You have certainly bought something online and suddenly started getting messages about related products. Maybe you have selected a product from an online store and began to receive recommendations for accessories or exclusive promotions. Does this senary sound familiar? This is what we call upselling.
A clear straightforward and easy to understand example is when you buy a Burger King or McDonald’s and the employee asks you: Would you like to add fries to your order for only 50 cents?
If the offer is attractive enough, you will accept it, right? It’s funny, you just wanted to buy a hamburger, but you ended up also paying for extra fries.
With a simple question, the company increased its sales and the money you spent at the store. If you think they will offer the same thing to other thousands of customers, that will mean a considerable increase in their profit.
This is how upselling works; this concept is also called additional selling.
Now that you understand the meaning of upselling, I would like to ask you something:
· Are you working to convince customers who bought from you to trust you again?
What I mean is that you should use your databases to send a newsletter and offer additional products or services, to convince your customers to buy again and become loyal followers of your brand. If they like what you are offering, they will also recommend your products to their friends, which means that you will be able to sell more.
To take advantage of your mailing list, you will need to captivate, convince, and attract your subscribers to your site, which is where the purchase will be completed. However, without sending compelling content, you will not be able to generate engagement, and your readers will ignore your posts.
Want to know more about this technique? Keep reading!
· What is upselling?
Additional selling or upselling is a marketing technique that consists of trying to sell more to the same customer. In other words, it’s about convincing the customer to buy something more expensive or spend more money.
In the end, the customer will be the one who will decide whether he wants to buy or not what is being offered, but a good upselling strategy could make a difference in your profits.
In fact, in this process, the key is to add value to what the customer wants to buy. So with upselling, the idea is to suggest a better product or an add-on that will add even more quality to the original purchase.
Also, you can work with upselling to improve your profits margin.
An effective upselling strategy will help you increase your return on investment (ROI).
There are two ways you could use to apply upselling techniques:
- Upselling for selling more products: You can offer complementary products
- Upselling for enhancing customer experience: You can offer the same product, but with more features or accessories that will enhance the product the customer is buying.
To help you understand better, I will give you an example!
Example.
Amazon is a success story in optimizing online sales. In fact, did you know that 35% of their revenue comes from upselling campaigns?
If for example, you want to buy a computer, they will offer you complimentary products, like a mouse and other options at the bottom of the sales page, for instance computers with different features.
The purpose of all these recommendations is to convince you to add another product to your shopping cart or even buy a more expensive computer.
As you can see, if you choose the suggested product or buy the accessories, you will be spending more money on Amazon, which means they will increase their profit.
To sell more, you need to offer your customers more options. You can’t force them to buy something else, but if you create a good upselling strategy, they will feel that they should not waste this opportunity.
· Advantages of working with upselling
Have you ever heard someone say that it’s easier to sell something to an old consumer than to a new customer? Well, the book Marketing Metrics showed that: “the likelihood of selling to a new customer is 5% to 20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.
The reason for this maxim is that your customer already knows your brand, he has already purchased a product and will trust you more than someone who is visiting your virtual store for the first time.
Therefore, that customer will be more receptive to suggestions and advice about better products.
Another advantage is that you already have his email, which allows you to interact with him to establish a customer-business relationship.
If you already have a customer database, you can create a marketing strategy with upselling to sell related products. That will allow you to:
- Increase profitability: upselling will enable you to sell additional products or services to generate more profits for the company.
- Visibility: Applying this technique will help you get rid of products that are in stock for a long time. For example; you could create a promotion to get rid of products that are not selling well and offer them along with your bestsellers.
- Delivering More Customer Value: If You offer added value to your customers and potential customers, through the products you are offering, you may exceed their expectations and convince them to spend more money on your store.
· How to use upselling in your email marketing strategy?
Implementing upselling in your email campaigns is a practical action, as long as you add value to the products or services you are offering. The best way to do that is to be careful when writing your messages, to convince your subscribers to open your newsletters.
To be successful, it will be essential to understand customer behavior and offer the products related to their purchase.
Recommended steps you should not skip:
How to use upselling in your email marketing strategy?
Implementing upselling in your email campaigns is a practical action, as long as you add value to the products or services you are offering. The best way to do that is to be careful when writing your messages, to convince your subscribers to open your newsletters.
To be successful, it will be essential to understand customer behavior and offer the products related to their purchase.
Recommended steps you should not skip:
1. Database Analysis:
The first thing you should do is to analyze the way your customers behave during and after the purchase process. That is, check which products they have already bought, the pages they are visiting, ensuring that you will send a newsletter with offers relevant to each subscriber.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for understanding customer behavior. Through this system, you’ll know what’s happening on your site: You can get statistics on visitors, unique users, conversions, clicks, email response data, among other reports. This information will help you when creating a personalized newsletter for each customer profile.
