High ticket items or low ticket items?

Hey, Edlund. I'd encourage you to think in a different way.

Tell you why.

What I'd encourage you to do is look at this:

1. The offer price to the consumer.
2. The value to the consumer.
3. The commission rate to the affiliate.
4. Any available EPC data.

Now, general EPC data is almost completely irrelevant. Almost. What it is mostly is an indication of your own potential EPC.

(EPC = Earning Per Click).

This is what I mean by all that. The most important element for an affiliate when looking at commission rates is his or her EPC from promoting that offer.

Offer A: high commission rate of $1,000 but it doesn't offer much value to the consumer so means you have to refer tons of unique visitors before getting an action (sale or lead) and thus leads to a low EPC.

Offer B: a high commission rate of $1,000 but it does offer a lot of value to the consumer and ends up resulting in a high EPC.

I hope I've made that clear; just waking up here.

I'll give you an example. One offer I promote has a payout of $12.50. It's a PPL (Pay Per Lead). All the referred person has to do is fill in a form. No credit card, no payment. I regularly convert at 1:1 and 1:2. In other words I have to send 1 or 2 hops (if you like to call it that) to the offer page before getting an action and earning my $12.50. This means my EPC can hover between $12.50 and $6.25. I'm earning between $6.25 and $12.50 for each click. And that's a fairly low-ticket offer.

So! Forget the distinction between just high and low ticket offers. Instead, use the above criteria to assess and look at your EPCs.

Finally, when you're new to promoting in a market or a niche, you need to learn which offers convert best (obviously).

A few things to look at:

- Landing page in general
- Placement of form
- Call to action
- Offer itself
- Any popups
- Page loading time
- Everything else

Effectively - look at everything above and everything else that is intended to convert an offer. Learn how a landing page converts. There are good and bad landers obviously. So you need to consider my 1 to 4 above as well as the landing page.

- Tom

Your low ticket products are "trip wires" for your higher priced products and high ticket offers if you set up a sales funnel correctly.

You'll always make more revenue with high ticket products and services if you know what you are doing. It takes a lot of sales to make great income with low-priced products, but you must figure in the lifetime value of the customer from your email marketing efforts and repeat sales as well.

High ticket items are a lot harder to sell than low priced items, so it's best to have a mix. A lot of marketers prefer products that convert easily in volume but pay little to high-paying products that rarely convert.

I used to have a retail business that specialized in sales of a collectible item that ranged in price from $5 to $1000. The price of the average item I sold? $20.

The high priced sales were infrequent and nice, but it was the lower end stuff that actually paid the bills every month.

As always, you should do some testing, but I tend to offer a mix of products, with emphasis on the low end.

Charlie

Tom (post#2) has offered some great advice.

I can't give you an answer because I don't know what you think is a high or low ticket product. Some think my 25k coaching is low ticket, some guys get 100k for their mentoring or coaching...

As for higher ticket being harder to sell...not true...depends on your market, they decide what is high or low.

Selling yachts is different than selling ebooks.

The "general" consensus in IM (around here) is the funnel goes from low to high...

Free or low cost intro
Low cost follow up. building rapport as you go
Higher cost...

Big ticket

Something like
free to 7 dollars
19 to 34
249
997

And then 2000 and up

Dan Kennedy has an Inner Circle which gets 18 to 25 thousand a pop...and he is no where near the top of that scale.

So, what matters is what you are bringing to the table...

Do you have a yacht or an ebook in mind? Because there is NO one size fits all, and TIME plays a big part along with capital if you have it or can access it.

So, a question from this side is...

What is your goal? What do you want? How much time are you willing to spend? And what assets do you have?

THEN, maybe we can (or can't) tell which might be most suitable for your efforts.

gjabiz

I prefer both. I do both. Main income can come from both. But it's best if you already have a list of people who's bought from you before - or your name is just so incredible in your niche that people will jump on your product and buy it before buying themselves dinner.

Usually it's a ladder, a funnel, etc. I was looking for a gig for awhile to sell more expensive packages via the phone as I'm a pretty good phone person, but it fell through the cracks.

Most of us start low. That's not right, by any means, but it's easier for your self-image to swallow when you're first getting your sea legs, and you're not sure about what value you can provide.

Marc

Probably a funnel starting with low ticket and then increasing in increments of 10 or so up to high end products. It all depends on the product.

Good quality answers so far in this thread.

