When many companies are looking to improve their sales, they often turn to marketing and bring in new leads by putting in more. However, they fail to reach out to one of the important growth prospects i.e. existing customers. Do not fail to pay attention to your most valuable potential market when expanding your business. Upselling is a great opportunity in keeping the current one, than to acquire other five customers by spending more.
Online upselling is considered a powerful tactic for driving in more revenue from a sale. It is a technique used by most of the successful brands who found it effective.
Upsell is when you influence a customer to buy a more expensive item or upgrade service to make the sale more profitable. As a sales tactic, in person it can seem a bit pushy, but online, it’s easier for brands to take a more nuanced approach.
In this post, we’ll keep a close eye at:
- Differentiation: Upselling & Cross-selling
- 5 Steps to finding opportunities to make an Upsell
- Why should you start using them?
- 5 Tactics to Upsell like a pro
Differentiation: Upselling & Cross-selling
Competition is intense as ever in all forms of business. Upselling and cross-selling is the way to get ahead of the competition and increase your customer value. With an upsell and cross-sell approach one can meet revenue goals in a way that is most profitable for your business.
Not only can upselling and cross-selling bring a great opportunity for you, but it also helps your customers in forming and maintaining their trust. If we take a closer look, upselling has more to do with your customers’ additional product or service needs than pushing more to them.
Upselling is a sales technique where the customer is suggested a higher-priced option or add-on to the service they are looking to buy for. As an example, introduce a larger screen with added features to a customer looking for a television.
Cross-selling is a sales technique where a customer is offered a complimentary product or service that the given product doesn’t cover. As an example, introduce the additional buy on by other customers on the same product which related to each other.
Upselling & Cross-selling helps a B2B in:
- Generating additional revenue than regular selling
- Building stronger customer relationships
- Increasing customer lifetime value
- Balancing growth between new & existing customers
- Improving customer loyalty and experience
- Broadening choice of products & services
- Enhancing long term value of appreciation
Most of them confuse upselling with cross-selling which is the utter need to differentiate and eventually benefit from two different sales techniques. An example, to clear out both closely related terms is of the Airport. Upselling is an upgrade from economy to first class. Cross-selling is offering food and headphones for the sale on the plane. Upsell is to convince the customer of the added value of a little high-priced item while cross-sell is to find and provide products that will enhance your customer’s experience.
5 Steps To Find Opportunities To Make An Upsell
- Hop-On Customer’s Stage Of Journey
The first and most important step in finding upsell opportunities is to take a journey-based approach. It is the strategy focused completely on the stages and touchpoints of the customer journey. It is possible by continuously managing and measuring the journeys of your customers. A team operating the same can better understand the likes, interests, behaviours and goals.
Adopt a refined approach to customer journey management and experience a breakthrough in your sales strategy. With the measured analytics over different channels and time periods, jot down multiple touchpoints to stay relevant to a customer and fulfil their goal.
- Have A Single Customer View
Once you are well aware of your customer’s touchpoints you are likely to get along their multiple journeys altogether. It is suggested for a marketer to make upsell offers that have a high win rate only when they have a single customer view across all of their touchpoints.
A customer journey analytics program that is supported by the required data enables you to get a single and unified view of the customer. As it integrates data across a variety of channels like email marketing, marketing automation systems, chatbots, etc. In addition to that, customer journey analytics include identity matching to determine what services are being used and by whom.
- Gather Customer Behaviour Data
To drive growth and expansion through upselling, behavioural segmentation is the key. Major companies employ machine learning algorithms that use customer behaviour data such as the user’s purchased history, type of items in their shopping cart, and items they’ve previously viewed but not purchased. A similar case is done through the medium of advertisements.
Start smart-selling by collecting customer behavior data to determine when to and when not to target customers for an offer. Identify customer segments by tracking customer’s end to end journey so you can make dynamic upsell decisions that are profitable in the long run.
- Grow Using Predictive Analysis
The customer journey data that you measured can be used to predict a customer’s likelihood of responding to an upsell offer. The input data can be predicted based on the services or products that are commonly purchased by the user. This knowledge is even valuable for the product marketing team to create products and bundles around them.
Most of the time, due to a weak marketing strategy the data collected is left unconnected. With a successful customer journey analytics program you can solve the problem by integrating data from different sources. In this way, the customer experience team can generate insights from the given data.
- Measure Upsell Campaigns In Real-Time
Customers today expect a personalized recommendation bar and offers driven by their preferences, recent interactions and recent product experiences. To be able to stay relevant, marketers need to make a suitable offer to the person at the opportune time via appropriate channels.
