Today we're talking about a certain software tool. It’s a tool that I have brought up on the podcast numerous times before. And it’s also one that I use consistently, regularly, and enthusiastically with my clients. We are talking about ThriveCart.
ThriveCart is more than just a mechanism to get paid. It is a vehicle that you can use to make it easier for your prospective clients, your students, and/or your members. How? It allows them to take the leap and trust you and buy your product or service, course, membership site, group program, whatever it is that you are selling.
I am so passionate about ThriveCart that I have set up a Day Rate and a Half Day Rate to get ThriveCart working for you in your business. What we do in this Day Rate or Half Day Rate, depending on your business, I will take your ThriveCart from initially purchased all the way to being completely set up with all of your systems. Full details on this will be at the end of this episode.
I want you to think right now, "Does ThriveCart make sense for my business?" As I said at the very outset, it is a mechanism for taking payment. So the first thing that you're going to want to do when you get into ThriveCart is to connect up all the back end. So you're going to want to connect up PayPal if you're going to use PayPal. You're going to want to connect up Stripe if you're going to use Stripe. And once you have both of those set up, realistically, you can set up a product and sell it. Honestly and truly, that's not what ThriveCart does best, but at its base level, that's all you need.
So let's get into a little bit more of what you can do with ThriveCart and why I recommend using this stand alone tech tool rather than the integrated payment processing in any number of the other tools that you're using. ThriveCart allows you to entice your user to do that much more. They offer a couple of different ways to augment the sale. The first one is what's called a “bump offer” and the other one is called “the upsell”. And the upsell has a sister called “the down sell”. But what's the difference between a bump offer and an upsell? This is a question that so many people have when they are putting together their products in ThriveCart.
The bump offer is presented to your customer before they make their initial payment. The upsell is presented to your customer after they have made the initial purchase. So let's put it this way, if you have $100 product, a bump offer is something that's going to increase that initial customer value. I recommend no more than 25% of the initial product value depending on your price point. So if it's a hundred dollars $25 would be 25% of the initial customer value. Depending on what you're offering, you could probably go up to 35% or 40% of that initial product so that instead of that first purchase that someone makes being $100 it may be a $125 or $140.
Now with an upsell, this is saying to someone, “You bought my $100 product, but I think that you are going to have more success with that product if instead of buying that product by itself, you join this membership or you add on one on one calls with me or you join this.” Essentially, the upsell is augmenting. The truth is with an upsell you can make that two, three, ten times the price of the initial purchase that someone had because of the perceived and real value that you are providing with that upsell.
There are two major differences between the “bump offer” and “the upsell”. The first one is when is this offer presented to your customer? Is it presented before the initial transaction or after the initial transaction? And the second one is what is the value of this offer as it pertains to that customer purchasing the initial product? If it's a small upsell, again like 25% percent of the initial purchase, then it probably makes sense as a bump offer. But if it's a multiple, then it is most likely an upsell.
As I mentioned before, an upsell has a sister called a down sell. So after you present your upsell opportunity to your new customer, they have the option of saying yes or no. They actually have an option to even walk away. But assuming that they actually click the button and say, “No thank you”, this is when we get to present them with a down sell. A down sell is still on top of the initial product, but it is in lieu of that upsell.
If your upsell was three coaching calls, your down sell may be a Voxer access to you for a month. There is still an intrinsic value. It is still going to help that person more than buying your course alone, but it costs them less. They are still getting an additional value and additional motivation for continuing through and doing whatever it is that they have just purchased.
A down sell is “version two” of the upsell. It is still trying to help your customers get the most value out of this transaction. It is not quite as expensive as the original upsell option. This is a really good summary of the purchase process. You can actually have up to five upsells and down sells on a cart in ThriveCart. However, most of the time you're probably good with one or two. I wouldn't go down to five unless you are a really high end power user and you know your audience is going to just keep buying and buying and buying. Sometimes setting up the upsell/downsell and bump offers can be a bit time consuming. I recommend outsourcing the implementation of your ThriveCart to someone who is familiar with the tool...like me!
ThriveCart is not just about the purchasing of your product. It's about all the power that ThriveCart gives you as the business owner on the back end. What ThriveCart allows you to do after the purchase or within the purchase is they connect that purchase to where the person needs to be going. So if someone's buying a course, you can either directly or indirectly connect to your course platform. Directly means using one of the integration tools that is built into ThriveCart indirectly is using Zapier. You can connect to fulfillment services, so if you have a physical product that you will need to deliver to them, you can use ThriveCart as the front end and then connect them to the fulfillment service. Most importantly, for most of the clients that I work with, ThriveCart connects them into your email marketing system. You know me, I love talking about your email marketing system.
The way that ThriveCart connects in is dependent on which system you are using, but essentially there are a huge number of conditions that happen on ThriveCart that ThriveCart can send over to your email marketing system. Obviously when someone buys the product initially, we're going to want to send them over, set a tag saying that they have now purchased a certain product. If they have been refunded, we want to make sure that we remove them from the product. And guess what? We can do that directly with ThriveCart as well during our setup.
In some cases you may want to add a second tag. So let's say that someone canceled their product and you wanted to know that they had previously purchased that product, you're going to use both. You are going to remove the existing purchase product and add a tag saying that they had been refunded that second product.
Other tags that I generally set up for my clients revolve around recurring payments or subscriptions. So if someone's payment fails, what kind of setup do we want to have so that we can reach out to them? And are we removing their access? We have to make sure that whenever there's something that happens that involves the payment, that it falls all the way through our different systems.
