How to Upsell Courses and Memberships with the Upsell Plugin

In this LMScast episode, Eric Davis gives a concise rundown of sales funnels and explains how WordPress and LifterLMS customers can maximize their earnings by using the Upsell Plugin.

The Upsell Plugin improves this process by allowing firms to build various sales routes while strategically increasing average order value. Although cross-selling is not the plugin’s main purpose, Eric recognizes it as related product offers even if the plugin’s main focus is upselling.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Eric Davis. You can find them over at upsell plugin. That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find upsell plugin on the Lifter LMS add ons page. Today we’re going to talk about upselling sales funnels, how to do it in WordPress and dive into the magic that is upsell plugin.

But first welcome to the show, Eric. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Chris. Yeah, it’s great to be here and chat with another person. Who’s into marketing and helping people make more money and stuff. Absolutely. Let’s lay the ground floor for people who may be unfamiliar with sales funnels, upsells, downsells, give us a high level education of, key concepts of a sales funnel.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. Maybe I overthink it, but it’s pretty straightforward nowadays. Essentially you have somebody that’s coming to your website. You’ve gained their trust already for getting them to your site and they’re ready to purchase something from you. Specifically, let’s say a course via LifterLMS.

So now that you have them strategically and they’re engaged in your website. You’re going to want to sell them more. And there’s no better way to sell more to somebody while they’re actively checking out on your website. So What the upsell plugin allows you to do is while they’re checking out. You can take them to a separate page after they purchased that initial product and offer them an additional, course product. Whatever it is that might, help that person achieve whatever results they’re trying to accomplish.

When it comes to sales funnels, again it’s a, it’s a term that’s became more hot over the past five or so years. There’s the order bumps, the upsells, the downsells, that stuff. So somebody is going to land on your checkout page. You have some order bumps and the order bumps.

What I like to describe order bumps as is if you’re going to your grocery store and you’re checking out, there’s the gum, the men’s, that kind of stuff. So it’s like an impulse buy. You want to grab that piece of gum, add it to your cart. You’re increasing that average order value, that order value of that customer.

After they check out, you essentially send them to another page where we call it an upsell offering them another, lifter LMS course. Do you want to add this to your order? Yes or no. If they say yes, you just upsell them on a new offer. And if they say no, you essentially can take them to a downsell.

Your sales funnels with the upsell plugin can have as many. Pieces as it wants, there’s no limitations, but that’s a high level approach of a sales funnel. Hopefully it made sense.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. One where I get confused and maybe you can shed some light is I get upsell, I get downsell, but what is a cross sell?

Eric Davis: A cross sell is more of so it all goes hand to hand, at least in my mind, the way I think about it. But a cross sell is essentially, offering them a product that’s similar already to what they’re checking out for. But when it comes to upsell plugin, we don’t really offer cross sells typically with that.

It’s more of, taking them through a strategic checkout path. A cross sell from my experience at least is more of, something that’s popping up during that process of the checkout and selling them on another product or service.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s look at some like Lifter LMS examples.

And by the way, we’re going to be doing, this is a podcast episode. So you’re watching us talk, or you’re most likely listening in your earbuds. But we are going to actually do a video demo that you’ll find on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. It’s going to be a separate video. So we’re going to be talking about ideas and concepts here. But if you’d like to see this in action Eric’s going to do a demo and that’ll be on our YouTube channel as a standalone video.

Look out for that, but just to go over some other ideas, just to get the gears turning on how you could use upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. One example is you may like it. Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s say the first upsell is a course. Maybe you have an ebook that you’re selling, but then you want to be like.

In the checkout, like upsell from that, getting the ebook to also get a course or, and just, I’m just going to keep going up the chain. If you’re selling a course maybe you have a membership that includes private coaching or group coaching. So great. You’ve got the a hundred dollar course. Do you want the coaching for a hundred dollars a month or whatever it is?

And then you can upsell that way. Downselling is also fun. Let’s say let’s say you have an expensive membership to your academy of courses that has, five, 10, 20, a hundred courses in it. And somebody. It’s too much, It’s not right. It’s overwhelming for them. They could downsell into just a single like introductory course.

That’s much cheaper. So just throwing out a couple of ways to think about this.

Eric Davis: Absolutely. And if I can add on to that a little bit, cause again, as you mentioned it’ll make more sense when they see it in action. But one of the reasons I developed the upsell plugin as well. I’m not trying to bash WooCommerce for example, or anything, WooCommerce is an amazing tool. I use it for some of my own personal projects, But when it comes to, let’s use Lifter LMS again, as an example, and it comes to selling courses and membership, I’m a big believer in helping your customer obtain whatever results they’re looking for.

