Today, mar­keters are scram­bling to find ways to increase cash­flow. Some will try to find new prod­ucts to sell. Oth­ers will try to drive more traf­fic to their exist­ing sales pages.

How­ever, one area most peo­ple tend to over­look is the abil­ity to increase their cur­rent sales by upselling their cus­tomers the moment they checkout.

But I’m not refer­ring to one-​​time offers or addi­tional prod­ucts offered in the same sales fun­nel. I’m talk­ing about offer­ing cus­tomers the abil­ity to upgrade their purchases.

I pre­fer “upgrade” rather than “upsell” because the lat­ter has received a bad rap of late due to a few overzeal­ous or unscrupu­lous marketers.

Sell­ing “upgrades” is an area that can become prof­itable for many busi­nesses in increas­ing their exist­ing sales. It’s by sell­ing extended ser­vices or ben­e­fits pack­ages before or at the time of check­out, also known as the “extended warranty.”

There are numer­ous ways to sell extended war­ranties (or what I pre­fer to call “extended ben­e­fits”). These silent profit cen­ters exist in almost any busi­ness, which can increase the size of a customer’s pur­chase by 50%, 100%, even 200% or more.

Very often, the sale of these extended ben­e­fits have higher profit mar­gins, too.

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Scarcity is an effec­tive tac­tic often used in copy­writ­ing to cre­ate a sense of urgency in an effort to con­vince the unde­cided reader to make a pur­chas­ing decision.

After all, peo­ple pro­cras­ti­nate, and they do for a vari­ety of rea­sons. It’s sim­ply human nature. So the goal of apply­ing scarcity is to pre­vent prospects from pro­cras­ti­nat­ing.

As online con­sumers become wise to these direct-​​response copy­writ­ing tac­tics, one ques­tion often arises:

“What about dig­i­tal prod­uct down­loads, like ebooks and soft­ware? How can you cre­ate a sense of urgency for some­thing that, in itself, is lim­it­less or per­ceived as such?”

Here’s how to use scarcity sell­ing effec­tively with dig­i­tal products:

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