Your customer journey analytics program enables you to do just that. For an advanced customer journey, your platform needs to integrate with commonly used marketing tools. To gauge the effectiveness of an upsell campaign, determine the need for adjustments to future campaigns as you will need to monitor real-time insights over the long term.
Also Read: 5 Helpful Tips To Improve Sales For B2B
Why Should You Start Using It?
When you introduce an upselling technique to businesses, they often consider it as a creepy salesman offering services and products that require customers to spend a few bucks just to promote their sales. No, it’s not that on the virtual ground.
The point of upselling is to provide customers with the options so they can make a smart choice purchasing something they need. It is, in fact, a win-win situation for both. At the same time, you show customers that you care and expect their needs. It is much more closely related to customer satisfaction. Any action regarding that increases loyalty and minimizes the costs of losing existing as well as new customers.
A huge benefit is that upselling works for both businesses and customers. Once you establish trust with the customer, you can go for the first shot by telling them the related products and services you offer. When you upsell to a customer, you proffer them the convenience of staying with you and flexibility to choose what they need.
Trust is vital, forming customer relationships is all about knowing their wants and needs. When you understand them, you can easily anticipate their needs and offer the products and services that fit them well. A gained customer trust will then earn you a more expanded business.
5 Tactics To Upsell Like A Pro
1) Create Buyer Persona In Detail
The key to successful upsell lies in discovering the client’s pain points, challenges, goals and positioning yourself from their side. As if you just offer the service under the sun to each prospect, your approach is visionary. You also risk the divisive buyers.
For that reason, we always recommend B2B businesses to draw out a series of detailed buyer personas that focuses on the industry type and challenges faced by each person for the product. Then when the lead comes in, you can easily associate one with the other challenges you know they face. This way you build genuine customer relationships that lead to organic upsell offers.
Also Read: B2B Buyer Personas: The Why, The How, And The Who – With Exclusive Examples
2) Bundle Relevant Products Together
Earlier, we reflected upon how cross-selling is simply recommending add-on products. Bundling is very much similar to that as here you’re still recommending the supported items but grouping them in a bundle. Cross-selling refers to the same but here you only introduce high-priced items as a form of upgradation.
For example, if a prospect is looking to buy a wooden desk, then you should offer them a sturdy table that is highly robust and persistent along with some desk accessories that might influence their need. The package price and value should seem better than the total unit prices for each item, so it’s a win-win for both.
3) Use Checkout Page Effectively
Has it happened with you, when you are about to checkout and you end up adding more items to your cart on the same page? Well, that is a clear tactic to upsell. Prefer to add a related product on the cart page of your eCommerce store and make sure it complements the product available in their cart.
If you sell a variety of products, then you will want to use your data to figure out what people with similar purchases have bought along with the given. Amazon had adopted this algorithm to fine-tune the upsell and cross-sell offers. You can also validate the last purchase by linking the upsell to what they have already bought. It makes your customers feel good about the purchase.
4) Time To Build Relationships
Businesses thrive based on relationships. When you’re looking to upsell a customer, the primary focus should be to add value and solve problems. Daily, your service should communicate with customers and understand their pain points and problems they are facing. Once that is identified, it’s all about offering solutions and using the experience in working out other problems.
The better the client relationship, the easier the upsell. If you don’t know your customer and how they work, it’ll be much harder to sniff out the problems and figure out an angle for an upsell. It’s always best when your business and marketing cohere with one voice, as the deepest relationships are built then.
5) Remarket Ads To Boost Upsells
To deliver the most effective upsell offers, social media is the most popular channel. Help your upsell campaigns by uploading customer email lists to Facebook to create a Facebook custom audience and run Facebook ads to the same audience to prompt an upsell.
If you use email marketing to reach out to your customer base and are often getting lesser open rates then Facebook ads are the solution. Combine both upsell by email, so you can double the reach and observe a much higher conversion rate. That is how you can retarget ads on social media to boost your upsells.
Final Thoughts
Are you ready to start upselling and generate more revenue than your existing marketing plan? Then get these expert techniques to work for you!
With the breakthrough of technologies, measure the customer journey in simpler steps. The time is now, give upselling and cross-selling a go and see what you deserve. By ensuring upsell and cross-sell offers are not there to achieve a marketing goal, but to help customers achieve their own goal.
By making these techniques work, it’s crucial to remember that not a single autonomic task will be held responsible for the extra revenue you make. But the standalone touchpoints make it happen. Upselling is entirely tied to the full spectrum of touchpoints for a customer right from marketing to sales, buyer journey, and back to sales. It is what makes the upsell more profitable and worthwhile for both parties.
Thus, stop losing opportunities and in case of help, connect! also, start investing in the latest algorithms of collecting user preferences to make upsells and cross-sells your biggest marketing move.