Redd: Hello and welcome to Fiverrcast, the official Fiverr podcast for sellers by sellers. My name is Redd AKA reddhorrocks.Adam: And I’m Adam AKA twistedweb123, today we’re joined by a special guest host Harold. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself Harold?Harold: Hey my name is Harold Everton. My name on Fiverr is givemeapps. That is my actual business. I run an app store called Give Me Apps. I am an educator by trade. I just finished my Educational Leadership degree. I’ve run several businesses for a couple of years and I’m also a musician, voiceover artist and I do commercials. That’s what Fiverr allows me to do.Redd: Very cool. Well, thanks for joining us Harold. So today we’re going to be talking about upselling. We’re talking about how you can get your clients to purchase extras, how you can upsell your Gig before and after orders. So Adam, why don’t you start off? Tell us a little bit about how you handle upselling.Adam: I think for me, one of the most important parts of upselling is making sure what you’re trying to upsell is related in quite a similar way to your basic Gig. So to give you an example of that, one of the services I offer is to perform a website review or a website critique as a hand-typed report. An upsell of that is a website review via video.Now I think those two complement each other quite well and I will often see them upselling because they’re quite similar. However if I were to offer a service such as I will tweet your website to 10,000 people, I think it’s not related enough in that scenario to really have an upsell. I think it would still maybe convert but it isn’t in the natural kind of progression to what the person is ordering.So I think the key for me to begin with any sort of upsell is to make sure what you’re upselling is a natural progression of the basic Gig.Redd: Yeah, for sure. I mean I think for me it’s a little easier because my specific topic is so tight. The only things I can really upsell people on are faster delivery which does often work for me. I have it set where people can order extra fast or my extra, extra fast service. So that’s kind of where I sit with the upselling thing.Then the other thing that I have is things like correcting people’s grammar. Like, I have that in there. But I can see how for you like – especially in your niche as a designer, you have such a broad range that you can pull from. How about you Harold? How do you handle upselling?Harold: My thing is this. I think any Gig, any service you provide on Fiverr can be upsold. So what you really want to do is make sure that whatever extra services you’re offering increases the value of the final product, whatever that might be.For example, I do commercials. You might want to start off with something as simple as for $5, I will do a script with 50 words or less and then from there, you can say, “Look, I will proofread your script,” the same way that you mentioned with your voiceovers.From there for $20, you could say something to the effect of, “Look, I will do a green screen background. I will add your logo and I will add some text,” and then you go for the big bang. That would be what I call my total package. Maybe the $50 or $100 Gig extra where you can say, “Look, I will pull out all the bells and whistles. I will give you HD. I will give you a 4K video. I will allow you up to six logos and I will let you add this amount of words.” It could be something like 400 words.The main objective as far as I’m concerned is you want to give people as much as they can get for $5 but you really want to kind of push them towards getting the best bang for their buck and for that, you have to load as much value as you can and be the largest I guess upsell that you provide and really make them feel like they’re getting the value for their money.Adam: I love one particular point you said there which I think encompasses everything you’re offering there which was the word “package”. I love presenting any kind of upsell or any kind of additional work as a package kind of persona to the buyer. So they think, “OK, we’ve got this option. We’ve got this package. We’ve got this package,” and as you say, you have the all-inclusive option, which allows you to sell basically everything packaged in a nice kind of branded or advertised way to really make the upsell.Harold: Absolutely. Having – giving – people love options. So having a basic $5 Gig is a great thing. I call it the basic $5 Gig but having as many options as you can on your – whatever service that you’re providing, lets the user, the buyer, feel like, “Wow, it’s almost like you had a buffet.” I can get – I can put the eggs. I can put the bacon. I can put the cheese and before you know it, you have a nice, big sandwich.Redd: I love that analogy. That’s awesome. So …Harold: Well, I’m kind of hungry at the moment. So …Redd: So Harold, how do you approach this with your clients? Do you always – so you got a basic $5 order. Do you then go to your client and try and upsell a package or do they – do you wait for them to express interest?Harold: I’ve taken several approaches to this. I’ve been very fortunate where a lot of clients will actually contact me. They will message me before they order which is great because there’s an opportunity to do your song and dance and tell them, “Look, this is what I offer. But it sounds like this will be a better fit for you.”I’ve been taking advantage of the custom offers that Fiverr just recently enabled on the site. So you could say, look – you look at what it is that they’re trying to achieve and you engage them. You communicate with them and see if they are interested in doing something a little more elaborate.I never get pushy. You never try to coerce them to do something. But you have to look at it this way. There are multiple entry points where you can upsell your Gig. It really just takes I guess some kind of sense if you may and really thinking about this from a customer care perspective. You want to take care of your clients.So if you can give them a better service that what your $5 package, your basic $5 Gig is offering, then why not go for it? You will benefit and more importantly the buyer benefits.Adam: What I’ve noticed when a buyer usually contacts beforehand, I find it a fantastic way to initiate the upsell. I often come across the scenario where a buyer will kind of say to me, “I want this and this. How much will it be?”I’ve heard from a lot of other sellers. They say, “It’s clearly stated on my Gig. Why don’t they just go ahead and order?” and rather than think of that as a bad scenario, I actually use that time there to contact the buyer and say, “OK, this would be let’s say $10. But if you’re going to order this, I recommend possibly looking into this as well to make sure you receive the best value for what you’re looking for.”Harold: I was going to say Adam you’re so right. I’m getting a headache. It’s that point of contact that’s so crucial and very often you can be overwhelmed with a large number of orders. You don’t want to get into the habit of saying – first of all, being on Fiverr is a joy and having many potential clients contact you is a privilege. So you want to take advantage of that privilege and respect that privilege. You need to use that as I said earlier as an entry point to engage your client. You want to give them the best service that you can provide for them and use that as an opportunity to have them purchase whatever other services you’re offering and tell them about your Gig.Redd: I think the big thing for me with showing clients what opportunities I have for it, like – as in for me, the upselling is all about delivery time. That’s where I can actually upsell a little bit more because my standard delivery is two days. One day is extra fast and then I have an extra which is where people can move to the top of my queue.So for me, one of the most important things is if I’ve got a client coming to me and I’m building them a custom quote, I always make sure in that custom quote I have laid out for them all of the delivery options so that they can see it there and see how quickly they can potentially get things. I think that’s a big part of it. It’s making sure custom quotes, when you’re using them – which I think everyone should use custom quotes because then the buyer just clicks once and you’re done. I think having all that information there is really pivotal.Harold: Custom quote is probably one of the most powerful features that Fiverr has available and I think that every seller, whether you’re a top-rated seller or not, a super seller or whatever category you’re in, should take advantage of that. It’s a really big thing.So you have your services available. When the client is contacting you, it’s a different scenario than just clicking that order button. Many times as we all know from my experience, people don’t read the Gig page thoroughly and many times they’re excited that they can get a quality product for $5.The ability to deliver your services faster is big. So though you – you feel like you have a tight space there Redd, it’s still a very powerful tool as you mentioned. I always make it a point to have – I guess like a template that I send out to most of my clients when they inquire about my Gigs.Then I will streamline with it, so it fits whatever it is they’re requesting. But like yourself, I always pour in those extra fast delivery options. Some people, they look at the queue and they say, “Oh my god, the person has 50 or 20 orders.” Just by saying, “Look, for an extra 10 bucks, I will give it to you in 3 days.” In my case most likely I have a five or seven-day delivery because of the volume and the speed. But most people will be willing to take advantage of that. Look, I need it tomorrow. I need it tonight. I need it five hours from now. It’s powerful.Redd: Definitely.Adam: I think as well Redd, you touched on a really good point when you said before – if I’m understanding this correctly, before you actually send the custom quote, you will send them a message outlining all of the available options available to them in regards to extra fast delivery.Harold: Right.Adam: Because what I’ve received in the past is if someone will maybe ask me for something and I sometimes maybe think, OK, they sound like they’re in a rush. Let’s look to tack on the extra fast quote as standard inside the custom quote. The feedback I’ve personally received from that is people often say, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting it to be kind of this much. Why is it that much?” and the fact that I’ve sent kind of like the quote as the reply as opposed to an initial outline to kind of engage and contact with them first, they’re less likely to convert from that.So taking the time to outline it to them, it kind of gives them the manual choice of what they want the custom quote to be and then you send the custom quote after that to make sure you’re getting the maximum upsell possible that I find without being too pushy with just