So when it comes like WooCommerce, for example, and letting them pick and choose what courses they want to add to their cart, to me, you’re doing a disservice to your customer. Because by overwhelming them and bombarding them with so many courses, they’re probably going to get too sidetracked and too much, information coming in overload that they’re not going to be able to reach whatever they’re trying to achieve.

So that’s why with the upsell plugin, it’s not like a basket. It’s not, let me, here’s my cart. Let me choose these six.

It might sound great. It might sound like to you as the core seller, the lifted Lifter LMS website owner. Hey, I just sold six courses. It might sound great, but you’re probably going to lose in the long run because by having them add those six courses to your card and checking out, they’re probably never going to really reach what they’re trying to achieve.

So with the upsell plugin, you’re taking them through a strategic path. I want to, I want to learn how to fix an engine on a car. Okay. I’m going to add that course to my checkout. Okay. I just checked out. I now have the course and I’m ready to start learning how to fix engines.

What goes along with that? Not necessarily how to fat fix basketball hoops, but it would probably make more sense on. How to fix, how to change a tire on a car. Okay. That makes sense. Let me, I want to add that to my order. So ultimately you’re helping them probably figure out how to, become a better mechanic or something. Or how to fix cars or how to, more everything’s related to that car.

And then they’re going to become, once you help them achieve that result on becoming a better mechanic and learning how to fix cars. They’re probably going to now become a lifetime customer of yours. So instead of letting them choose how all these different courses on things to do, and maybe that was a poor example, but ultimately what I’m trying to say is if you can take them through a strategic sales funnel on the course that you know, make most sense for them to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve.

You’re probably going to end up, having a customer for lifetime. And that lifetime value is going to be more than if they just came to your site one time, purchased six courses, added them all to your cart, the cart, and then they never really get any with those. Again, hopefully that made sense, but that’s the process of, the upselling and downselling, you can ultimately do whatever you want with the upsell plugin.

But what I strongly suggest is not just going to upsell them on something just to make more money. You’re going to upsell them and offer them a course that makes sense with what they just purchased from you to help them achieve the results they want to achieve. And now they’re going to be like, I’m, they’re going to love you for helping them achieve what they’re trying to accomplish.

And they’re going to be. A lifetime customer.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Just to expand on what you’re saying there. I think Russell Brunson over at ClickFunnels did a really good job with instilling this idea to the internet marketing world that you don’t need a website, you need a sales funnel.

So it’s. If you’re new to these concepts like what Eric is talking about, having a guided experience. Imagine if you could not put a menu on the top of your website or even footer links and the experience that you’re crafting is they go from one page to the next page and they have decisions they can make Oh, I don’t want this right now, then we’re in a downsell.

Oh, I do want this right now. We’re in an upsell. It’s an extreme example to not have a menu on your website. And literally. The entire thing is landing pages that kind of have a decision tree in them, but that’s the way to think about it and understand it. For example, if you do a ad, you want to send people to a landing page with a specific offer or call to action, not necessarily give people a, the menu and all these places they can go.

You’re trying to do a specific sales funnel that starts from an ad or another call to action from, let’s say a YouTube video or any, anything. Okay. So thinking about that flow and guiding the user through your offer and giving them decisions is a really smart way to think about that.

Let’s talk technically a little bit like, so in the example we’re talking about, typically upselling happens from like a landing page. First there’s an offer on a landing page. There’s typically a call to action button. It’s somewhat good practice to have one call to action so that users don’t get or visitors don’t get decision fatigue.

But where talk about the technicality of upsell plugin in terms of. Handling the checkout, landing pages, WordPress. What are the pieces that come together to make it possible? So

Eric Davis: the beauty in my mind, at least the beauty of upsell plugin is we didn’t want to take over any of the page builders or the websites or the course, lifter LMS.

Everybody has a specialty and they do an amazing job. I would be lying if I said, Hey, I’m going to create a page builder. That’s better than Elementor or better than Divi. I’d be lying about that. But So ultimately, the way that click with the way that upsell plugin works is we integrate directly with everything.

So it’s really just links and short codes. So you can just install upsell plug on your site and use everything you pretty much already have set up. All you have to do is take a short code for the checkout form, plug that into your checkout page that you’ve already designed. And now the checkout form would be populated.

And then when somebody purchases course a, let’s say we created a product inside of upsell plugin called course a, We say, where should they be redirected to? After they purchased this, we can redirect them to a sales page that we created. That is now doing the one click upsell functionality of subplugin with course B.

So when it comes to the integration process with WordPress and everything, Lifter LMS we’re not redesigning anything, essentially. We’re working with whatever you already have in place and allowing you to use, all the amazing tools and features that those other tools already have.

Chris Badgett: And we’ll go into this in in a video, but lift their LMS just technically, if you’re thinking about how do I connect all this together as an example, courses and memberships have an option to have a. A different sales page for your course than the default lifter page. So you have two options.