I find it very interesting how individuals and their own comfort zones determine what:

a) "low" and "high" ticket mean, and

b) they feel is easier to sell.

In contrast to poster #4, I have an easier time selling things at say $500 (to me, the beginning of "mid-ticket", and what I still think of as "cheap") and up than low ticket items. My comfort zone says "if it's cheap, it must not be good quality and it's hard for me to stand behind it"--unless there's evidence to the contrary.

A friend who worked in the RV sales field, certainly not a low ticket marketplace, has a lower ticket comfort zone and believes poor people are easier to sell to because they are used to throwing their money away.

I have a different belief, that goes like this:

The people who have money HAVE MONEY.

The people who don't have money DON'T HAVE MONEY.

And so, to me, a high ticket item is easier to sell because the person who has money merely moves some of their pile over to you...a stress-free operation compared to the person who does NOT have money, who has to "rob from Peter to pay Paul (you)."

Perhaps we both are "right", for ourselves.

What I've found is this:

> Low ticket buyers rarely convert to higher ticket sales
> Mid and high ticket buyers often convert to further high ticket, repeat sales
> These results are probably due more to my own comfort zone, self-esteem, self-image than anything else.

Throw me into a situation where I need to make $2000 in a week and I'd much rather make ONE sale to get there than five $400 sales. The energy and complexity I have to go through to get that one sale is far less than the five...and in my mind it's easier to get that one sale from a buyer who has the cash and values the solution I'm providing.

(Saturday post coming up; grab a coffee - or maybe several.)

21 years ago, almost to the very day in fact, I made what I considered to be my first high ticket online sale.

It was a website design for a hotel for (the memory is a bit hazy here) about £250. At the time I didn't even know the phrases high and low ticket, so I didn't think of it in terms of ticket price, but considering that I would have done it for free, considering that I was a student on a budget, the £250 was a nice figure that I would have called, had I known the phrase, high ticket. I came from money, had a little, too, was a Brit who'd been lucky enough to grow up in prep schools, boarding schools, and I was currently going to the first red brick (what you would call Ivy League in America) university that I would end up attending. But that £250 was greatly appreciated. I was working at a hotel in town and had literally, only months prior to the design job, started learning HTML from a mammoth book purchased from those old-fashioned things we old-timers call "book shops." The hotel owners discovered my hobby, needed a website and asked me to whip one up, and when I'd finished and received my payment it felt wonderful: I'd pulled something from my head, done something that I love, and been given enough money to buy half of my text books the next semester. Thumbs up. In over two decades, having stepped into more markets and setup more business systems that you would believe, online and offline and combinations of the two, sometimes as an affiliate, sometimes not, I now do of course know the phrases low, mid, and high ticket, and as we all do, I have my own personal interpretations.

Ticket values from my own point of view:

- Low Ticket: Between $1 and around $15 (primarily, for me, PPL offers, books, eBooks).
- Mid Ticket: Anything over $15, and up to around $10,000.
- High Ticket: Over $10,000.

As of this morning, the above represent around 2,000 different interests for me.

This is what I think:

He Makes More, He Makes More

A newbie might ask: which can earn you more money, the low tickets or the high tickets? My answer is that the person who sells low tickets can earn more than the person who sells high tickets. And vice versa. In an efficient system, one in which an efficient price is set, it is just as easy to sell a low ticket as it is a mid-range or a high ticket product or service. I'll tell you why. When you, as a sales person, present the right offer at the right price and do so in the right way to the right person, it is no more difficult to sell a product priced at $1,000,000 as it is to give away a product for free.

1. Right offer
2. Right price
3. Right presentation
4. Right person

Ticket price is therefore irrelevant. This, as far as I'm concerned, is a stone cold fact.

What you have to remember, however, is that we're talking can, not is able to. So, when the same newbie, or in fact anyone, asks the question, "Which one is easier?," the answer can never - again, a stone cold fact coming up - be set in stone. Some people do not have it in them or the requisite resources to sell high tickets, and believe it or not, again we have a vice versa. The person who can sell the high tickets can not always sell the low tickets.

1. Ticket price, in an efficient system, is irrelevant.
2. In reality, ticket price is very much relevant, due to the personal strengths and weaknesses of marketers.

