A dental client approached me this week about marketing and selling her practice enhancement products online.  My recommendation to use “The Ascension Model” to market and sell their information products.  This was an idea that the Surfing Guru had presented to us so I thought I would talk about here and how we presented it to this client.

With an “Ascension Model”, you are creating a sales funnel in which the prospect would sign-up for an initial product. Once the new customer is generated, they will be upsold via automated follow-ups for additional and more expensive products.

For example, we would have pages on the website focused on the different products and services that the client’s group offers. Each one would have some type of special report or video broadcast that they would find to be very helpful. Once they take a few minutes to read or view some of this helpful information, they will then be presented with an opportunity to buy the products that you are selling. The illustration below is from Entrepreneur’s Journey in a series about the Sales Funnel, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in reading more about the Ascension Model.  The illustration shows the different sources of how they could enter the sales funnel and how they advance to higher priced producsts and services.

The main point of this first purchase is not to make a lot of money. The point of this purchase is simply to pay for marketing costs. However, that’s not to say that you won’t or can’t bring down the costs to where the first purchase is very profitable. The whole point of the model is to get a lot of interested prospects into the funnel so they could purchase other products that they would be interested in.

The real money is made once they have bought the first product. At that point, they will go through the upsell process for other products. For example, this could be more detailed products in the same area of focus or a related product.

Center Piece - The Web Site

While the Ascension Model works perfectly well in the offline world, it would require a lot of manual work.  And since I prefer Laziness over constantly doing work, I recommend having a web site as the centerpiece of the business model.  Here are some of the capabilities it provides. 

• Lead Generation – A Website with the specific goal of collecting e-mail addresses of potential prospects so that they could be marketed to directly.
• Shopping Cart – The website would have a shopping cart section that could be used to sell both physical products that would be shipped to the client and digital products (like webinars) that could be e-mailed to them.
• Automated, time-sequenced e-mails – The website would automatically e-mail leads on a time-sequenced basis. This would increase the “customer contacts” to slowly warm the lead and provide them with value so that they would be interested in eventually purchasing the product.

Online Marketing/Pay-Per-Click

By building a web site that is the centerpiece of the business model, you can start driving traffic quickly and easily to the website to start testing it out. 

Based on our experience in the client’s industry, Pay-Per-Click fees would be about $2-$3 per click. We believe that we can generate sales for the first product at the rate of around 1%-2% or at the cost of $100-$300 per lead. Obviously this range is very big and through constant testing and changing, we would be able to get a lower rate.

But if the products that they sell are around this rate (and I think they would be closer to $500), I think that the first product could be used to pay for the marketing costs, gain a little bit of profit, and then the sales after that would be all profit.

Additional Opportunities

There are several opportunities that we have with this model.  The client can use it to constantly add on new products that can easily be sold to already engaged and active customers.  This is part of the real profit in the Ascension Model.  Here are a few examples of how they could add additional profit to their business model:

• Live Webinar – Existing clients would be extremely interested in attending a live webinar hosted by the client. At the end of the session there could be Q&A for them to ask questions directly. The value would be extremely high and existing clients would be willing to pay a premium for this access. These webinars could then be recorded and sold at a reduced rate to others who weren’t able to attend.
• Subscription Model – Once a client base has been built, clients could be sold on a subscription model in which they get exclusive material by paying a monthly fee. This could involve personalized newsletters, one-on-one discussions, or whatever the group comes up with.

Benefits of an Ascension Model

The benefit of the Ascension model such as this is that it provides the client with an automated online business. They will just be required to create the products (most of which have already been created), provide some direction with the marketing materials, and then let us generate new clients and upsell for additional revenues and profits.  Then, they too can become Lazy Business Owners.