Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
I took a $27 offer and turned it into an average sale of nearly $300 without changing the offer, without changing the price or the traffic. In this episode, I’m walking you through exactly how to do that because it comes down to a key sales number that most of us aren’t paying enough attention to. Welcome to the Soulful Sales show where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show.

So today I want to talk about how it can be hard to make enough money when you’re selling low ticket offers, like $27 offers and what will actually turn them into much higher income offers instead. Besides the obvious, which is just raising the price and just spoiler alert, what I’m talking about this episode is increasing the average order value. So the funnel structure you need in order to take a low ticket $27 offer into something that makes you on average, let’s say $300 every single sale that you make. So yeah, I want to talk about something that I have been working on a lot behind the scenes in my business lately because one of my big goals is to be setting up ads and having clients coming in via ads and testing different low cost offers on the front end of the ads, but making sure that I can earn enough from those sales to not just cover the ads, but hopefully make a profit not just with the offers that I’m running ads to, but in general as well, what I’m about to share with you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:45]:
So the thing that we need to bear in mind, especially when we are trying to make enough money from low ticket offers, whether we’re using ads or not, is that you’re going to need a lot of volume, you’re going to need a lot of eyes on your offer in order to make enough money from a low ticket offer. And with paid ads especially, you’re going to have to spend quite a bit of money to get enough people seeing it to make the sales on the front end that you need. So it’s really, really hard to even break even, let alone make money on the front end. Now, of course, there might be reasons why it makes sense to lose money on the ads you’re spending and then, you know, sell them future offers, of course. But ideally we want to be making money right away and the mistake that most people are making is that you’re thinking too much about the main offer and forgetting that the price of that main offer is far from the whole story of how much money you can make from that offer, if that makes sense. So what you need to be thinking about instead is not just how much people are paying for that first offer, but the entire customer journey that’s going on on the checkout page, just after the checkout page, and then after that as well. So the real key to bumping the money that you can make from any offer, including very low ticket offers, is to think about the average order value. This is sometimes abbreviated to aov, but this is basically the average amount that a customer spends with you in a single purchase.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:20]:
And a single purchase doesn’t just mean that initial offer. So if you can lift the average order value, and of course I’m going to talk about how you can make that offer break even if you’re running ads, you can earn more money from that low ticket offer if you’re just selling it organically off the exact same amount of traffic. And the key to this is really doing the maths and thinking about how much potential each offer can bring in. So I am going to talk through all of the different parts of increasing your average order value you on a single offer and share some of examples from my business. And I just want you to know as well, like if you come inside the Soulful Sales Society membership, we talk about all of these different mechanisms in there. So if you have a question about how to set up, for example, on order bump, which I’m about to talk about, head to the Soulful Sales Society ruthpoundwhite.com forward/sss. I can help you with all of that inside this membership. Okay, so let’s talk about the terminology and the mechanisms by which we can increase the average order value of any offer that we sell.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:28]:
So firstly, you have the front end offer. This is the main offer that you’re selling, the one that’s on the sales page, the one that has the low price tag, it solves a specific tangible problem or desire for your audience. And the sales page is all about that offer. But when they are going to check out, they’ve decided that they want to buy or they’ve opened the checkout page tentatively, you have a couple, one or two additional easy yes offers on that checkout page. They’re basically low cost add ons that complement that front end offer. They don’t cannibalize it, they don’t make the front end offer seem less useful if they choose not to buy them. But they complement them so they’re Usually very related in terms of the outcome that people want. And these are called order bumps.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:17]:
So it’s a really easy. You’ve probably seen this when you’ve been checking out. Certainly if you’ve been on my checkouts, you will have seen them. But basically it’s like going. The classic example is it’s like going to McDonald’s and them saying like, do you want fries with that? It’s an easy yes. Add on to the order that you’re already making. You may have gone up to buy a burger and then you’ve been offered to add fries on top of that. So in my business, for example, my front end offer that I had been testing with ads is my AI Sales Email toolkit, which is a training on how to train AI to write sales emails in your voice.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:50]:
The order bump is the subject line custom GPT AI bot that will write subject lines for people and the strategic Freebie builder AI bot that will help them build a freebie. Neither of these are covered in the AI Sales Email toolkit, which is all about writing the actual emails, but they are very complimentary because anyone who is using AI to write their emails will probably find it helpful to use AI to write their subject lines. And anyone who’s using AI to write their emails will probably find it helpful to be creating freebies to generate leads. So they’re the two easy yes offers. They’re around 17 or 27 each. Very low cost, easy yes related, but you don’t need them in order to benefit from the main offer. So already we’ve taken a, let’s say this is, I’m just going to give example prices. We’ve taken a $27 front end offer.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:40]:
We’ve added an order bump for 17, we’ve added an order bump for 27. The total maximum order value has gone from 27 already. And if we add on the additional 17 and 27 to 71. So where someone could just come on your page, buy the main offer, only spend 27 with you. Now there’s a maximum potential value of 71 in a single sale. Like already, just by adding those order bumps, we have increased the potential order value and as a result the average order value that you’re going to get. Now obviously not everyone is going to say yes to the order bumps, but it’s increasing the potential of how much you can make per sale. Then once you’ve got those order bumps nailed, the next step is to add an upsell to your offer.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:22]:
So they’ve gone through the sales page, they’ve decided to go to the checkout, they have bought the main offer. Maybe they’ve added an order bump, maybe they haven’t. And before they get to that page that says, thank you, your order is complete, you say, hang on a minute, do you want to add this to your order? Do you want to upgrade? So this could be going to McDonald’s and saying, oh, do you want to go super size or does that still exist anymore? Oh, my goodness, that definitely existed when I was a kid, but I don’t think it exists here in the UK anymore. And in my case. So for my AI sales email toolkit, they could add on those AI bots custom GPTs as an order bump. And the next step for that was an upsell that was about creating an entire AI team. So why stop at emails? You don’t just want to do emails. You can create an AI team to do this, this and this for you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:07]:
And the upsell is a bigger ask in terms of price. So mine I think was 199 or 149. And then again, we’ve gone from starting price of 27 to adding on those order bumps. So we now got a potential order value of 71 to adding on a 199 upsell. And now we’ve got a potential order value of nearly 300. Now, I’m not saying that that would be the right pricing for it. You might want to test like a lower price. If the front end was that low at 27, you may want to test a lower price point upsell.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:40]:
And that’s the thing about these kind of funnels. You do need to test them. Some upsells will be a steal at 199. Even if the initial offer, the front end offer, was 27 and some, it may be too much for Leap. So you do need to test it. And that’s, that’s the tricky part of building these funnels. But having the options there to increase how much people will spend is the best way to make sure that you have the funds to enable you to spend the time testing this and potentially the money testing this if you are running Facebook ads as well. So like I said, we have taken a 27 product.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:15]:
We’ve increased the potential order value to nearly 300. Now, obviously not everyone is going to add on all of those different order bumps and upsells. You can’t necessarily predict what percentage of people are going to do it, like I said, and you need to test. But what is really, really helpful is in the debrief and I spoke about this in last week’s episode. Make sure that you calculate the average order value when you have run a sale or a launch or ads to an offer where you have had order bumps and upsells. So don’t just look at the front end sales, but divide the total money made in your in your launch by the total number of sales and then you will get the average order value. So for example, when I did my Black Friday sale in 2025, my average order value was really bumped up because I was very, very intentional about adding order bumps and upsells to every single one of those offers. I’m actually, in fact, I am going to look up my results for my Black Friday sale just to see if I can give you a number before we finish.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:12]:
Okay. And this is why you need to debrief, by the way, for moments like this. So I actually just had a look at my spreadsheet for my Black Friday sale and I made over a thousand dollars thanks to the order bumps and upsells on my offers. So an extra thousand dollars in my Black Friday sale because of thinking about my average order value. So yeah, this is just a really short and sweet episode to get you thinking about how you can increase that order value. You will need a cart that has the capabilities of adding order bumps and upsells. Most shopping carts will do this. If you’re running a funnel on something like school, then the mechanisms are different and you’ll need different offers in the classroom and stuff like that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:52]:
But I won’t get into that here. What I do want to say is that I will be sharing my behind the scenes of setting up my own funnels in my own funnel experiment. And if you want in on that, if you’re listening to this on the day of release, go to my birthday sales page@ruth£white.com bday because there is a a special pricing for the funnel experiment where you can hear and watch my behind the scenes documentation of everything I’m doing to boost my recurring revenue behind the scenes. And if you’re listening to this after the fact, then you can still head to the link and it will redirect to the current offer. So yeah, I hope you found that useful. Really short and sweet. Just take this information right now and see if there’s a low ticket product that you are currently selling that you can go and add some of these boosts to. And like I said, go to ruthpoundright.com forward/sss to join the soulful sales society.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:48]:
If you want my help and the training and the accountability to actually get it done. Because I know sometimes actually half the battle is just implementing it because it doesn’t necessarily feel urgent to add on an order bump to add on an upsell, it feels urgent to deliver the main offer, to set up the new ads, to grow your list. And there’s just so much going on that sometimes having that accountability, which we do in the form of get it done weeks in this whole full sale society is that loving kick up the bum that you need to actually get it done. And yeah, you don’t need a fancy funnel, you don’t need fancy tracking, but it could make a huge difference to your next sale. Especially if you’re doing some kind of daily deals offer like I’m doing with my birthday sale at the time of recording and release or my Black Friday sale. It can make a huge difference. So I hope that that has motivated you and I will catch you again for the next episod. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:39]:
If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation then you can connect with me in the free community@ruthpoundwhite.com community or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sale society membership@ruthpoundwhite.com membership and keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.