In this episode, I break down why relying on a single offer just isn’t enough if you want to grow your revenue, especially when only a small percentage of your audience will actually buy during a launch. Instead, I walk you through the concept of an “offer ecosystem” and how layering additional offers around your core product can significantly increase how much each customer spends—without needing more traffic. I also explain the difference between where you place offers (like order bumps, one-time offers, and thank-you page offers) and what actually makes up the ecosystem itself—things like bonuses, upsells, downsells, and cross sells.
I dive into how each part of the ecosystem works and how to use them strategically—whether it’s upsells that enhance the main offer, downsells that capture people who aren’t ready yet, or cross sells that provide complementary support. The key is making sure every piece feels aligned and genuinely helpful, not random or overwhelming. I also share common mistakes I see—like adding too many choices, pricing downsells too close to the main offer, or not positioning them properly—and why mindset and ethics matter when increasing revenue this way. By the end, I encourage you to think beyond just your main offer and start building a simple, intentional ecosystem that better serves your audience and boosts your results.
3 Key Takeaways:
Your Revenue Is in the Ecosystem, Not Just the Main Offer
Most people won’t buy your core offer, so having upsells, downsells, and cross sells gives you more opportunities to serve different needs and increase overall revenue.
Alignment Beats More Offers
Every additional offer should support your main product and solve a specific problem—random add-ons or too many choices can actually hurt conversions.
Small Tweaks Can Drive Big Results
Simple additions like order bumps or downsells can noticeably increase your average customer spend without needing more leads or a bigger audience.
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
Connect with Teresa on Website, (Grow, Launch, Sell), Sign up to Teresa’s email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Subscribe to my Youtube
Transcript
Most people seem to think that the most successful online business owners get their success from one main offer, but actually a lot of their money comes from the offer ecosystem in which they’ve created for their business. And once you understand how to create an offer ecosystem for your online business, you are going to find that you are bringing in a lot more money and serving all of your customers where they’re at.
If we’ve not met, my name is Teresa Heath Wareing and I help course creators, membership owners, and coaches grow their online businesses. And in this video and this episode today, I’m gonna be taking you through. What I call an offer ecosystem. It’s something that I see a lot in the online space that people have one main offer and they put the offer out.
And if you’ve followed me for a while, if you’ve listened to my videos, if you’ve followed the podcast, you will know. I often talk about what is expected from a numbers point of view, and I will often talk about if you are doing a launch, roughly [00:01:00] one to 8% of the people coming into the launch on the launch list are going to buy from you.
So what happens? If you sell to 1% to the rest of the 99% of people who don’t buy, well, that’s where your offer ecosystem comes in. And in this video, I’m gonna take you through what I mean by an offer ecosystem. I’m gonna talk to you about the placements of different offers, and then I’m gonna share with you what is an upsell, what’s a down sell, and what’s a cross sell and how you can use them to make you more money online.
Now, you’ve heard me talk before about the offer, ladder, ascension model, whatever you choose to call it. And if you’re watching on YouTube, then great, we’re putting up an image. But if you are listening, basically it’s a triangle. And at the bottom of the triangle, the widest bit is your free offers, your free content.
And as you move up the triangle, you tend to get to your most expensive things. And normally the triangle goes from free or very low cost to high cost. Or on the other side, it goes from [00:02:00] low touch to high touch. So in most cases, an online business owner, the thing that they offer, which is the most expensive, is working with them one-to-one.
Or if they do have a done for you offer, then it’s a done for you offer, and then everything else tends to come under that. So. We’ve talked about this before. We know why we need a value ladder. We know why we need this kind of ascension model because it’s really helpful to have different things at different price points.
But the offer ecosystem goes a bit further into that. But before we get into the offer ecosystem, I want to address something that lots of people often miss talking about the placements of your offers. Because sometimes people get these things confused where they say they’re doing an order bump and they think that’s part of the ecosystem, which it kind of is, but it more describes the placement.
Stay with me, you’ll get it. So let’s talk about offer placements now, an order bump. The first offer placement we’re gonna talk about is where you are giving them an opportunity to add something to their existing order. [00:03:00] So often you will see this on a checkout. You will actually see. The checkout for the thing that you’re about to buy.
