, and get your bank account connected to your ConvertKit account.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll have opened the doors to unlimited possibilities for creating, selling, and delivering what you create and sell to your subscribers.
Create your first Product, set up a 100% discount code for yourself, and then buy it and experience what your clients will get whenever they buy your ‘Product’.
If you haven’t yet joined ConvertKit, here’s the link to get your free account, including a 14-day free trial of all premium features: convertkit.com
