Boosting Your Sales With Upsells
If you want to increase your sales, just ask! Systematically, every time you have a customer ready to make a purchase, ask them to buy just one more thing, and you’ll be surprised what happens. The process of routinely upselling can boost your average sale with very little effort. The most successful upsells have the following elements in common:
Affinity With the Product Purchased. If your customer is buying roses, try selling sturdy gloves or rose shears, not something like bamboo that comes out of left field.
Easy to Describe. The best upsells are only about three sentences long: one describing the product, one describing the offer, the last asking for the sale. Make sure you can describe the product you’re selling adequately in just a few words.
Low Price Point. While I’ve used some $50+ products successfully as an upsell, a popular item that’s $15 or $20 is usually a better choice. Fertilizer, a related book, or a best-selling plant are all good choices.
Make It a Bargain. Upsells are impulse sales, so they sometimes require an extra incentive. A reduced price, an extra bonus, or free shipping adds urgency and helps close more sales. Always test to make sure the reduced income (or, in the case of a bonus, the extra expense) pays for itself by generating a sufficient number of additional sales.
Offer More of the Same. It’s almost always worthwhile offering more of the base product at a modest discount or with no extra shipping. Even in cases where I never expected this to work, the results have been surprising.
Typically somewhere between 5% and 40% of the customers who are offered an upsell will take it — the norm is generally between 10% and 20%. If 15 out of 100 customers say “yes” to a $20 upsell, that’s an additional 15 x $20 = $300 for every 100 orders — or a $3 increase in your average sale. Not bad for asking one simple question!