And then underneath that, there might be another box that you can tick that says, yes, add on this particular thing. So that is what we call an order bump. Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an upsell or a cross-sell, it’s a mechanism. The word order bump is the way in which you are selling it. So it’s the placement of that offer, and that’s the only.
Place. Really, you see an order bump, it’s next to the checkout, and your system needs to be able to do that. So often if you want to offer order bumps, then you have to work with a system like Kajabi where it gives you that option to add those onto. One thing to note with the order bumps is you are usually given very limited information and it’s normally hopefully a bit of a no brainer, so it tends to be much lower cost because you tend to be able to go, oh, do I want to add that little thing?
Sounds good. Add it. So we don’t need to give a big, long [00:04:00] explanation. Okay, the next offer placement is one time only offers, and these tend to happen straight after purchase. So rather than the order bump being on the purchase and you ticked to say you want it, the one time only offers tends to be the next page or the next step.
And this really is about your tech being able to manage this because one thing that’s really important about the one time only offers. Is that you can only have it one time. So for instance, you would need a system that presents a page, and if they don’t take up the offer within a set amount of time, normally like five, 10 minutes, then it makes that page go away and they can’t get back to that page.
And there are systems that can do that. For me, it’s about always telling the truth online, always being honest. So if you are doing a one time only offer, you need to make sure that it is genuinely a one time only offer. Now if you don’t have the system to be able to do that, one thing you could say, [00:05:00] which.
Maybe sounds a little bit deceitful, but it really isn’t. It is just telling. The truth is you could say the offer is only available on this page. Now they can come away from that page, and if they are driven enough to save the URL and go back to it later on, then they’ll still get the offer because it’s not the tech that we are using, it’s just the page.
Normally the one time only offers offer a short amount of time. The page diverts automatically once they’ve been on it for whatever length of time. And it’s normally a really good offer. So it’s a big discount on something that they would get if they bought it at that point. And then the final offer placement is a thank you page placement.
So with a thank you page offer, this often can be something like a VIP upgrade. So for instance, when I do my. Summit, I have a free summit, but when you hit the thank you page, you are then given an offer to upgrade to VIP. So you’ve already gone through a step. It doesn’t even have to be a purchase step, but you’re being given an offer on that thank you page, and it’s normally [00:06:00] very well connected to the thing that they’ve just bought.
So often a kind of upsell would be the case, but with the thank you page offer, it’s really leveraging the emotion of the excitement of the thing they’ve just bought in going, do you want this other thing that’s going to really compliment it? So those are the three placements that I just wanted to touch on because often people can say, I need an order bump, where actually the order bump is the mechanism.
The order bump is how you’re delivering it. That’s not actually part of the ecosystem. So let’s talk about what I mean by an offer ecosystem. So again, if you are watching on YouTube, you will see a lovely image of how I describe an offer ecosystem and basically. It’s a circle with your main offer in the middle.
Then there’s a outline of what would be your bonuses, and that could be a whole nother video altogether, because there’s some real psychological things that you need to think about when offering bonuses. And then we’ve got upsell, we’ve got downsell, and we’ve got a cross sell. So what I’m gonna do in this part of the video is just.
Break down what I mean by each of those things [00:07:00] because they are so, so useful. Okay, let’s get started with upsell. An upsell is when you offer someone a better version of what they’re already buying. It’s not about selling them something completely different. That’s a cross sell. Offering them a cheaper alternative.
If they decline, that’s a down sell. It’s about giving them the opportunity to upgrade on what they’ve already chosen. If you have an effective upsell, you can often increase your sales by 10 to 30%. So when considering your upsells, these are some of the things that you need to think about that make effective upsells.
They should enhance. The main offer, obviously, because it’s an upsell. So think of the main offer as the core offer. How can that get even better? That’s what makes a really effective upsell. The next thing is they should help accelerate the results. So for instance, if you are doing a. Program where you are offering X amount of support and maybe your upsell is to add some additional one-to-one support, that’s gonna really help them accelerate their results because you’re working one-to-one with them.
Another really good example of an upsell is expanding someone’s [00:08:00] capabilities. So for instance, within my Grow Launch sale program. One of the things that can be really effective when you’re trying to reach a bigger audience is ads. Now we don’t specifically train you how to do ads within the program, but if I’m doing an expanding capabilities upsell, then I might want to add on a how to do Facebook ads course, because that is going to give you an extended capability of something that you might need to help complete my things.
