Karen Grace said
Hi John,

Thanks for these thoughts :).

To my mind, a booklet of stories behind the songs does enhance the album. I'm curious as to why this seems different to you from an interview album? It would really help me to know your thinking there - thank you.

I can understand your logic there, and for a real fan, it would enhance the album. However, the main issue is that it is a different medium. This person has just purchased a download (or a CD), we know they like downloads of music (or CDs) but we have no idea if they would like a book. And as a new fan, I think it's a harder sell to get them to buy a book about songs they don't know if they care about yet. It's a different selling proposition, whereas if you just bought 10 candles for $10, and then someone offers you 40 candles for $20 as a one time deal, you sort of feel like you're foolish not taking the deal. Because you already admitted to yourself that the candles were worth $1 a piece. But if someone offered you a chance to get a good deal on flashlights, it would be easier to just decide that you have spent enough and don't really need any flashights. Make sense? I've also seen a few artists who are really successful at this stuff, flop with books as an upsell. But I think a one off promotion of a book, once you have a more solid fan base, is a great idea.

On that note, I'm not actually entirely sure what an interview album is- an album that mixes up the songs with me being interviewed about the songs?

An interview album is a sort of old school thing where artists would offer albums in which they were interviewed. So you could take the same idea you had, and sell it as an audio album of the stories behind the songs. The biggest benefit here being that the medium is the same. I don't necessarily think this would be strong enough to sell on it's own, but it would help flush out a box set.

The thing I've been thinking about since I wrote yesterday is that I believe your advice is to sell something for at least $30. And as I don't have a back catalogue to speak of except for my 1 album I can't do box sets or anything. Or is it generally true that if I go for a cheaper product, more people will buy it? Sorry if I'm asking you to read the crystal ball there- I'm not sure if there are general trends to these things?

Yes, my general advice is to offer an upsell that sells for 3x the price of the main product. But if you can't pull that off, sell something for less. I actually don't see huge fluctuations because of price, unless you start going over that $29.95 price point. But there are many exceptions here. The most important thing is that the price you are asking seems like (and is) a great deal for what you are selling.

My other thought this morning is that people seem to be connecting with the 'Message in a Bottle' thing -responding to that email etc. I'm wondering whether actually that image is something that they associate with the album/the journey of that album and whether perhaps an upsell of a beautiful message in a bottle print sold for $25 is part of the same logic (perhaps more emotion) that led to the album sale. My instinct would be to do just a little more testing with my funnel to see whether this trend continues where people who buy the album seem to also connect with that idea...

For the reasons above, I see this as a great one off promotion. Not a great upsell. This is a product for fans. These people are interested enough to buy, but they aren't quite fans yet. They need to fall for the music. That won't happen until they live with it for a while. But you could add a customer funnel and try and sell things like this a couple of weeks later.

A while ago I was messing around with ideas for text for an upsell page (even though I haven't done the tutorial yet...). This is the kind of things I was thinking of communicating on my upsell page, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from:

A massive thanks to for buying my album. It means a lot.

If things carry on like this, maybe those Messages in Bottles I left in the porches of music industry bigwigs were always unnecessary! And I can happily keep reaching out to the people I was always trying to reach anyway :).

I’ve always loved the symbol of a Message in a Bottle, because basically it represents reaching out, and the potential for a magical twist of fate.

We all have our proverbial messages that we’ve sent, or would like to have the courage to send…

I love the thought of some of you having this mosaic print I made on your walls, which I made in celebration of all Messages in Bottles everywhere 🙂 ... 

etc etc..

Having read that, does it feel like it enhances the album, or d'you feel it's still much better as a later promotion?

Good one off promo.

Thanks so much for your thoughts. As I'm using the last little pot of savings I have to make my upsell, I want it to be a smart move, that fills the pot back up, ha !

Karen   

I totally hear you. Good luck.

Karen Grace said
Hi John,

Thanks for all those thoughts...

Yes I can see now how the things I have suggested are more for true fans.

I'm a little stuck for inspiration as to the way forward right now, but I'm sure something will become clear. 

Right now, I see my only option is to make something for a customer funnel that I sell a couple of weeks later ... Perhaps that's the way forward ...

Thanks,

Karen  

That would totally work.

Like I just mentioned to Leo above, some of my favorites easy-to-make upsells are acoustic albums, live albums, older demos, and membership access where you release new content each month in a sort of self-hosted Patreon-style approach. None of those are particularly time consuming or expensive to create. But your approach is fine as well. Whatever drives the customer value up.

Hey Karen,

It all comes down to the inherent logic of the offer. Patreon is an established "thing". You are asking people to become Patrons. So I do think this is an offer to put before fans that might consider becoming a patron of your art.

However, a self-hosted membership site can be positioned differently. You can essentially explain to your ans that the music business has changed and you don't sell traditional albums, you sell access to a content channel, or library, or whatever you want to call it. For something like this, I don't think a person needs to be a true fan to be convinced to spend $3/month (or whatever) get access to your musical world. That make sense?

Re: You don't control, the redirect: No, I mean that you can't send people back to your own website after they order on Patreon. This means that you can't actually uspell them. Your system will have no idea whether o not they ordered on Patreon, and therefore you can't deliver the products properly, or tag subscribers the way you need to.

The way an upsell works is that someone orders and goes to a "step 1 thank you page" on that page people are pitched to buy something. If they pass, they go to the thank you page where you add an opt in form for that person to be added to the customer list. If they accept the upsell offer and order, then they get redirected to a different thank you page where they enter their email address to get not only the primary order but also the upsell content. If you sell through Patreon, then you can't redirect back to your site and add them to the list where they would be added to the appropriate list and get their content. You also can't place Patreon order buttons right on your upsell page, so in order to pitch them, they need to click away to your Patreon page, and then, even if they decide to pass, they would likely miss the "no thanks" link that would take them to the appropriate than you page. It would get very messy, and a lot of people would get confused, and not get the products they ordered.

You could mitigate some of this by just using the Paypal integration to add them to the customer list that way which would mean that even if they didn't get redirected back after going to Patreon they would still get the album they ordered. However, Paypal doesn't pass tags so you would be creating multiple lists if you did it that way, which allows less advanced campaign automation for you and creates more of a mess. And no matter what it would mean that the customer never got redirected back to your site to conclude the transaction. I also think manually going in and t

Fucking Orks. That is indeed what happened. Not sure what didn't get posted at this stage. Sorry about that. But again. Not my fault. Orks.

There are so many ways you could go with this its hard to offer a simple answer. The simplest answer I can offer is all you really need is a membership plugin and you need to decide what you want to sell and how you want to sell it. 

I use Scott James. He is very reasonable and a friend. I'm not sure what is availability is right now though: http://ihelpmusicians.com/

You will not find anyone more familiar with the MMM theme and what I teach. By the way, and this is very important, y

Disappointed Karen. That last one was a joke. I thought for sure you would get that. But seriously, it’s really important. You just t