sending a custom quote straight away.Redd: Yeah, I think it depends on what the client is asking for. If a client is really – is very specific – and a lot of my clients do say like, “Oh, I need this by Thursday.” So I won’t necessarily push the extra fast to them but I think I feel it’s not necessarily about pushing something. It’s about making sure that my client is aware of all of their options.So they can select what’s best to work for you and I think that some people do worry that upselling is like pushing things upon people and I would definitely counsel that thinking of it as making sure your client understands all of the services you provide is a better way of thinking about it than, oh, I’m trying to push stuff on people.Adam: I think it depends on how you go about doing it because I’ve been in a scenario before where I was a buyer and I asked someone how much this Gig would cost and rather than send me an initial message as a reply to kind of engage with me, their reply was an instant custom offer with the price.So from my side, after I contacted the buyer, I received an email to let me know, “Hey, you received a custom offer,” and before I even had a real chance to engage with that buyer, a custom offer had been sent through with the price that I didn’t fully understand. But if that seller had taken the time to maybe talk to me beforehand, even just a message to – just to give me an outline of their options, I would have been much more likely to convert from that.Redd: I think it’s OK to send a custom quote right away, provided you’re outlining exactly what the person is getting and making sure that within that custom quote, you put in a note that says, “If you need any alterations, just contact me and I will adjust the quote.” Like making sure that they know that they – you can withdraw it and resend it to make sure that they have …Adam: OK. So almost like it’s a draft proposal.Redd: Yeah.Adam: Rather than an invoice.Redd: Yeah, kind of. Yeah, that’s definitely one way to do it. I think having that thing in there that says, “I’m happy to adjust the quote,” that’s the line that gets you a better response from potential clients.Harold: I think that’s pretty accurate. To put it mildly, you don’t want to have the customer feel as if they’re in a Looney Tunes cartoon and the ACME anvil is falling on their head.You want to educate your buyers. You want to make them feel comfortable. You want to outline everything that it is that you offer so they feel that they have a choice and you will find that you will get a great conversation and develop a professional relationship and more than often, they would probably be more willing to go for the highest-tiered services that you provide with your Gig.Redd: So here’s another question on this kind of – along this vein. For you guys, do you have any opportunities to upsell after a client’s order is completed? I think Adam you have some stuff with this, right?Adam: It’s probably my biggest kind of sales plan I would say in relation to my Gigs. So I mean one of the ways I initiate this is as I say I offer a $5 custom report to critique your website and tell you what’s wrong with it. Now for me it doesn’t matter if the seller at that point should place a $5 order or a $105 order. Either way, I’m still able to upsell on that model based on my deliverable.So what I do with that is basically the order that they receive on the Gig as stated is almost like an intro into my full service. So when I deliver the intro, that becomes a whole range of other services available. So they may order a $5 report. I will tell them what’s wrong with their website or what I would improve and then they come back afterwards and say, “OK, this is great. Can you do it for me?”Instantly then we go from talking $5, $10, even up to the $100 extra to talking to technically an infinite amount depending on how varied or required their details are.Harold: For me it’s kind of similar. I have a lot of clients who will order a simple $5 commercial and in the delivery message, I will highlight what it was that they didn’t order so that it would be – they order the basic $5 Gig and provide X, Y and Z. Then I will say, “You did not order the green screen. You didn’t order the HD and high quality audio. You didn’t order the total package,” and more than often, the client will come back and say, “Well, hey, wait a second. What does that get me?” and there’s that opportunity to point them to your portfolio and in my case, what I want to do is point them to YouTube videos. I do a lot of that. So they can see the type of quality that we get if they ordered one of the higher-tiered services that I provide with the Gig.Adam: A question to you Harold. In regards to things like the high definition extra, is that something that maybe you record in high definition previously but you send the file in a lower quality for the lower orders or would you have to reshoot all over again if they purchase afterwards?Harold: Great question. I film everything in high definition but because it takes a longer – a lot more time to render the high definition videos, I down convert to SD and ship out. Here’s your basic $5 Gig and if the person decides, hey, look, I want the high definition and whatever, then I will say, “Well, here it is.” You send it out. You have an easy upsell right there.Adam: So that’s great for you then because you’re technically doing the work anyway. So when the buyer does click to upsell, you’ve already done it. So the upsell is very