And the final idea for an upsell is added implementation. Is there something you can do to help them implement it faster? So for instance, could you give them additional support, if that helps, or is there something done for you that you can give them? Is there templates or swipe files or something that will help them accelerate the speed in which they’re implementing?
The next one I want to talk about in our offer, ecosystem is a downsell. Down sells are brilliant, but loads of people don’t use them properly. When someone says no thanks to your main offer or upsell, a downsell gives them another option that costs less or [00:09:00] has fewer bells and whistles. If someone is offered a dang sale, it can typically convert between 10 and 30% of the people who said no to your original offer.
So let’s go back to the conversation I had about between one and 8% might buy, and you’ve got 90% that don’t. More than 90% that don’t. You could convert some of that 90%. If you give them a down sale, again, this needs to be really well thought out with your customer. You really need to think about what would be a good down sale compared to my existing offer.
In order to offer a down sale, you really do need to understand what is holding your customer back from buying your main offer. Is it that they’re overwhelmed? Is it that they think they’re not ready for it? So, for instance, one of the things that often holds people back in the online space, specifically with something like my program is they’ll think their audience isn’t big enough.
Now, actually, that isn’t necessarily true. I’d happily have a conversation with them about it. However, that can sometimes hold them back from buying the main offer. [00:10:00] So then if I was to offer them a down sell that helped them grow their audience. Then I’m addressing the objection to them buying the bigger thing.
And that fits really nice. So often having a downsell that bridges the gap between where they are and your offer is awesome. That helps. An objection that helps them move closer to your offer is brilliant. So some examples for dying sales are things like a stripped back version of the thing you’re offering.
So for instance, in Grow Launch sale. I talk about in section one, how to grow that audience. So I actually address it within the program itself, but I could take just that section and sell that section alone if I think that is an objection that’s holding people back. You could also offer just a self study.
Now, I’m gonna be totally honest that I did offer this as a dying sell and it didn’t work for me, but let me tell you why it didn’t work for me. One of the things that I talk about. Everywhere. And if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while or if you’ve [00:11:00] watched these videos for a while, you’ll know that one of the things that I am most passionate about is you having access to an launch, an online business expert, IE me, that I can actually look at your business, look at you, look at your offer, look at the price, look at the audience, and I would give specific advice based on those answers and what I know about you Now.
I did such a good job in selling Grow Launch sale and explaining why you have six months support with it. That when I tried to offer the self-study, when I tried to say, okay, you can have the program, but without the support, it just didn’t sell. And when I went back and looked. It was a lot to do with the fact that I was really pushing the fact that you need my support and you need me.
So it made perfect sense that when I said, Hey, do you want the course without the support, they went, no. So again, you need to think about, although on paper that sounded like a perfect down sell in the way in which I pitched the program, it actually cannibalize that [00:12:00] offer. So that didn’t work for me. The other thing that you could offer as a downsell is a completely different course, but like I said, a mini course, a mini something that actually helps them get to the next step.
So they’re ready to then come into the program, or you could literally offer module one or the getting started bits. So there are lots of things that you could offer as a downsell. I’ve also seen where someone has offered a big program and then their down sell was their membership. So there are things that you can offer to keep those people in your world and meet them where they’re at.
And the final thing I wanna talk about in the ecosystem is cross sells. Cross-selling is a great way to offer complimentary products or services that make a customer’s main purchase even better. It’s different from an upsell, which is a souped up version of the thing that you’re selling a. Or a dying sell, which potentially is a simplified alternative.
A cross sell expands what the customer is getting horizontally rather than vertically. When you offer a cross sell, you can typically expect between 20 and 30% of the people who [00:13:00] bought your original thing to buy the cross sell, because the cross sell should compliment it really well. It’s not the same thing.
But it would compliment it. So an example that I had was I did a paid workshop on my open house strategy. So it was a strategy that talks about how to do the open house. And I had a workshop where basically I took people through that strategy and once people had bought the actual training on how to do the open house, I then offered a cross sale.
Of my swipe files to get people to turn up to the open house. So it was another pain or problem that my customers would’ve had that I could add or help on top of the existing thing. So the existing thing that they were buying is a course that basically said, this is how you do it. And within my cross sale, I was basically saying, you are going to need to send emails and I’m gonna make it easier and quicker.
