How to sell one high-ticket offer and reach six-figure earnings

Running your own business means you’re in charge of your own hours and your income.

But this freedom often leaves many creators feeling like they’ve left one hamster wheel for another.

That’s because most of us go from offering freebies to selling as many low-ticket offers as possible. While this can help build an audience initially, it’s not enough to scale.

Add to that the fact that low-ticket offers require regular updates and more effort on marketing, and you’re bound to find yourself in the middle of where you don’t want to be… burnout.

The solution? Create one high-ticket offer and generate a six-figure revenue stream to scale your creator journey.

Investing your time in a high-investment offer that zeroes in on your audience’s problems and solves them with accountability is much better than chasing sales on offers that rarely bring ROI.

Here’s what that looks like:

What is a high-ticket offer?

A high-ticket offer provides high value for your customers—at a high price. What high-ticket item look like varies wildly based on the goods and services you provide, but for many creators, it’s through courses, coaching, community-building, or productized services.

What price is considered high-ticket? Everyone’s favorite answer: It depends. But $1,000 or more is a good starting point.

Is selling high-ticket digital products and services worth your time?

The catch with high-ticket product is that they take more of your time and energy to build and sell. You may be wondering, “Are high-ticket sales worth it?” Creating high value in exchange for a higher price isn’t always easy. But it can pay off in big ways if you’re willing to take the risk.

With a high-ticket offer, you can:

• Earn more money by working with fewer customers: A smaller number of customers means you can give the customers you do have more attention instead of spreading yourself thin across a large number of people.
• Reduce the chances of burnout: Creator burnout is real, and one of the best ways to handle it is by creating a single high-ticket offer. Doing this means you can drive more revenue with a single offer rather than trying to keep multiple plates spinning.
• Engage more deeply with your audience: The more you pay for something, the more you value it. Part of creating a high-value offer is that you’re going to be doing more with your community—watching them learn and grow.

Next, let’s look at the different types of high-ticket items you can create for your audience.

5 types of high-ticket offers (with examples!)

There’s no one-size-fits-all guide to crafting the perfect high-ticket offer—it depends on your skill, solution, audience, and creativity. But there are a few common types of high-ticket products that your audiences will expect to see at a higher price point:

1. Courses and cohorts

These are pre-recorded courses or live cohorts that solve a particular problem through hands-on guidance. The difference between low-ticket and high-ticket courses is that it requires a considerable time investment for your audience, with direct access to you as an expert.

High-ticket course example: Succeeding in business with Dorie Clark

Author Dorie Clark launched her first course in 2016 and made $269,000 in the first 18 months. She relaunched with Kit in 2020 and brought in $250,000 in just one launch. This high-ticket offer came after years of building a segmented audience interested in what she had to say.

Yes, I would love my email subscribers to buy things from me, but I would rather them respect me and, three years from now, buy a $2,500 product rather than harass them today so that they spend $50 with me and then immediately unsubscribe.

Her courses vary in scope and cost, from $99 for a one-hour webinar and accompanying coursework (low-ticket) to $2,495 for her “Recognized Expert” course, which has over 50 hours of video instruction, monthly Q&As, and takes 12 weeks to complete.

2. Personal and group coaching

Personal or group coaching involves mentoring, consultation, and one-on-one time with clients to help them solve specific problems and reach their goals with a tailor-made strategy. This model can include a single, one-time, one-to-one live session with the coach or multiple personal or community mentoring sessions, along with elements like recorded training, workbooks, and other supplemental materials.

What takes these from low-ticket to high-ticket is the level of community and access to yourself as an expert that you offer.

High-ticket sales example: The Creative Focus Workshop with Jessica Abel

As a cartoonist, Jessica Abel found plenty of talented artists who struggled to turn their creative spark into a real business. She launched her group coaching program, The Creative Coaching Workshop, to help serious creatives make a living from their work and find community with one another.

I’m teaching others the same kind of ‘take control of your own life, build and rely on community, do the thing even though it’s scary’ thing that I did when I started out and is at the heart of the DIY, grassroots, no gatekeepers ethos of the mini-comics and punk communities I came up in.