seamless for you and able to be delivering that difference.Harold: Absolutely. I think from the seller’s perspective, your job is to deliver the highest quality products you can with the least amount of work. When I say work, I don’t mean effort. I mean work. If it requires some more work, then you point that towards the higher tier stuff.So in my case, yeah, with the HD, I already record in HD and that’s an easy send-off whereas my app promotion Gigs, they have the app store and I do app promotions. I will do a basic tweet for $5 and then I will say, “Look, if you spend another $20, I will do a review of your app and if you spend $100, then I will do the review or the written review with all this extra stuff,” which is a big benefit to them. There’s always a second thought and you mentioned it earlier. It is always – there are multiple entry points to upsell, when they message you, when they initially do the order and post-sale or even a couple of weeks down the line. There’s always an opportunity to do that.Adam: Yeah, definitely talking about a couple of weeks down the line. When I do logo designs, I often have buyers coming back weeks, maybe even months in advance asking for the source files or the large resolution printing files. So from that then, as long as I keep those files, maybe 20 orders I made a year ago could actually start bringing in more revenue today.So talking about having the – maybe delivering the lower quality file as per the order but having the previous or the better quality file ready to upsell, this must be something quite good for you Redd where there’s a new feature on Fiverr that allows you to deliver source files. So I imagine with your voiceovers, you may have the opportunity in the future now to – let’s say for example if you delivered MP3 as standard for your $5 Gig, you could deliver the WAV source file directly in the order for your buyers to easily upgrade whenever they want.Redd: Yeah, I mean for me, I deliver everything in the high quality WAV files. So that’s actually a big part of my service. But I know there are other voiceover artists that are able to do that. So I think that’s definitely something that will come into play for a lot of people down the line and I do try and think about how I could potentially do more upselling and do more source files and things like that. But for me it’s – I’m very much – everything comes in high quality. Everything is delivered instantaneously. It’s something I should really work on. I think it’s …Adam: I think actually you’ve just raised a very valid point or almost a fear maybe where at the moment your service is very all-inclusive. So if you wanted to maybe broaden your upsells in the future, how do you think you would handle the price change or the difference for your previous customers? So let’s say you start charging more for your high quality WAV file. How do you think you would handle that situation if a buyer came back and said, “This used to be inclusive”?Redd: Well, I’ve come up with this – I’ve come across this a couple of times already because back in – I think it was March of this year. I actually increased my rates for the first time since I’ve started on Fiverr and it was one of those things where I notified all of my clients about a month before I increased my rates. I put a message on my Gig saying, “Hey guys. Just so you know, starting on this date, I’m increasing my rate.” Then I had clients come in after that date that were still ordering at my old rate and if they did, I gave them kind of a free opportunity to be informed.So if a client ordered at the old rate, I would do the order as I would have done normally and then I would message them and say, “Hey, just so you know, on March 1st, I changed my rates,” and then I kept track of anyone I had messaged. So I knew the people that I had kind of given warnings to and honestly I think I only had about eight or nine clients make that mistake and no one – after I had sent that initial – done the order and then sent a message, I didn’t have anyone come back and try it again.So I think it’s all about communication. You have to make sure that you don’t do it overnight, that you give people warning so that they – because again, a lot of our clients are working for other people. So when you’re doing a voiceover, it’s entirely possible someone has purchased that on behalf of their client.So you need to make sure that they have an opportunity to pass on that additional fee to their client, so that no one is out of pocket on it.Adam: I think that’s a really great thing to mention. I never even considered that previously but giving the clients the warning beforehand and then almost like the free pass so to speak on their first order after the change. It’s not only informing them but it’s also great customer service from that.Harold: I had some experience with that. I know when I first started on Fiverr, I had a certain rate and then as I became more knowledgeable about how Fiverr worked and what you could do to sell your services, I did a rate change on my side also. What I normally do, because sometimes people just like I said before, they may not read your Gig page but they may rush or may be with some other client and they have other things to do. That’s no fault of the client but when they do purchase, when they do make the order, you want to have clarity. You want to be very clear with them from the beginning and it’s great to communicate that when they make the purchase. You also brought up the