What is an Upsell & How To Use One In A Sales Funnel

What is an Upsell?

An upsell is an offer or a sales technique that is aimed at getting customers to purchase an additional product that is more expensive than the initial offer sold.

If you've read our existing article on downsells, then this would be the perfect companion since they both work together as part of the overall sales process.

In short...

The more upsells you can realistically offer in your sales funnel, the more profits you will make and the more successful your business will be.

Here are a few real-world examples:

• Being offered to upgrade your burger with fries or to go large in a fast-food restaurant.
• A shop owner offering a more expensive item with better features but at a limited discount.
  
• Being offered upgraded seats during an airline booking.

In case you're having reservations about whether an upsell could work in your business, consider these statistics:

According to Amazon, it's reported that upselling and cross-selling make up as much as 35% of their business.

That's almost 50% of their entire revenue! 

In another statistic, 32% of customers order again from the same company within a year of being a customer.

So it's clear that if you're not upselling or offering an additional or a more expensive version of a product to your customers, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

There are many ways in which businesses could benefit from using a upsell strategy.

However, there are some key factors that need to be taken into consideration first.

These include:

1. The current market conditions.
2. What products/services are currently selling well?
3. Is there anything unique about the product or service that makes it stand out from others?
4. Does the product offer something new or different?
5. Are there any competitors already doing similar things?
6. Do they provide better quality than their competition?

The key thing to consider is whether or not your business is making a profit.

If you have a successful product that sells well and is the only thing you're selling, then you may want to decide to offer a simple payment plan as a pricing option for customers who didn't buy the product.

You will likely have a number of customers who will opt out of purchasing due to budgeting issues.

So offering an upsell, in this case, could provide a great way at handling these objections and ensure that all of your customers are taken care of.

Upsells are usually offered after a successful transaction while downsells are typically given during the initial stages of it.

Both upsells and downsells work together to increase revenue and profits.

In fact, both strategies should complement each other rather than compete against one another.

When choosing what kind of marketing campaign to run, you'll find that most companies tend to focus on either upsells or downsells depending on how much money they generate.

So let's take a typical sales process:

1. A customer sees a product in your digital store that they really like and decide to purchase.
2. Upon purchasing, they're greeted with an upsell of another relevant product with a higher price point.
3. The customer decides to pass on the upsell.
4. They are then taken to another page offering the same product but as a monthly payment plan (downsell)
5. The customer decides to go ahead with the purchase and complete their order.

Looking at the above scenario, you can see how powerful this is at increasing your profits and the overall lifetime value of the customer.

What started off as an initial sale ended up with further purchases, thus increasing your sales and the overall profitability of your business.

As upsells and downsells have shown to work well in business, more and more software providers have included upsell and downsell abilities as part of their software feature set.

The One-Click Upsell

The most powerful inclusion that has been added to merchant providers and SaaS checkout services is the 'One-Click Upsell' or 'One-Click Downsell.'

Prior to this feature, customers had to retype their payment details if they decided to purchase any additional products.

As you can imagine, this disrupted the buying process of the customer and increasing the likelihood of them abandoning their purchase.

With the addition of a one-click. Customers are able to add to their transactions with just a click of a button, making the checkout process seamless and straightforward.

With OptimizeFunnels and OptimizeCheckouts, we've added one-click features as part of our suite and ensured that you're able to set this up quickly and easily without any fuss.

Some Upsell examples

This is a nice example to show how easy it can be to set up an upsell offer. Opting for a minimalist design and a clean layout. Making it easy for the customer to know what the offer is and what to do in order to upgrade their order.

This is a great example if you're offering multiple package options in your offer. It can be added directly to your sales page and reduce the time for making a separate upsell page in your sales funnel.

As you can see from these 2 examples, adding upsells as part of your checkout process isn't that hard to do. 

With OptimizeFunnels and OptimizeCheckouts, you will now be able to set this up quickly and begin increasing your revenue in just a few minutes.