Turn that small purchase into a bigger one.
Yesterday I took my three-year-old daughter to Six Flags in San Antonio. She loves amusement rides, and probably can handle more thrill rides than most adults.
There are a few things Six Flags does well, including cross sells and up sells. Using behavioral economics, Six Flags presents you with a number of “no-brainer” upgrades.
-Buying a one day ticket for $35? Get a season pass for only $15 more.
-Getting that season pass? For $10 more, get a deluxe season pass with $300 in coupons, free tickets for friends, and more.
But it goes beyond just tickets. Like the $9.99 all-you-can-drink today cup. Spend a few bucks more and it’s all you can drink all season long. As long as you remember to bring your special cup with you.
3 balls for $2 in the ball toss? Or $5 for a bucket of about 15 balls? Who wouldn’t take that deal?
Buy our overpriced roller coaster picture of you looking freaked out for $15. Just $5 more gets you twice as many copies.
In all of these cases, the incremental cost to Six Flags is nominal. They have a customer, and they want to squeeze more out of him.
It’s a beautiful model. The domain name company that does the best job of this is Go Daddy. Try to register a .com and what do you see?
Go Daddy makes very little getting you to buy these alternate TLDs. But the odds of someone else coming along and buying them are low. They have a targeted customer. And even if they don’t make much this year, hopefully you’ll renew all of those domains at full price next year. Perhaps you need to buy some extras for them, too?
Six Flags sells you a season pass for $15 more than a ticket because it wants you to get suckered into $10 hamburgers and carny games.
Don’t knock the model. It works. You should consider how you can apply some of this same logic in your business. You can get some good ideas from this book.
Do you mean like how you sent me to Amazon?
🙂
Great post.
That is what I love about Monte.
He is always incremental selling.
Go Daddy is the king of upsell. Everyone should list some of their domains for free as premium listings as nobody else spends as much advertising and has the end user base. They market premium listings just like another upsell which their end users already expect. 30% commission may be high but if you figure it into your pricing the buyer pays it anyway. A lot of people knock Go Daddy but I don’t see anyone else buying Super Bowl commercials and grabbing that end user customer base. Need a domain? How about some hosting? How about a premium domain? etc…
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ROFLMAO
That silly GoDaddy upsell is just so lame because in one year, you’ll have all those ugly renewals.
Even as a noob, I didn’t bite.
But it must work because they keep that upsell page.
Good article!
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Yep they do it well. The drink deal is not quite what was described. You get free drinks the first day and $.99 per after that. We spent 7 days at different SF parks last year. We would bring our cups, but buy one new one. Once we got a wrist band, they would fill them all.
BTW why is the photo from Busch Gardens Williamsburg instead of a SF park?
@ Coaster Freak – I got the coaster from iStockPhoto, so I didn’t realize it was from Busch Gardens