The course is priced at $750 and includes online coursework, live coaching calls, and access to the Autonomous Creative Collective community for peer-to-peer accountability. She also offers personal coaching packages starting at $2,500.

3. Masterminds

Similar to personal or group coaching, these are closed, niche-specific groups where specialized individuals network, discuss business, and learn from each other.

Masterminds can be hosted on a communication platform like Slack, in-person, or through regular conferences and can be free or paid.

High-ticket mastermind example: SavvyCircle

Abbey Ashley created a step-by-step virtual assistant training program to help VAs ramp up their business and learn the ropes of a brand-new industry. While most of her students take her signature course, The SavvySystem, she now offers a high-touch mastermind for those who want to go deeper called SavvyCircle.

We literally had our students begging us to create a higher-ticket, high-touch mastermind. Now, we bring about 50 people a year through it. It’s more of an intensive, hands-on course for folks already making money in their business. My goal is to get them from $2000 months to $10,000 or $20,000 months. This rounded out our ticket offers, so we offer our signature course, a lower-ticket monthly membership to our community, and now this high-ticket offer.

The mastermind is designed for service providers already hitting $2,000 months and requires an application to join. Unlike Abbey’s signature course, the mastermind offers exclusive access to coaching, a specific Slack community, and live calls, in addition to video recordings and other materials that go deep into scaling a VA business.

4. Productized services

This model involves selling a “done-for-you” service as a productized solution. Customers pay a fixed monthly amount to access a recurring service. The key is figuring out what you offer that can be developed into a subscription.

High-ticket sales example: DesignJoy

Designer Brett Williams offers design solutions for his clients through his productized design service DesignJoy. His clients pay him a fixed subscription fee every month for unlimited design requests, making Brett more money in a week than he used to in an entire year. He wrote on X/Twitter:

10 years ago I made just $20k as a designer. Today, I earn that every 5 days. That doesn’t mean I’m one of the greatest designers out there. In fact, I’m nowhere remotely close. But I crafted a model that made good design easy to get. That’s the key.

For productized services, the most important element is to make it a frictionless experience for your customer.

5. Retreats

Want to meet your audience IRL? Hosting a retreat for members of your community is the kind of high-ticket offer that takes a lot of planning to pull off but can be high value for you and them.

High-ticket retreat example: Sisterhood Circle Retreats with travel blogger Gloria Atanmo

Travel blogger and influencer Gloria Atanmo wanted to diversify her income away from brand partnerships and take control of her own income. She built a seven-figure business coaching other bloggers and running all-inclusive luxury trips for female entrepreneurs.

I realized that there weren’t many black female travel bloggers who were writing about some of the negative experiences – like being denied service at restaurants. If they experience this and think the whole world is like this they might never travel again. But if they see, ‘Oh no, this happened to Glo as well, then maybe they’d be inspired to keep going.’

While she no longer runs retreats as part of her business, these high-ticket sales anchored her regular coaching offerings and one-off workshops.

How to create and sell your first high-ticket offer

The challenge with making six figures from a single offer doesn’t lie in marketing or acquiring customers but in crafting an offer that provides value. So, how do you make a high-ticket product?

To create and sell your first high-ticket item, you’ll need to:

1. Understand your audience
2. Perform a competitor or gap analysis
3. Start planning your high-ticket offer
4. Design the flywheel to market and sell your high-ticket offer

Here’s a breakdown of how exactly you can create your first high-ticket product and set up a six-figure (or more) revenue stream for your business:

Step #1: Understand your audience *really* well

To make a high-ticket offer that sells, you need to know exactly what motivates your audience. This goes beyond basic demographics like age, gender, and income. You want to know everything about your ideal client. Here’s how:

Conduct niche audience research

The biggest mistake creators make with high-ticket offers? Thinking they’re selling to everyone.

You don’t need more clients. You need more ideal clients.

Instead of making assumptions about your audience’s needs, work to define your ideal clients and understand your audience to their core. Evaluate their pain points, dreams and goals, and ideal communication style.