clerical side of things of keeping track of who may not have looked over your price in the Gig.Adam: I think it’s important to highlight what we’ve just discussed there to the listener that both myself, Redd and Harold have all increased our rates successfully and maintained the upsell from it because I often hear from a lot of sellers. They’re a bit scared that if they increase their rate, they will lose the customer. But I think it’s important to remember let’s say you sold 10 Gigs at $5 each and you increased your rate to what was offered at $10, you only need to sell half the amount of Gigs to make the same revenue.So you may lose a small amount of customers from increasing your prices or increasing your offering inside the Gig but overall, there’s that tipping point where if you’re still receiving a certain amount of buyers, you will actually make a better revenue overall.We’ve got some great questions today, one of which is from juliepalmer7 who asks, “What if a buyer orders your Gig and then cancels? Do you have the right to use that work in your portfolio?”Redd: That’s a really good question. I think the biggest issue with this is if it’s work that is really relevant to the client, I wouldn’t advise using it in your portfolio mostly because you may have an opportunity to actually use pieces of that work elsewhere.So if someone has – say someone has purchased – I guess for you Adam, say someone has purchased a logo and they decided that they no longer needed the order but you had already done some of the work. I think it would be completely fine to kind of table that logo and then as an original design and then maybe down the line you might come back to it with someone who has something of a similar vein that they want and then you could use it.But in my opinion I would say if you’re putting it in your portfolio, and it has not been paid for, you’re almost wasting your work because once it’s in your portfolio, you can’t really use it again.So I would say, yes, you probably could put it in your portfolio but I would just hold on to that for another day. OK. So we’ve got another question here and I think this is a good one for Adam. This one is from victoria1231. “I sent my customer a picture. He posted a review and this picture became visible in my profile but the customer doesn’t want it to be visible. Can I do something about that?”Adam: OK. So there are a couple of things you can do about this. The first one is if you don’t want something visible in your profile or your portfolio before you deliver, what you can do is make sure that you maybe deliver the image, if it’s an image, inside a zip file so it doesn’t go inside the live portfolio or you send a message with the image and then send a delivery message afterwards. So you just make sure that whenever you’re delivering the file, there’s no live portfolio thumbnail on that delivery message and it won’t be in your portfolio.In this scenario, if it’s already inside your portfolio, the buyer has the option to go ahead and remove the image at the point of feedback. So if you deliver your order and it’s inside there, when the buyer goes ahead and leaves feedback, they can just click on the image to remove it and place their new feedback inside.If they’ve already left feedback, they just go back into the order, edit that feedback and then remove the image. If the buyer does struggle with this, customer support can help and have that image removed.Redd: All right. We’ve got one more question here. Harold, this is probably a good one for you. This is from mariekaz. “I use my real name on my Fiverr seller account. I was wondering if using your real name sets up any limitations.”Harold: A really good question. I don’t believe it sets up any limitations. It depends on what your purpose is or what your goals are. For example, I do commercials because although I’m an educator by trade and a businessman, I do some acting, so in that case, having my name out there is great as a networking tool.However, I have come across many Fiverr sellers who don’t wish to give their real name and they work under an anonymous name. Either an anonymous name or a name they made up just for Fiverr. It depends on what your goals are and whatever you’re trying to do. If you’re doing anything racy or raunchy and you have – if you work as a professional like I do, education, obviously you don’t want to attach your name to anything that can come back to haunt you. But again, it depends on what it is that you have, what your goals are and what your purpose is on Fiverr.Redd: So it’s probably one of those things where if you’re producing work that you don’t want necessarily – maybe you’re moonlighting on Fiverr and you don’t want your fulltime employer to know. Maybe you shouldn’t use your real name.Harold: That’s a great point and I’m very fortunate where I haven’t had anybody ask me to do anything really offensive. But in some cases, you may not want your employer to know what it is you’re doing on the side and there’s privacy. It depends on I guess your goals, what kind of person you are and these days everybody is Googling everybody. So you got to think about that.Redd: Definitely. Well, thanks everyone for listening today. Thank you so much to Harold for joining us. You can find him on Fiverr as givemeapps. Our jingle is by Ryan AKA customdrumloops and today we were edited by Dansha. Thanks so much and we will see you next week.Transcription by Trans-Expert
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