How You Sell

Whether you prefer low, mid, or high ticket products or services is, I believe, dependent on how you prefer to sell. This is why, when a thread like this one arrives, you have mixed feelings on which type of ticket is best. Personal judgement boils down to three main factors (although there are others, these three are the most influential factors):

1. How you sell.
2. Your strengths.
3. Your weaknesses.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Example 1: The Dating & Webcam Affiliate

Joe, the dating and webcam affiliate, promotes, among other things, pay per lead and pay per signup dating offers and revenue share webcam offers. When he refers a person to a dating website, through his unique affiliate code, and when that person registers a free account or buys an account on that site, Joe receives an affiliate commission. Similarly, when one of his free referrals to a webcam site buy some coins, and effectively upgrade their account, he receives an ongoing cut of whatever they spend (and some of these chaps have been known to spend 5 figures a month). In terms of PPL, commissions tend to average around the $5 mark for adult offers, around the $8 mark for mainstream offers, and for non-tier 1 countries his top-end commissions can be anywhere from $0.20 to around $15. In other words: low tickets. His mid tickets pay anywhere from $100 to $200 per signup for dating, and due to volume and quality traffic, his revenue share percentage for cams is never lower than 60% for the lifetime of his referrals.

To make money as a dating and webcam affiliate, he utilizes every system going. Literally. And he drives traffic, obviously, from every traffic source going. Joe , in old school terms, is what we call a "whale." If he sends anything less than 1,000 leads in a day, his AM (his account manager) will hit him up on Skype, just to find out if his favourite whale has died. Joe will generate around $7,000 every day, and believe it or not, Joe is very far from being at the top of the whale food chain.

And to Joe, this is all relatively easy. Relatively. He has, you see, his systems in place. And they're efficient. He has his team running the adult TGPs, MGPs, link lists, hybrids, review sites. He has another team running his adult tubes and his forums. He has yet another team who manage his social media, his SEO, his video marketing, his email marketing, his ebook creation and syndication, his legit bot creation and usage, his - well you get the picture. Most of Joe's time is devoted to a few very much isolated areas where he entirely manages the processes. He lets no one go near his PPC campaigns, for instance. That and a few other key areas.

Does he rely on any one thing? Not Joe. Joe is diversified. Give you an example. Does he rely on email marketing? Get real. You see, people will tell Joe that you need email marketing, that it means a stable business, that it represents the best way to sell. You know what Joe will tell you? He'll tell you two things: He'll tell you that there are better ways to sell than through an email, and that the only thing you ever need to worry about when it comes to income stability is traffic. Joe is like a magician when it comes to traffic. He will always have traffic. It will always grow. And, through experience, Joe knows precisely how much each type of traffic is worth to him. Not only that, but he knows how much traffic he'll get today and in 30 days from now, and he knows how much money he'll make from it today and in 30 days from now. Traffic, Joe will tell you, is stability. And when you know what Joe knows, you know a stone cold fact: that traffic will only ever grow.

The above scenario represents what Joe does in the dating and webcam industries. He doesn't of course limit himself to those industries. But, to explain how he views low, mid, and high tickets, it is fairly elucidating I think. Joe literally, nowadays, does very little at all when it comes to selling. He doesn't need to. Remember, he has his systems. They're all in place. Yes, they always require tweaking, but essentially: the platforms to send and receive traffic are in place and they are efficient and truly require very little selling - and you could even say no selling - whatsoever.

Joe prefers low and mid ticket products and services due to:

- How he sells;
- His strengths;
- His weaknesses.

If you asked Joe, "Hey Joe, could you sell my $550K website for me, mate?," he'd shake his head and tell you, "Not my thing, matey."

Example 2: The Domainer

Alex, the domainer, began as a domain flipper - registering and buying domains for one price and flipping them, selling them, for a higher price within days to weeks - but soon discovered more money, far more actually, can be made in two more evolved areas:

1. Long-Term Domaining.
2. Website Development.

Alex has worked in the domain industry just as long as Joe has worked in his own industries. A regular feature on DNForum, who look snobbishly down their noses at the NamePros bottom-feeders, a chap with hundreds of relevant connections, immense buying power, and the systems in place to work to an almost perfectly efficient level, Alex is happy doing what he does. He loves the kill of the sale, he loves getting a deal, he loves developing properties that he considers to be important. He would no more promote a dating or a webcam offer than he would pull down his undies in Starbucks and sing and dance around the terrified patrons in an homage to Lady Gaga. But let me tell you 2 things he would do.

