How to Optimize your upsell

Optimizing an upsell can take the shape of many forms and there are literally as many ways to optimize an upsell as there are upsell offers to make to your online and offline customers.

No matter what industry and no matter how you go to market, the art of the upsell is critically important to maximize your sales per customer and optimizing your upsell artistry is the logical next step after creating an upsell.

There is a dangerous trap of complacency that many online businesses will fall into because the reality of the upsell is that it just works.

Upselling works for everyone and upselling works for every product.

So when an online merchant introduces their 1st upsell, and they see an immediate increase in sales revenue from this upsell, it’s common to believe they hit the home run on their first attempt at bat.

But as anyone that has every run long term split testing will confirm, your first version is never going to be your last version. No matter how successful your upsell is performing, it’s highly unlikely that you hit every key point and every refinement on day one.

Nor is it likely that the same upsell you’re offering today is going to be the same upsell offer that maximizes your sales 6-months or a year from now. This "shifting" of offers is even more extreme when you have a seasonal product where the upsell offer needs to change along with the seasons.

A simple example of seasonal products requiring different upsell offers can be found with riding lawn mowers.

In the spring, selling a riding lawn mower to a customer should come with an upsell offer of the following items:

• Utility trailer
• Grass bagger
• Fertilizer – Growing formula
• Weed killer
• Grass seed

But selling this same riding lawn mower in the fall when the grass stops growing, the leaves are falling, and winter approaches, is going to require a new upsell offer because the customer is now thinking about different needs for the lawn mower.

• Leaf vacuum vs grass bagger
• Winter storage
• Service – Winterization of the engine and other mechanical systems
• Utility trailer
• Grass bagger

This is not to say that you will not still be successful with the old upsell offers, it’s just that you’ll be more successful if you optimize your upsell offer for the seasonality of the product.

I think it’s obvious that people are more likely to purchase items that they can visualize themselves using in the immediate future versus items that they know they’ll need but will not truly use them for half a year later.

Now this is simply 1 example of how you can optimize your upsell I think it’s obvious that this is a "real world" optimization scenario likely deployed by the "big box" retailers but more often than not ignored by the smaller retail operations.

So what can you do today to take simple steps to optimize your upsell?

While there are many ways to do this, I’ll focus on the easiest optimization steps you can use to improve your online sales.

1. Associative Products Lists – Use a brainstorming session to write down all the products and services associated with a specific product. Then compare this list to the upsell offers you have in place right now and if you’re not offering all these items somewhere in the upsell sequence... then you need to start start upselling these additional products today.
2. Split Test – This is the obvious answer to most sales questions. Split test the upsell offers and make sure the sales pitch you’re using is the best one to convert your prospects into buyers.

Often times a sales message that makes perfect sense to a highly knowledgeable person i.e. product owners, will fall flat on people with less in-depth knowledge of a product. Features that you know are fantastic may not seem as impressive when the end customer has no idea of the value of that feature and will then place a lower value on your offer.

3. Surveys – Ask your current customers why they bought from you to better understand what to pitch to your prospects. If you do not understand why someone likes your product, you’ll never understand how to optimize your upsell to convert more prospects into customers.

Are there more ways to optimize your upsell?

Of course, but if you can perform even 2 out of the 3 methods I’ve listed above, you’ll be light years ahead of your competition. Start today, make your first product association list, and start optimizing your upsell for greater sales and higher conversions.

About the author: As a web marketing coach and consultant for over a decade, Andrew have decided to share his experience and insights with online business people so that they can know more about smarter business automation system available in the market and save hell lot of money, time and energy.

As a web marketing coach and consultant for over a decade, Andrew has decided to share his experience and insights to help online business people become about business automation systems available in the market to save money, time and energy.