The tagging feature inside of ThriveCart makes it really flexible. It makes it so that you have less manual work. You don't have to go in and check things. Literally, you can be sure and trust that if you want to send out an email to everyone who took advantage of your upsell, then you have that information. You don't have to go in and manually move things over from ThriveCart to your email marketing system. As you can see when you get into implementing ThriveCart to its full ability, it can start to get a bit detailed. I recommend outsourcing this task to someone who is familiar with this system...ahem...ME!
For most of my clients, I will set up somewhere between 5 and 12 automations on the heels of a product inside of ThriveCart. There is no rule as to how many is good, bad, or indifferent. You just need to get it working right and don't worry about creating too many scenarios. It does mean more work up front initially setting up and making sure that all those tags lead where you need them to. But it is so, so worth it!
We have now covered your purchase, your bump, your upsells, and down sells, connecting to whatever system needs to be connected to. I really want to talk about affiliates. I love the way that ThriveCart has created the affiliate system. What they've done is they've created a mechanism for you to determine how your affiliates are going to be able to promote your product. Are they promoting the main product? Will they be getting a commission on the bump? Are they getting commissions on “the upsells” and “down sells”? Will the affiliate links be tracked with first cookie or last cookie? First cookie means the first person who's linked got clicked gets the attribution even if someone clicks on three or four other people's links before the purchases made. Last cookie is whoever is the last link that got clicked gets credit for the sale.
With affiliates, you have so many options. Ideally, you want to make it as easy as possible on you. ThriveCart does this by hooking up to PayPal to pay out your affiliates. Even if you take transactions through Stripe only, PayPal is still the recommended tool that ThriveCart uses for paying out your affiliates. You can't actually do that with Stripe at this point in time. So that's kind of a nonstarter. This is the best and most efficient way of doing it. You can set the interval. Sometimes you may want to set your affiliates to be paid immediately. Others you may want to have a wait period. So if you have a refund policy, you only want to pay your affiliates after that refund policy has elapsed. Others are more along the lines of they want to pay the affiliate for any upsells that come down the road. So they want to keep the affiliate bucket kind of open so that you only have to pay your affiliate once instead of several times.
So there's a lot that can go into this affiliate process and I love the fact that it is so granular. You can just go at a very simple level saying all of my affiliates get 50% of everything that they send over to me. Also, you can even set it to manually pay out your affiliates. You don't have to use PayPal. I do recommend it though. Once again, when it comes to setting up this feature of ThriveCart, it’s important to know it can get tricky. I recommend outsourcing this type of task to someone familiar with the tool like the Tech of Business agency.
So we've covered your bump offers. We've covered your upsells and down sells. And we've covered your connections to other online systems. We've also covered affiliates. The last and probably most important element of ThriveCart that I want to cover on this episode is what that cart actually looks like for your customer. What you're able to do with ThriveCart is to create a very succinct, one page checkout that looks pretty on desktops and mobile browsers. It is very streamlined. The most important information is right there for them. I like to have a header at the top of the cart, which is either going to be your logo or the product name. Then we go straight into their form fields where they put in their name and their email address and whatever other fields that you want to collect. We have a checkbox for terms of service. Also we have a few other optional fields we can include. We have our payment options, they are just done via radio buttons. Then we've got our credit card checkout and we have our complete transaction. That's the main column.
There is a second column on this page, which is a nice narrow sidebar, which usually includes some kind of box shot or an image that can” portray the product that they're actually buying. And then you can include things like:
list of features
testimonials
coupon codes
It just sits there. It's just easy to use,and access. Your bump offer is going to sit in that first main column. It's going to be right by the credit card fields so that it's very easy for somebody to see if they click the “check box”, what their total changes to, and that's it on that page.
Once someone completes their transaction, you can send them to a custom page on your website or you can use the built in thank you page that ThriveCart has. I generally use the built in thank you page on thrive cart because it's succinct. It's faster and it is all that someone needs because most of the time the next directions that they are going to get are via email.
One final thing about this checkout process. ThriveCart has really truly thought of everything. They have a full section where you can link up all of your tracking codes. You can link up Google analytics, Facebook pixels, and Pinterest pixels if you want them, because there is a custom script section in all sorts of different places. Truly ThriveCart can help you sell your first product or your hundredth product. You can sell one product a month or one product every three minutes.
This checkout process just works. I encourage you to check out ThriveCart today. They actually use their own system to pay their affiliates. The way that they have their affiliates set up is immediate. If you go and purchase ThriveCart right now using techofbusiness.com/ThriveCart I will get a notification from them saying that I have a new affiliate sale. Also I will get a PayPal transaction issued to me where I get immediate payout of my commission.
I love that there's something about instant gratification. I think that ThriveCart is a valuable tool for just about every business owner. That leads us back to the Day Rate for getting ThriveCart set up for you in your business. What we do is have a call prior to the day or half day I spend with you. During this call, we map out on that call exactly how ThriveCart is going to work for you in your business. Then you provide the access. On the day we agreed to do this, I will spend the whole day with you from 9 AM -2PM PDT getting ThriveCart completely implemented for you. If your business is such that you only need a half day it will be a 3 hour stretch of time. If you are interested in having me set up ThriveCart for you head over to techofbusiness.com/work-with-me and you will find information on this service there.
If you have questions about how ThriveCart can work in your business, please reach out to me on Instagram. I would love to have this conversation with you. If you know someone who is contemplating ThriveCart or looking for checkout options for their business, send them this podcast episode. I would truly appreciate it. I know that it will help them make the best decision for their business. If you would like to figure out if ThriveCart is what you need in your business, let’s do a Tech Audit and see is and where it can fit in your business!
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share rate, and review on Apple podcast, Stitcher radio, overcast or wherever you download your favorite shows. You can also check out the show notes and learn more about me by visiting my website.
Connect with Jaime: Instagram: @techofbusiness
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Email: jaime@techofbusiness.com
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