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Regardless of size, niche, or industry, upselling is a must for your e-store if you want to round up your bottom line. Though any business can upsell, to make an actual difference, you need to upsell customers in a way that makes them feel like you add up more value to their shopping experience.
That’s why as a OneUpSell user, you can access our 7 exclusive upselling tips to boost your average order value to new heights.
What is upselling?
Before we get to the main parts, it should be noted that upselling is slightly different from cross-selling. To be precise and concise:
- Upselling focuses on ‘up’, meaning offering a more premium version. Think a waitress asking you ‘Do you want to upsize your ☕ for only 50 more cents?’
- Cross-selling focuses on ‘across’, meaning offering complementary products. Think a KFC staff asking you ‘Do you want to buy combo ??? to save $5?’
Clearly, these 2 suggestive selling techniques share the same purpose – increasing your customers’ average order value. Given that the two terms are entwined and many brands used them interchangeably, we’ll do the same in this article.
But does your business need to upsell? Well, yes if you want to improve sales and average order value without much effort. Indeed, the possibility to upsell an existing customer is 5-10 times higher than that of a new one.
Maximize average order value with smart upselling
07 upselling tips that prove to work
Now that you know what upselling is & how important it is to incorporate upselling into your marketing and sale strategy, let’s jump right into 7 battle-tested upselling tips.
Tip #1: Personalize your upsell offers
Many hold the fallacy that the more offers you give your potential customers, the more chances you can convert them into sales. But that might prove the opposite when it comes to upselling.
In fact, when you give customers upselling offers, the best practice is to show limited products at a time, on a page. Otherwise, it would overwhelm your customers with too many options displayed in front of them, making their buying decisions unnecessarily harder.
This is indeed backed up by a famous study about jams where 2 sampling tables were set up in a grocery store. One table had 6 jam variants, the other had 24 varieties. Surprisingly, 30% of customers who checked out the table with 6 jams ended up buying one while only 3% of those who stopped by the table with 24 jams purchased one.
Clearly, the table with 6 jams converted 10 times better than the one with 24 variants. This means you should bring your customers personalized & selective upsell offers instead of drowning them under endless choices.
But how to choose the best products to upsell your customers that make them add to cart instantly without a second thought?
That question leads us to the second tip!
Tip #2: Upsell products that already sell well
If you do not dropship, then you probably want to push all the slow-moving items out of your inventory to cut down on the expenses of keeping them in your warehouse.
But there is a reason why those products don’t sell well. So if you think you can compensate for that with upsell discount, you may be wrong. Your customers are not easy-going, they want good stuff at good prices!
Hence, upsell your customers only the products that already sell well.
To check which items of yours are performing well, head to the Analytics tab on the sidebar navigation > select Reports > click on Sell-through rate by product. Herein, you could see which ones are generating the most revenue for your e-store.
Then use those items to upsell your customers with OneUpSell!
Tip #3: Make your upsell relevant
After picking all the high-performing products and SKUs for your upsell campaigns, make sure that those items are complementary to each other as well.
For instance, you can have an apparel store selling both men’s and women’s fashion lines. Even though a vintage skirt of yours is the best seller in town, you wouldn’t want to recommend it to a customer who has just added a sporty men’s sweater to cart.
Tip #4: Add a sense of urgency to your upsell
If you want your upsell campaign to shift into top gear, add a sense of urgency to your upsell offers! This is old but still gold.
By letting your customers know a good deal is about to end soon, they’ll have more motivation to make impulse purchases. You can do so by giving customers a sneak peek at your deal with a small banner on top of a page as shown:
One of the best upselling tips is to add a sense of urgency to your campaigns
However, perhaps you would want to say no to a full-screen upsell pop-up that shows up when customers have just arrived on your homepage, which leads us to the next tip.
Tip #5: Don’t be too pushy
Imagine you arrive at Sephora and a salesperson there talking non-stopping about the great offers and discounts they have, how that will make you feel?
Annoyed? Yes, that’s how your e-shoppers feel if you welcome them to your homepage with a ton of upselling offers.
In other words, showing upsell widgets at the wrong time or on the wrong page might scare your potential customers away from your store. Instead, the best time for you to upsell your customers is when they have the highest buying intention. Specifically, on product pages and cart pages.
With OneUpSell, you can feature a stunning pricing table or show customers smart upsell messages on cart pages.
Tip #6: Be cautious about your upsell price
If a customer buys a $100 vintage dress on your e-store, it’s perfectly fine to upsell them with a floppy hat that costs $10, but if they buy a floppy hat, should you upsell them the $100 dress? The answer is nope!
Make sure that after taking your upsell offer, the money your customers have to pay won’t deviate too much from their original purchase plan. Although it’s suggested that the upsell price shouldn’t be higher than an additional 25%, this figure may vary depending on the niche and your target customers.
Tip #7: Diversify your upsell offers
Don’t just go with something like ‘Buy $100, Get $3 off’ or anything like that. Instead, you may love to spice up the game by offering your customers various discounts.
A few more types of upselling discounts you may love to try:
- Free shipping: did you know that 90% of online shoppers say free shipping is one of the main incentives that encourage them to purchase? So perhaps you would love to offer customers free shipping when their cart value meets a certain value.
- Gift with purchase: besides giving a discount on total amount off, giving free gifts to your customers to incentivize them to buy more could be a brilliant idea as well. However, make sure your gift is relevant and adds more value to customers’ cart
- Product customizations: sometimes all you might need to increase sales is just some extra services from you to ‘upgrade’ the products. For instance, if you sell souvenirs, allow customers to carve their name with $3. Or if you sell books, extra services like gift wrapping or book protection may bring you some extra cash.
- Product bundle: think of a frequently bought-together section on Amazon. Enable customers to buy a whole bundle to get sweet discounts. For example, buying a set of T-shirts and jeans to save $10.
Ready to take action?
That’s it! We hope our 7 exclusive upselling tips can help prepare you for your upselling journey ahead. And if you love reading this article, perhaps you may also love to check out our 5 Brilliant Offer Types To Help You Sell Like Crazy.