You can learn more about your audience by:

• Social listening: Identifying and analyzing what people are saying about a topic on social media can help you gain more insight into a particular audience. You can use Sprout Social or Falcon to do this analysis and unearth rich insights.
• Polls: Polls are easy ways to get the answer to a simple question, or if you’re struggling to choose between two ideas. You can conduct polls on social media platforms like Instagram really easily to get a quick temperature check.
• Surveys: The most straightforward way to capture customer feedback is to ask them via a survey. Include questions that’ll help inform you about the type of offer you should create, which problems they’re facing, and how they want to communicate with you.
• Audience research tools: Tools like SparkToro help you understand your audience on a granular level by telling you which social media platforms or hashtags they use, who they follow and engage with, and which websites they visit. It can give you precious information on the obstacles your customers might be facing to help you create an offer around it.
• Interviews or focus groups: Conducting interviews or focus groups with a few vocal customers isn’t the most scalable or quick method, but it can give you a much deeper understanding of what your audience wants and needs from you.

Without a clear understanding of who you’re selling to, you’ll struggle to craft a valuable enough offering for them. Understanding your audience takes time, but it’s the foundation of creating a viable business offer.

Step #2: Perform competitive market research and gap analysis

A high-ticket offer requires significant investment and commitment toward solving the problem or achieving a specific goal.

But your customers won’t jump at the chance to invest unless it’s the best solution available.

So, it’s crucial to understand what other solutions exist in the market, assess gaps, and create an offer that bridges those gaps to offer the best solution.

Here are some things you want to look for:

• Who your competitors are
• What product/service they’re offering
• What their pricing is
• What some unique perks they’re offering are
• What their marketing strategy is
• How well the customers are engaging with the competitors’ content on social media
• What some of their weaknesses are (search for “company name + review” on Google and social media)
• What they don’t offer that can give you an edge

Use this information to understand how you’d fare in the market with your new solution and how you can one-up them to provide an excellent solution to your customers.

Step #3. Start planning your high-ticket sales

Your offer is the most important thing about getting sales, helping customers, and building a creator success story for yourself.

Here’s a roadmap you can follow to start planning your high-ticket offer:

1. Define the outcome of your offer: Your customers will invest because they want to see results. Everything needs to be developed considering how it’ll help customers achieve that goal.
2. Decide on the format: Pick the model that’ll help you take your customers to the goal, whether that’s personal coaching, a mastermind, or something else.
3. Set your client limit: A high-ticket offer lets you deal with fewer customers while earning more money. But you still need to put a cap on how many people you will accept so you can manage expectations and resources.
4. Decide on your content delivery method: It’s important to decide on your primary content method early so you have enough time to spend creating it. Your content doesn’t necessarily have to be video content; you can mix different types and include live sessions, workbooks, audio notes, community group interactions, and so on.
5. Invest in your tech stack: Once you know what you want to offer, you can figure out the right tools to make it happen. (Psst… Kit can help with pretty much any offer!)
6. Make your content visually attractive: Spend time branding your content, making it visually appealing and thorough with rich insights and examples to support understanding.
7. Pre-sell your ideas: You don’t want to spend months creating content for your offer and not get customers in the end. Instead, collect feedback along the way so you can incorporate audience insights into your offer.
8. Decide on your pricing: Understanding how much to charge and adding a price to your offer is perhaps the most daunting task. You don’t want to overcharge or undercharge for the solution you’re offering. Your best bet is to analyze what your competitors are charging, what kind of outcome you’re promising, how valuable that outcome is to your customers, and then decide on your pricing.

Creating the structure of your offer before putting it to market is a critical step, but don’t get caught in the trap of making it absolutely perfect before launching. You’ll want to incorporate customer feedback as often as possible into your product, especially one that is a high price.

Step #4: Design the flywheel to market and sell your high-ticket offer

You can’t go directly to your audience and tell them to buy a $2,499 mastermind subscription. You first need to build trust, establish your expertise, and nurture them with educational content and social proof.

Start with a small offer and then go for the big ask.

Traditionally, selling a high-ticket item meant working through the sales funnel: Going from acquiring a new lead to closing a sale in a linear progression. But today’s sales process is anything but linear. That’s why you need to set up a different marketing model: The flywheel.

