Intro (00:01):
Pixie Dust & Profits is a podcast for small business owners who love Disney and want to sprinkle some of that magic onto their own businesses. Join your host, Nicole Boucher and Yasmine Spencer. As they explore the mouse’s $12.6 billion operation and break down exactly how you can apply these big scale concepts to your own business.

Nicole (00:26):
Welcome to this week’s episode of Pixie Dust & Profits. And we have a super fun one for you today. All about the magic of the upsell. Now, if you don’t know what an upsell is, an upsell is an opportunity to increase your cart for your customer. So if you’re selling a service or you’re selling a product that usually averages about, you know, a hundred dollars, just for easy terms, we are getting that number up. We’re giving them a little option to bump that up to 125 or 175 or even more. So we’re talking about some cool ways that Disney incorporates this into the things that they do and, and then some tips for you to do it in your own business.

Yasmine (01:05):
So the first thing we’re gonna start off with is kind of an obvious one, the annual pass. Now for people who go to Disney a lot, or want to go to Disney a lot, it looks like the opposite of an upsell. In fact, it’s a savings, you know, if equates about, I think, seven or eight days of going to Disney. So if you’re, you know, doing a seven day long trip and you plan to do a second trip, well, the annual passes the way to go. And that’s where they get you. So you’re paying for seven days of admission. It brings you back a second time, or if you’re local, maybe even more. So you’re actually going back to the parks more frequently and spending money, but you’re say weight, ya being able PA gives me discounts on dye, gives me discounts on merchandise. It saves me money.

Yasmine (01:48):
How is that an upsell? Well, do you find yourself doing more table service restaurant reservations because you’re saving that extra 10% or maybe instead of packing a sandwich, you’re going to a quick service location to grab some lunch or, you know, instead of buying your one or two souvenir for the trip, maybe you walk away from, you know, these many gift shops with a whole bag full of fun stuff. I know I’m guilty of that, but the annual pass actually gets you to spend more money. And because you keep going back, it gives you more opportunity to buy for from Disney. So they actually make more money off of you by giving you discounted park admission than they would someone who’s only staying for seven days and paying full price for admission.

Nicole (02:34):
I know that when I have two trips in a year, the trip where I didn’t have to buy admission or pay for a hotel room or anything like thought is the trip where I buy all my souvenirs

Yasmine (02:48):
A little more

Nicole (02:48):
New years. And so they know that that average customer value of an annual passholder is way higher than someone who is making their once in the lifetime trip to Disney. Who’s maybe budgeting a little bit more toward their room or the daily lunches and things like that. So there’s also a difference in mentality in an annual passholder, you know, they’ve probably gone on all the rides and they’re willing to maybe forego that this time to experience some restaurants or some backstage tours or things like that. So

Yasmine (03:21):
Events,

Nicole (03:22):
Yes, they definitely make their money off the annual pass holders while throwing them AONE here and there to save $5 on the Mickey’s not so scary Halloween party. So along the same lines is that we are talking about the room upgrade options that they have at Disney. So if you have ever planned a trip on Disney world dot, it is an experience they have, we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, they have a resort level to reach every type of budget or aesthetic that you can think of. And so when you’re looking at packages on the website, for which room you wanna stay in and how you want your tickets to look and things like that, they actually break down the price in a way that makes it seem a lot smaller than it actually is. They say, you know, per person per night. So something that is $50 per person per night for four people, that’s $200 a night.

Nicole (04:18):
Okay. So, but you see $50. So then right in front of that, they say, oh, you’re, you’re thinking of staying at pop century, have you considered poor Orleans French quarter? You get a little bit bigger of a room and you get this beautiful, lovely waterfront view. And it’s only $55 per person per night. Well, that’s now $220. So that’s a $20 in increase times. However many nights you’re staying and the numbers are actually much bigger than that, but when they break it down in that way, you actually think you’re kind of maybe, oh, just for a couple bugs, more, I’m getting something new. So that’s the magic of that upsell, where they have the inventory to be able to push people from one level to the next, without them actually thinking that they’re spending more. There’s also like the Disney dining plan option that exists out there.

Nicole (05:05):
And so I personally, haven’t taken part in the dining plan in probably a decade because it’s changed over time. And for me, it’s not actually a savings and money. And the dining plan is where you prepay for your meals. Essentially you buy them all up front when you purchase your room and your tickets, and then you can just kind of walk up to the restaurant and you give them a credit and your food costs basically tip only. So that kind of prepurchase process means peace of mind for people, right? They’re like, oh, I don’t have to worry about my meals while I’m gonna perfect. But if you actually dime by dime that out, it’s way more expensive. And most cases are situations where you can get your money’s worth, but it usually means that you’re sitting in restaurants for a good portion of your day and you’re always eating the steak.