Here are the emails. Now, when I did this, I actually had a 70% sign up, which was crazy. However, it showed me I matched that cross sell [00:14:00] perfectly to the original offer. Also, from a price point of view, I got the right price point as well. So thinking about the cross sell is normally. And a little addition on top.
It’s not like a big, massive amount of money and it’s normally a less than a third of the original thing, so your cross sell, you do wanna try and make it a bit of a no brainer. So a couple of examples of what you could do from a cross sell point of view. You could spot a related problem that you know they’re going to have.
So for instance, mine would be a good example of that. I knew that they’d have to write emails, and I knew that that is a potential hurdle for people. So I wrote those emails for them. You could also help them find a missing skill. So a bit like I said before about what if I offered a course on ads? It could be that actually that’s a missing skill that I know they need, and I could add that as a cross sale.
Another cross sell could help them have success faster. So again, the swipe files, the templates, the anything, the tools, the things that you can give them to get [00:15:00] to the result quicker than they already can, makes a great cross sell. To finish off, I wanna talk about four things that I see that people get wrong when they’re offering an ecosystem, when they’re considering whether to do upsells, down sells, cross sales, and all of those sort of good things.
Number one is that they just throw in anything as random. They just think, okay, Theresa said I need an upsell. What can I have? I need a cross sell. What can I have? I need to down sell. What can I have? First off, you don’t need to have all of them every time, but it’s very much about identifying your customer and their problems.
So if you don’t understand the customer journey, you don’t understand the problems they’re facing, you don’t understand the hurdles that they might come across, then it’s gonna make it really difficult for you to create a really effective. Offer ecosystem. So problem number one is just throwing anything in just to say you’ve got it.
Problem number two is offering too many choices at once. Hopefully, by the way I’ve described it, you’ll understand that they only get given the options after they’ve made a decision about the f. Previous option. So for instance, we only offer a down sell once. They have refused the main offer, [00:16:00] and I don’t mean they clicked on the page, didn’t buy it, and therefore we immediately offer them a down sell.
I mean, the cart closed, they never bought. Now is a good time for a down sell. They only get offered a cross sell once they’ve already accepted to say, yes, I want to buy the main thing. So we are not offering them three or four things at once because when we do, we cause confusion and when people are confused, they don’t take action.
Number three problem I see is that when people offer a down sell, that they offer it price point too close to the original price point. So they think that maybe if they’re offering something for 2000 pounds or dollars and the down sell is 1,800, well, it’s a down sell. Yeah. But it’s still really close to the original offer.
And potentially one of your big objections of not buying the original offer was cost, and therefore you’re immediately ruling out a load of people again. Number four, that things like down sales need to be communicated as an offer in their own right. That yes, they were considering buying the thing that you were offering them originally, but if you are going to then offer them [00:17:00] something different, you almost have to go through that sales process, hitting those pain points, having those conversations again, because it’s not just a straight, they didn’t buy that they’re going to buy this.
And finally, a couple of little mindset shifts that I want you to think about. It’s not sleazy to have these things. Sometimes it can be delivered in a way that feels sleazy Sometimes when you are being offered an order bum, then another order bum, then a cross sale, then a something else. As you are going through that process, it can feel pretty horrible.
You have to do what feels right to you, but to give them alternatives, to give them help, and when you’re doing it properly, IE the upsell is going to move them faster to the deadline or to the transformation that they want. The downsell is helping fill a gap that they think they might have. That’s not sleazy, that’s helping your customers where they’re at.
And I could argue that by not offering them something to support them where they’re at is a disservice to them. So I really hope that this has given you a bit of an idea of what I mean by an offer ecosystem, [00:18:00] how you can make money in other places other than just bringing in your main offer. This is quite a big concept to get your head right, and it does take some testing and learning and understanding in order to have a really effective offer ecosystem.
But I really hope that this has got you started. If you are planning on doing a launch anytime soon, then you will want to grab my launch toolkit. In this toolkit, I map out exactly the timeline when it comes to launching, and I literally give you breakdowns of all the various things that you need to do.
So you actually have a checklist of what we need to do when we go through a launch. So if you’re watching on YouTube. Scan this QR code here, and if you’re listening to the podcast, then go to Theresa Heath wearing.com/toolkit to grab yours today. I will be back next week with another episode.