Instead of focusing on creating content that attracts new people into your community, building a flywheel means infusing value into every interaction with you, creating a growth loop that continually builds lasting relationships with customers.

Here’s what a flywheel looks like in action for your high-ticket offers:

1. Attract subscribers to your high-ticket offer

To start the flywheel spinning, you’ll need to find a way to attract subscribers into your online orbit. To do that, you’ll need:

• A high-value lead magnet: A lead magnet helps you nurture your audience, earn their trust, and then ask them to invest in your product or service. A great example is hosting a free webinar promoting a course or mastermind. To make it high value, your webinar should include real, actionable tips so viewers learn something—no hour-long pitches.
• Set up a landing page: For your lead magnet to work, you’ll need a landing page to promote it. On this landing page, mention who would be the ideal customers, which problem you’re solving, why your customers need this solution, what’s included, and what change your offer will bring. Continuing the webinar example, you’ll want to include dates and times and a link to sign up.
• Promote your lead magnet: Once you’re set up with a landing page, you’ll need to spread the word about your freebie. For example, you can invite your existing subscribers and social media followers or run a newsletter advertising campaign. You can also add a little extra incentive by offering attendees a discount on other products or to be entered into a giveaway or include attending the webinar as part of an email list challenge.

If you plan on using a free webinar as your lead magnet, know that you don’t have to run it yourself every single time. You can pre-record the webinar and host it on a separate, locked landing page—just be upfront about that when promoting the event.

2. Engage and nurture subscribers that show interest in your high-ticket item

Every single subscriber on your list is not going to be interested in your high-ticket sales. In fact, most of them won’t.

Pay attention to which subscribers engage with your promotional content and which ignore it. Then, create a separate segment of interested subscribers to nurture that interest by:

• Creating a high-ticket sales page: You’ll want to create a sales page specific to your high-ticket product to fully explain its value, what customers receive, and how to sign up. Include this link as the call-to-action in your lead magnet.
• Sending automated emails based on behavior: Drop anyone who engages with your high-ticket offers into a specific nurture flow based on their email and website behavior. This might be someone who attended a webinar, downloaded a bonus freebie, or clicked on a certain link.
• Making purchasing your high-ticket item as easy as possible: Flywheels work on forces (like nudging someone with a nurture campaign) and by removing friction. Make it easier for your subscribers to make the leap by running an early bird discount, or creating installment plans for payment. Use Kit Commerce installment plans to help your customers pay for your high-ticket offers conveniently.

Simply go to Earn, Products, and then +New Products. Under payment methods, select the payment plan option and add details about the price, number of installments, and frequency of payments (monthly, quarterly, or yearly).

Then, complete your product details, and the payment plan option will be available to your customers.

Remember, these people raised their hands and said they wanted to know more about your high-ticket offer. You’re much more likely to see someone from this cohort make a purchase than someone brand new to your community, so give them the attention they deserve.

3. Delight and retain your new VIP clients

Keep the flywheel spinning by delighting the customers who purchase your high-ticket offer. They should be getting your best. Give it your all by:

• Making onboarding a breeze: Don’t leave customers hanging once they make a big, scary purchase like a high-ticket item. Automate an onboarding email sequence and get them into the product as quickly as you can so they build momentum.
• Exceeding their expectations: Everyone always wants the shortcut or hack to building a six-figure business. The best way to do it? Continue to blow your customers away. Offer bonus calls, workshops, or downloadables for your best customers. Word will get out that you deliver what you say you will and more.
• Offering top-notch customer support: Murphy’s Law holds true in spades when it comes to a high-ticket offer, so make sure you’re ready for technology, payment, and satisfaction issues and have a plan to resolve them quickly.
• Creating brand ambassadors: What’s next for your best customers? Give them a path forward by creating a brand ambassador program. This could be a loyalty program with VIP perks, special discounts for future products, or a referral discount for anyone who brings in new community members.

These customers will go deep with you, so make sure you’re ready to fully support them, no matter what kinds of products and services you offer.

Launch your next high-ticket offer with Kit

Attract high-quality clients with one offer, focus on getting your customers the results they want to see, say goodbye to burnout, and create a more consistent revenue stream for your business.

Start building something big.