Nearly all companies focus on new business development to help scale their organizations. Discovering new opportunities for growth and unlocking additional revenue sources is a great way to ensure a company’s long-term financial viability.
When maximizing company profits, looking at your current client and customer base could be the answer. By leveraging different upselling strategies, organizations might find that there is more revenue potential than they originally thought.
The Power of Upselling
Upselling is an effective sales and marketing strategy that is used in a variety of industries and is executed in several different ways. The primary goal of an upsell is to encourage customers who are already in the process or have recently made a purchase to add additional products, features, or services to their orders or subscriptions.
This technique can be highly effective for organizations and can provide many benefits:
- Increased Revenue – Upselling provides several opportunities to increase revenue streams. By strategically suggesting additional features or add-ons to purchases, businesses can see increases of anywhere between 25-100% per customer, which can add up considerably over time.
- Improved Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) – Often, customers aren’t aware of other products or services that they would benefit from. By guiding customers towards those additional purchases, businesses can create a better overall purchasing experience for the customer. This often leads to repeat purchases and can increase the customer’s lifetime value.
- Stronger Relationships – The purpose of upselling products or services isn’t just about the additional revenue they bring. It’s also about taking the time to understand customer needs and helping them get the most value out of their purchases. When organizations take the time to incorporate this personalized approach to selling, it helps to build better relationships with their customers.
Common Strategies for Effective Upselling
Upselling to customers isn’t just as simple as suggesting to purchase something new. While this may lead to some additional sales being made, effective upselling requires a certain level of due diligence to be made.
Below are some common strategies you can apply to improve your upselling abilities:
Know Your Customers
Before you can start upselling effectively, it’s first important to understand your customer base. Gathering and leveraging data insights from recent purchase histories and relevant online search behaviors is a great starting point to achieve this.
When you analyze the data surrounding your customers’ interests and past purchase types, you can predict whether or not they would benefit from an additional item or service type.
Build Relationships
When you’re able to establish trust with your clients, upselling is a much easier thing to accomplish. If a customer knows you have their best interests at heart, they’ll be much more likely to accept your recommendations as something that can benefit them.
You’ll want to ensure the products or services you upsell will be useful to the customer. Take the time to educate yourself and the customer about any features these items bring and any additional problems they can help to solve.
Timing is Key
The timing is as important as the relevancy of the items you’re trying to upsell. There are different stages in the purchasing process that customers will enter. Being strategic about your timing to offer an upsell opportunity during these various stages can help to improve conversion rates.
For example, during the sales process, showing casing a wider range of lower-cost and premium products can help customers quickly decide what options are best for them. During a post-purchase, you can follow up with complementary products or services that complement the products they’ve already chosen and can leave the door open for additional purchases down the road.
Create a Sense of Urgency
The most effective upsell opportunities have a limited time associated with them. This helps create a sense of urgency or fear of missing out when being offered to customers.
One of the best ways to leverage upselling opportunities is by creating limited-time offers or exclusive deals only available to past customers. These deals could have an expiration date associated with them which will help to push customers to make a decision sooner rather than later.
Bundle Products or Services
Another great opportunity to increase average purchase amounts is by creating several bundled products or services. These allow customers to save a decent amount of money when purchasing certain products or services together.
It can be hard to justify ignoring larger sales or promotions, which is why this strategy can be very effective.
How Using E-Gift Cards Can Improve Your Upselling Initiatives
Businesses purchase e-gift cards for many reasons—whether providing additional incentive pay to employees or when putting together various holiday gifts for staff and customers. However, e-gift cards can also be a great way to improve an organization’s upselling strategies.
Because of how convenient and flexible e-gift cards are, they can be used in many ways to drive revenue growth with current clients. E-gift cards can be delivered easily and used for different purposes, including making partial payments for products or services and allowing customers various ways to make a payment.
From a business perspective, e-gift cards are a great way to increase initial spending. Many studies have shown that customers who use a gift card often spend more than the value of the card when redeeming it.
Effective Ways to Use E-Gift Cards When Upselling
There are a few different ways that organizations can use e-gift cards to support their upselling efforts. Some of them include:
- Offering e-gift cards with upgrades – Offering bonus e-gift cards as an incentive for customers to choose a higher-priced item or add-on is a great way to increase revenues. For example, a customer upgrading to a premium subscription could receive a bonus e-gift card that can be used for future purchases.
- Creating customer loyalty rewards – Companies can use e-gift cards as a rewarding choice in their customer loyalty programs or referral initiatives. This not only incentivizes additional purchases but also helps to improve the customer experience while building long-term relationships.
- Designing targeted promotions – Another effective strategy is to launch targeted e-gift card promotions that incentivize specific customer actions. For example, you could offer a bonus e-gift card for signing up for a newsletter, reaching a certain spending threshold, or purchasing a specific product category. This can attract new customers while encouraging existing ones to explore new upsell options.
Start Leveraging E-Gift Cards to Increase Upselling Opportunities
Upselling can be a great way to increase revenues by leveraging your current customer and client base. By using the strategies discussed and discovering unique ways to use e-gift cards in your upselling initiatives, you’ll unlock new opportunities for growth while increasing loyalty with your customers.