Yasmine (05:49):
Yep. So the other interesting thing that Disney does when you’re booking your trip is they try to upsell you on the memory maker, which is basically Disney’s photo PA it’s photo pass. Basically, if you take any photos by photographers at Disney, they scan your magic band and you get to keep those photos later. You don’t have to purchase them separately. And it’s actually discounted if you added on at the time you book your trip compared to when you buy it later. So they kind of make you not want to miss out on a, all of those memories. Now, the first trip, when I went to Disney, I added that onto my package. And I guess the one thing I didn’t really consider is me and my husband were not really the, the type to like scope, wait in line for photos. So I think I spent like $200 and only got like 10 photos out of it. So kind of pricey. But they definitely sold me on not wanting to miss out on all those magical memories.

Nicole (06:38):
And from my perspective, like we have had years when my son was young and we did all of the photos and it was worth it. And now as he is getting older, he doesn’t wanna stand in line. He doesn’t wanna meet the characters. But as an annual passholder, that photo pass is included. So that makes me feel like I’m getting value out of an annual pass, even not even standing in those lines, meeting those characters. I still feel like I’m getting something.

Yasmine (07:02):
So on the topic of booking reservations, one of my favorite things is getting to pick my magic band. If you’re staying on Disney property, you have resort reservation, you get to get a complimentary magic band. And the complimentary magic bands are just so or standard playing colors. I always like to like pick something different so I can have like a little rainbow of them. But recently Disney has added an upsell where you can upgrade your magic band to one of their more custom designs. So the way that it works is when you are S selecting your magic band, you can spend an extra, like 10 to $15 and you can at upgraded magic band. That’s actually, it costs less than what it would cost if you were to buy it on par property, it’s a really easy way to just get you to spend an extra 10 $50 for each person in your family, because you want something a little bit different than what everyone else is getting.

Nicole (07:56):
It’s also really sneaky on their behalf because they can kind of a beta test, the magic bands that are coming out because they’re kind of like limited additions. And we’ve actually had to sit there, refreshing the page to see if they have a design that we actually wanted. There was one I wanted with all the little food icons on it, and you know, that one kept going out of stock, but they can use that as a little test field of who’s buying. What, so what, how many more of the is do we need to make, do we need to make different magic bands from this character or this theme or anything like that? So it’s kind of a twofold there. It’s an upsell, so they can get you in when you probably wouldn’t have purchased a magic band on property and you, they also get to test a little bit.

Nicole (08:35):
So for our very last example here of like the upsell and how it can into play in a different way is the shop Disney website, which I have fallen victim to a few times in the last few weeks, most recently on may the fourth. They had some big sales going on for star wars, and I knew I wanted to get in on whatever they had going on because my husband is a huge star wars fan. And hopefully he’s not listening to this episode right now, cuz father’s day will won’t have come yet. And I wanted to get a couple of things for him. And so they had these limited edition star wars stuff going on there and you know, they just get you, you see the deals you’re coming in and they have this big, huge banner on the site that says spend $75 and get free shipping.

Nicole (09:23):
Now everyone knows that everyone loves free shipping. Amazon has trained us to be the expectation and not like a surprise and delight thing. And so, you know, you spend that $75. We, you know, got something that only came up to 60 and you’re looking at, and it’s like $9 to pay for shipping. Like, well, that’s gonna bring me to $70 total. If I spend 75, I get free shipping. And so somehow magically a star wars pin and a little key came into the order and it’s over 75 now and now I have free shipping. So I’m happy cuz I got my free shipping, but I also ordered a couple of extra things. So segueing this into how that impacts your business. If you are a product seller or maybe if not, there’s a couple of things to consider there. Definitely thinking about offering free shipping because everyone loves it, but well planning for that free shipping purchase, make sure you build that into your costs.

Nicole (10:21):
If you know that on average, you spend about $7 to send something in the mail, know that going in. So you’re actually giving them a $7 discount in your head instead of running some other promotion, like 20% off or $10 off or whatever may be, make sure you’re building that cost. So that way to you, it doesn’t feel like, oh, I’m paying for the shipping and they’re not covering it. They are, it’s just a different type of promotion. You can offer $20 off or you can offer free shipping. They both kind of equate to the same. The other thing there with the free shipping offer is make sure you have products at variable price points. I can’t tell you of times I’ve been on a maker’s website and they have, you know, a whole bunch of great things like candles, but they’re all the same price points.

Nicole (11:05):
So when I get to that point of needing to earn my free shipping, I don’t really have anything to choose from. There’s no cards or like just accessories that would go with it that I can add to the cart to get to that value. It’s like when you get a two, buy two, get one, but or buy one, get two. You, you didn’t want to, you wanted one. So gimme some other things at different price points and different sizes. So that way I can fill my cart up with a variety of your products and still get that feeling of oh yeah, yeah. You earned free shipping.