You could have a custom page or you can embed that checkout with shortcode right where Eric is talking about. And of course you could link, you could have a button somewhere on your site that, or a menu link that goes into the flow that you want people to go into for upselling.

Eric Davis: And then the way that the upsell plugin, and like you’re saying exactly correct, we can even take it one step further because the way that.

Our integration works and it’ll make more sense. Once we do the screen sharing, people see this, but you create a product inside the upsell plugin. That’s again, let’s just call it course a and inside of when you’re creating that plugin, when you’re creating that product, there’s an integration tabs with Lifter LMS that you just simply enable it.

And you say, when somebody purchases this and product enroll them into course a and Lifter LMS. So you can create a sales page however you want and then that checkout call to action Button when they click on it would take them to the checkout form And that checkout form when they go through that process will automatically add them Into a course a on lifter lms because you have the product attached to the course inside of lifter lms

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Let’s talk a little bit about integrations so You have a lot of integrations. Of course you integrate with Lifter LMS, but you also have, for example, MailChimp and active campaign. So how did the email marketing tools like that integrate with upsell plugin? Awesome.

Eric Davis: Yep. So again pretty basic, at least to me, maybe I look at it too much.

But you essentially, add the API keys from MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, for example. And then what we allow you to do is just like we, just like I explained with Lifter LMS, if they purchase a specific product, you can tag them and, or add them to a specific list inside of your email marketing service.

Awesome. So again, let’s work with course a, if a person, if a customer purchases, of course, a, you can add them to course a list inside of MailChimp and tag them course a as well. So now when they make that purchase, they automatically get added to MailChimp. And then again, that’s huge because if we go back, I’m talking about, this customer becoming a lifetime customer of yours, you now know inside of your email marketing system what they purchased.

So you can follow up with them appropriately if they were on your marketing campaign. And now they purchased for say, you can set up an automation now inside of active campaign, MailChimp, all the other ones, we want to remove them from our marketing campaign. We want to add them to our, automation sequence for when somebody purchases a course a, so we can follow up with them appropriately.

We allow you to add your customer to a specific list or tag. With, most of the main email marketing solutions. So you can follow up with them using their powerful automation tools. And we also have a Zapier app as well. So if the email service you’re not using, isn’t we don’t have a direct integration with, we have a Zapier app that will allow you to connect with, pretty much any of the main guys.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And this is a good point to clarify on as upsell plugin creates its own checkout and has its own integration with Stripe and PayPal,

Eric Davis: correct?

Chris Badgett: You’re going to do this. You need to connect to your Stripe and PayPal, even though Lifter has those things. If you’re going to go down this route, it’s totally fine to use the upsell plugins, PayPal and Stripe integration, which is essentially the same thing as the Lifter one, and I’m really glad you created this because Lifter LMS does not have.

These kind of sales funnel like tools. So I’m really happy that you’ve done this. I also noticed affiliate WP on your integrations. That’s popular with lifter LMS users. What tell us more about how that works?

Eric Davis: Yep. So just as most website owners know, having an affiliate program can be extremely powerful.

It just helps you have users drive essentially traffic and sales to your site. So we have an integration, we have a direct integration with two. Affiliate programs. One is or affiliate tools. I should say is affiliate WP, which is a wordpress plug in. And then another one called I dev affiliate.

I think I dev affiliate has a direct integration with lifter LMS as well. But I did affiliate is not a wordpress plug in. It’s standalone solution. But it’s really powerful. And I like it a lot. I personally use I personally use IDevAffiliate, but AffiliateWP is another really good one.

And it’s pretty basic how it works. Again, it’s, just if the customer, you create your affiliate program using AffiliateWP, your customers, clients, whoever you’re influencers, whoever you’re trying to attract becomes an affiliate of yours. They now have their referral links, the referral codes, when they send the traffic to the website, if that customer checks out and purchases a product via upsell plugin, that affiliate will generate the commission based on the commission settings that you have set up inside of affiliate WP.

So again, going back to the page builders and things like that on how we work, we’re not trying to, sometimes people are like, you don’t have an affiliate program. And I, my answer is we don’t have affiliate program because we’re focusing on creating a checkout solution that’s going to convert for you.

That’s going to optimize for you. We can spend our time and try to figure out how to convert an affiliate or create an affiliate program, but affiliate WP does an amazing job. That’s why we would rather integrate with tools like affiliate WP, Lifter, ML, LMS, that does an amazing job. Instead of saying, Hey, I want to create, I own LMS.

I don’t. I would rather say use lifter LMS and use upsell plugin. So it’s the same process with the affiliate program. You use affiliate WP use the idea of affiliate because their programs are amazing. And then use upsell plugin as the checkout process.

Chris Badgett: Nice. I also see you have WP fusion, which is very popular in the lifter community.

Could you step through how that works with upsell plugin?