He would post a thread on any number of industry forums (IM, adult, eCommerce, anything goes) telling them he had a $1,000,000 budget, for instance, and asking the forum members to offer up their best domains for their best prices. Such forums are a haven for sweet deals for Alex. Not the domain forums, understand, where he must always compete and where more people understand the value of a domain or a website property, but these industry forums, forums where people could be struggling to make a buck, where they might be desperate for a windfall, where, as we now know, where true value of a domain is not universally known. It is here where Alex picks up his sweetest deals. Domains for $10,000 or $50,000 that are worth 10 times that (sometimes more) to Alex. Sometimes he even picks up domains for a few hundred bucks and these end up being his biggest earners.

He would also keep tabs on ailing businesses. Oh boy, does Alex love an ill business. Does he pop round and offer it chicken soup and dry bread, perhaps two paracetamol tablets? Heck no. Alex is the Grim Reaper, not a nurse. Not a murderer you understand. No, no. To Alex, what Alex does, well, he likes to think of it as euthanasia. The business is on the way out. Alex, he just gives it a little push. $10,000 here, $500,000 there. Makes no difference to Alex, just so long as the price is right, as Drew Carey might say. Alex euthanizes and, putting aside his Grim Reaper cloak and scythe, he then devotes himself to one of two things: holding on to the domain for the right time and the right person or, and this is his favourite, developing that domain into something he can be proud to tell his friends and family; heck, the world.

If you asked Alex, "Hey mate, could you show me how to promote Find Bride? I hear it pays $8 for a free registration. Not bad, eh?," Alex would scratch his head, shake his head, and tell you, "Sorry, mate, not my thing."

To Summarize My View, Then

In a perfect system, we're talking on paper perfect, ticket price is irrelevant, but in real-world terms, it is most assuredly relevant because successful selling for low, mid, and high ticket products and services is reliant on how we sell, our strengths, and our weaknesses.

Which type of offer is better? All things being equal, and all things being efficient, it depends on you.

- Tom

You should do a combination of both, you cannot put all your efforts in only one. However any commission per sale below $40 is a waste of time for me. The drawback is that high ticket items are very hard to convert into sales, but if you can get targeted traffic into your sales funnel you can make a killing!

HI
No one who don't know you will invest in a high ticket offer,

The tact is to start with low cost offer which gives value and warm them up and give more value leading to a high ticket sale.

If the Value you give them is great them over time they will move up the ladder.

1. FREE PRODUCT
2. FRONT-END PRODUCT
3. UPSELL/DOWNSELL
4. MEMBERSHIP PRODUCT (RECURRING INCOME)
5. HIGH TICKET SALES

I prefer high ticket items. The low ticket one's are just to get the ball rolling.

You'll always make more revenue with high ticket products and services if you know what you are doing. It takes a lot of sales to make great income with low-priced products, but you must figure in the lifetime value of the customer from your email marketing efforts and repeat sales as well.


Best Hotels

Personally I will do both low ticket and high ticket offers cause some prospect might not want to buy your high ticket offer immediately but when you lure them in with a low ticket offer at the front, build good rapport with them and make them trust you, you will be able to sell high ticket offers to them.

Is what I do and it works all the time. All you have to do is set up a good sales funnel, send quality traffic to it, get them in your list, make them know, like and trust you and it becomes much easier to sell to them.

So I suggest you do both. Hope that helps.

In my opinion it would depend on your reach. For example if you are promoting a $10 product and you are only getting 100 visitors a day on average, your conversion rate would have to be sky high to make any kind of profit.

So it would be helpful to set a target based on the traffic that you are getting and either go with a high ticket item or find something in the middle and work on improving your conversion rate.

Typically, you want a low end offer something like $5-$50 then upsells in your funnel. It works great. The real money is in the high ticket products, but if you know what your doing you can also have a nice residual income from lower ticket items. All depends on the platform your selling and the products.

as a starter, I would prefer dealing with both. This is because the low priced ticket sale items tend to convert easily but with low income. on the other hand the high priced sal items tend to convert slowly but have high amount of returns. Combining both will ensure that as I wait for the high priced ticket to convert, the low priced will help me in running the business. The low priced ticket sale items also act as my platform to gain more experience in the world of income, gain more trust and eventually be able to effectively reach to the higher niche. thanks

From much testing over the years, I prefer promoting low ticket items as I find higher ticket items have a much higher refund/chargback rate. Yes I understand that some have the motto "if you can take $20 from someone, you can take $200" but I personally don't like to do things that way. Reasonably priced items, aon a preferably recurring committment nets me the highest profit margins.