Yasmine (11:36):
Another thing that you can do to help in increase the size of basket is recommending products that are frequently purchased together. So, you know, your customer shopping habits, you know, if they buy you know, this one candle, they might wanna buy some wax melts along with it. If they buy mini ears, they might like, you know this other style because it’s complimentary or cute or you know, your customers just love them. Cause they’re popular recommend items that will help them increase their basket size. So one, if you have free shipping that makes it easier for them to make that purchase because it’s basically social proof telling them these two items work well together. People, people who need this also want that. And two, maybe they didn’t consider that they wanted, you know, a, a holder for their candle, for example, that you also sell in your store and they now realize that that product’s available to them. So it opens their eyes up to the other things that you have available to purchase that they may never have considered and by recommending products or other products that they might want, it’s such an easy way to get them to explore more, add more to cart and at the end increase their purchase.

Nicole (12:41):
And along those same lines, those are some great tips for our product sellers, but for our service providers, how do you offer a complimentary product? So you can do that in a variety of ways. It can be done where it’s kind of like you have a done for use service. That’s kind of part of your package. So sometimes for me as a service provider, I’ll have people come and I’ll say, well, I have this here where it’s like a consulting package. We talk, we strategize, we come up with your strategic plan. We map out what you need to be doing in the next quarter or two quarters. We, but do you want someone to execute it for you? And so that’s a little bit different and on a different scale, but it’s the type of thinking that you can have where, you know, you have your core product and then you have a side product that they might need and you can kind of give them the option of, you can add that on now or you can wait until you’re ready to need it.

Nicole (13:33):
And it can also take the form of here. We’ve got this service relationship, but I also have a couple of things already handmade ready made for you. So that way you can do this yourself. So you can work with me or you can do it yourself. And here are the two options of what that looks like. So it’s a little bit different for our service provider, but if you can get creative with your thinking or just look at your data of all of the past client you’ve had, what have they gone on to purchase after? What kind of hires have they needed? What, what things were they looking for while you worked together? You maybe come up with a couple of ideas of complimentary things that you can offer in the beginning. Since you have all this data to look at from your past clients

Yasmine (14:11):
On similar note, if you’re offering like a course, for example, I a great upsell that can go along with the content that you’re teaching are like templates that make it easier to implement those learnings. I see this a lot. You buy Amy Porterfield did this ages ago. She sold a course on how to run a webinar, right? Webinars are a great way to sell high ticket items. They’re still used as a marketing you at this day. And well, what do you need in order to run your webinar? Well, you need a service to run your webinar so she can make recommendations of tools that she uses and make affiliate income on the backend, but you also need slides. So one of the upsells that she had offered immediately after you purchased the course was her like top 10 converting slide templates that she had used. And you know, the hardest thing is creating the design and getting things going. It’s easy to pop in your content, but you don’t wanna have to spend hours fusing over where to put a call to action. She’s taken the care of that. You so spending an additional $99 seems like a no brainer after review spent a grant on her course. So creating giving templates that help the implementation of your content and education and make the whole thing a lot easier is a great way to increase that basket size.

Nicole (15:26):
That’s such a good point, cuz I’ve seen this before, too, that it’s not even a, is like a blank template that they’ve given. They’re definitely in people who have upsold take my exact thing with my exact words and you know, create your own template from it. But here, if you just wanna see what I did here you go. And as someone who loves to reverse engineer things like that’s really interesting to me. So it doesn’t even have to be a blank template that you’ve created for them. You can just kind of give them what you have along those lines. Our last little example of using this in play is that customer journey map that we might have talked about in previous episodes, we feel like that this is a great tool for you to look into, to kind of help you plot along how you can do upsells in your business, how you can try and cross sell, which is when you’re like giving them a related product.

Nicole (16:16):
And so you can use this map and essentially just a big overview of who your customer is, where they’re at in their journey, how aware they are of you and what you sell to them at each point in that journey. So you’ve got the person who hasn’t heard of you yet. How are they hearing about you? What are they thinking when they first come across your brand on Instagram or Facebook or wherever it may be. And then you’ve got the person who gradually grows with you. You know, they’re like their business is getting more seasoned and they’ve bought a product from you. What’s their next step on that journey. So it’s a customer journey map. We think it’s an amazing tool that will definitely help you understand and where your cross cells and upsell should happen. And we are really excited to bring it to all the women that we are working.

Nicole (16:58):
One on one with at Pixie Dust & Profits Live in August. It’s such a useful tool for so many reasons, but in this specific case, we think it just brings so much clarity to what your product is, who needs to see it, the type of language you use while you’re selling it and also what they need next. And before it, and at the same time that they’re getting that. So customer journey map is a great exercise. And if you want to be doing that with us too, look at our next pixie Dustin profits live event. So you can join us for that experience.

Yasmine (17:28):
All right. Well, we hope that the tips that we’ve given you will help you think a little bit about how you can increase the basket size in your, your business, whether you sell a service product or an information product. And if you’re not following us on an Instagram, you really should. We’re @pixiedustandprofits. And if you’re not on our mailing list, we highly recommend that you get on it. Because if you also want to know more information about Pixie Dust & Profits Live, that’s where we sort of send it out. We send it to our insiders first. So head to magic.pixiedustandprofits.com to sign up. See you real soon. Bye.