Eric Davis: Absolutely. So they have an integration on their end and then we actually have a direct integration on ours as well, but it works pretty much the same way as like the email marketing where, you know, that’s, I know WP fusion can be used as a membership tool and things like that, but it all ties back to your email marketing service system.

So it’s essentially the process works the same way where. You can add when it’s all on a per product basis. So if you need to do something with, WP fusion where, when somebody purchases Corsair, you want to enroll them into, tag them on Corsair inside of your affiliate program, or I’m sorry, inside of your email marketing system through WP fusion, you can do so again, it’s, I keep using the word basic. Maybe it’s not basic. Cause I’m just looking at it all the time. But that’s essentially how it works. Everything is like on a per product basis. So you can be extreme, so you can be strategic about your followups and everything like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I just want to throw a pro tip out there. So if you’re thinking about using the upsell plugin, and let’s say you already have, you’re using Lifter LMS as e commerce or the Lifter LMS WooCommerce integration. And you’ve got like a catalog of courses, but you’re trying to get more sales.

You’re trying to experiment with, let’s say, paid ads like Facebook ads or Google ads. And for that, it’s particularly helpful to use more of a sales funnel flow. You’re getting the traffic, you’re paying for traffic. You want a specific landing page. You want to upsell down and downsell that traffic and give them that more sales funnel, like experience that you can control, but also add more clarity, value, and ease to the visitor.

That’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. So you don’t necessarily have to like re engineer if you’re already moving, you don’t have to re engineer how your site currently works, but you can actually just add more value by. Doing some ads and doing some upsells. And it doesn’t even have to be ads.

You could be experimenting with, let’s say a strategic partnership with some, somebody else’s podcast or YouTube channel. And you want a specific flow for people coming from the call to action from there, that’s a great way to get started with the upsell plugin. Tell us the story, Eric. How did this all start for you?

Why why create this? Or how did I know people get fastened? There’s a fascination here because like you said, you’re super focused on just the upsell. Optimized checkout flow. How did that start in your story?

Eric Davis: So my story is, as you already mentioned click funnels, for example. So I’ve been developing websites for the past, probably about 10 years now.

And. About five years ago or so when ClickFunnels was really, making their main push, maybe it’s been more than five years now, my clients would come to me and say, Hey, I want to build a sales funnel. I said, awesome. That sounds great. Let’s create a sales funnel. Just like you, Chris, I’m assuming, I love WordPress and I like to stay inside the WordPress ecosystem just cause it’s open source.

If you want to. Do something as long as you, or, you can have a team around you that knows how to accomplish it and create it. You can create it with inside of WordPress. So when my customer, when my clients would come to me and say, Hey, can you help me create a sales funnel at that time?

I would say we can, but we either have to sign up for click funnels or there’s the solutions, with WooCommerce and if you’re selling courses and membership, it’s just. In my opinion, too much. It’s just, we have to buy another six or seven extensions, subscription extensions, things like that. In the beginning, I was helping them with those different, channels, but then, being the WordPress level or lover, I was like, there, I feel like there’s just this missing piece in the WordPress ecosystem for creating and being able to easily, I should say, create a sales funnel.

So that’s why for the past five years, I’ve been spending, my time, my energy, my money on developing the upsell plugin, continuing to maintain it because everything essentially is built into the upsell plugin. So again, you don’t need WooCommerce. It integrates directly with Stripe or PayPal and everything, subscriptions, you don’t have to get another extension through us.

It’s, it’s all right there. It may, to be honest, maybe it’s a poor business decision, having, I should be upselling people and buying more and more modules and things like that. But currently the way that, and for the past five years, the way we’ve been selling the upsell plugin is, everything is built into it.

Yeah. Again, I just thought that there was, there needed, I just thought there was a missing piece inside of the WordPress ecosystem for somebody that wanted to quickly and easily create a sales funnel. So that’s why, ultimately I’ve been. Developing and maintaining the upsell plugin.

Chris Badgett: And I just want to mention too I just went over to the click funnels pricing page and you’re looking at spending about 3, 000 a year with click funnels and upsell plugin, just like in WordPress, like they’re way, way more economical solutions for literally more power and customization and stuff like that.

Just throwing that out there. This has been awesome, Eric. I appreciate our chat. We’re actually going to switch to go create a video together about how specifically with screen sharing to use the upsell plugin with Lifter LMS. So go look for that on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Also be sure to check out the upsell plugin.

That’s upsellplugin. com. You can also find it on the Lifter LMS website. In our third party add ons where we recommend tools to help add even more value to your learning management system. But Eric, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, we’re here to help you make more money like upselling and downselling and all this is can be very powerful and better for your users to have a clear path and give them decisions and stuff like that.

So thank you for making upsell plugin and thanks for coming on the show. Awesome.

Eric Davis: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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