After reviewing all this data, stop for a moment and think. If we know that 48% of users bought the most expensive computer we are selling, and 42% preferred the cheaper option, why should we waste time offering the most low cost computer in our store? It would be best to try to sell the most expensive product first and offer the other option for users who don’t want to spend too much money at the moment.
As you can see from the previous example, it will be vital to analyze data about customer behavior to create increasingly effective campaigns tailored to their interests.
You should follow and understand your customers because only then you will be able to identify their needs or concerns, to offer the products and services they are looking for.
2. Custom Greeting:
Surely you, like millions of other people around the world, receive daily messages from many brands.
In 99% of cases, after opening them, you will close the email because you think that the message is super commercial, with no relevant information and extremely generic content.
But when you receive an email addressed to you, the situation changes, and from the beginning, you are more comfortable. That’s why when we receive a personalized message, we feel special because we can see that this company doesn’t just consider us another number.
It is highly recommended that you only use reliable data because strategies like “Batch-and-Blash,” that is, sending a newsletter to all subscribers without any criterion, is an outdated technique that could bring you negative results.
3. Show the items your customer has purchased:
A good way to apply the upselling technique is to email your subscribers to talk about items that they recently purchased. You could write a nice thank you message and explain that you would like to offer them an exclusive deal or help them to make the most of their new product.
You may also include similar products and relevant recommendations to each consumer. If he is satisfied with the purchase, he will check the other products you are offering.
4. Offer suggestions for similar products or items:
Sending related product suggestions will increase your sales chances, because the customer is already interested in a product; if the alternative you are offering is even better, he will check both options, even if only to compare them.
For example, if someone bought a computer from you, you could show additional accessories like mouse, mouse pad or suggest computers from different brands.
If you don’t work with articles related to the product that the customer bought, you could always let your imagination fly and try to offer indirectly related products such as a handsome set of coffee cups for a customer who purchased a computer from you.
Additional tip: You should always be helpful and try to talk to your customers, sending valuable information and useful recommendations to each consumer profile. If you decide to sell aggressively, your customers will never trust your word as they will always believe that you just want to get their money.
5. Make them feel part of the company:
You should always listen to what your customers would like to tell you. But it would be vital to send a newsletter to ask their opinion or suggestions on relevant topics, to convince them that they are important to your company.
For example, you could ask for a review, include a link to a survey in your emails, or simply ask them what they thought of the product you are selling.
In addition to demonstrating that you value their opinion, this technique can help you spot problems with your approach.
With this data, you can generate future upselling strategies and create personalized and more value-added emails.
6. Include contact information:
You should add more than your email address in your newsletters; If users have several contact options, they will feel safer buying from you, as they know that they can talk to you if they need help or have a problem with the product they bought.
If users can’t trust you, they will be afraid of spending money on your virtual store, so your job is to show that you have a serious business.
Allowing users to share suggestions about your products or services will be vital to improve your brand image.
Therefore, you should always include links to your social media profiles, so your customers will know where to find your business, or mention you to their friends (when sharing content) and follow you.
8. Plan the emails you will send:
The first step is to stop and plan; If you don’t know what you will send next; it will be challenging to create a successful upselling strategy.
For example, if you identify that a customer has already purchased a product, you should not send a newsletter selling the same item. It is improbable that he will buy the same product a few days after he received the article. That is why you should take the time to plan your actions and target your email list correctly.
You should customize the content of your emails and explain the benefits of the similar product or service you are offering. You can use texts, images, infographics, and anything you can add to convince your customers to buy the other product. If you are trying to sell a related product to a user who has already purchased from you, you should send a newsletter immediately after the purchase, as an upselling strategy doesn’t work when you send an email several months after the last purchase.
9. Create a captivating call to action:
When you send a newsletter to your customers with related products, they will ask themselves: All right! I am interested in buying what they are selling, but what should I do now?
To prevent your customers from getting lost and not knowing what to do, you should scrutinize the process and clearly explain what you would like them to do next.
That’s why you should add a compelling call to action with a button that will allow them to view new products or services.
10. Transactional Emails:
You can take advantage of notification emails to invite your customers to follow you on social media, subscribe to your newsletter, or join an event. You should take advantage of this opportunity to try to sell more or build trust.
Additionally, you can include a final offer or suggestion about new products.
This type of email has a high open-rate. So it’s a fantastic option for applying an upselling strategy.
Finally, you should apply the 80/20 rule: only 20% of the content should be commercial.
11. Analyze Your Results:
To find out if your strategy worked, you need to look at the results to detect problems and make changes to your planning. A marketing strategy is a continuous cycle of research, implementation, monitoring, analysis, and change. If something is not working, you should change your strategy and try again.
Remember that the smallest details could make a difference. When you are writing an email, think about how your customers will read and interpret your message, avoid problems, and convince them to trust you.
The key to the success of any upselling technique is to add value to what you’re offering, whether it’s for related products or complementary items. If you do things correctly, your sales will increase in a short time. Best of all, you can apply upselling to any product or service.
If you send a special newsletter to your customers, you will be able to increase your profits!
