How to up-sell to your customers

What's the best way to increase your profitability?

Your confident answer will probably be: "By attracting more customers."

And you'd be right. Of course, attracting new customers is an essential part of making a business succeed. But there's another equally important way to increase your profits without spending loads of time and money on the advertising and promotional efforts needed to bring your business to the attention of new buyers.

Up-sell to your existing ones.

Up-sells are offers made to customers for bigger, better, and of course, pricier products and services, premium versions of the same product or service, or an extra premium package of products and services. The up-sell products and services cost more, so the key is to add enough to the up-sell offer that it becomes irresistible.

The 'science' behind up-selling relates to the 'value quotient'. This can best be expressed by the following equation:

Value = perceived benefits divided by price.

Successful up-sells increase the benefits that customers believe they will get from a product or service more than they increase the price. The customer then believes they are getting better value for money by taking advantage of the up-sell offer.

Here are a few ways to offer up-sells to your customers:

• Create an up-sell web page on your website that visitors are directed to after they click on the 'buy' link. The page could contain a snappy sales pitch designed to persuade them to upgrade their choice to a premium version, or information about an additional, complementary product or service.
• Use direct mailshots to up-sell by putting your up-sell offer in a second envelope inside the main envelope. Customers considering responding to your main offer will be intrigued enough to investigate.
• Every time you make a sale to a customer, include a sales letter or catalogue in the packaging to encourage customers who are happy with their initial purchase to buy more from you.
• Follow up previous customers with regular mailshots that include offers to upgrade their product or service or buy additional goods to go with it.
• Make sure your customers have incentives to respond to your up-sell offers. For example, create a premium package of products and services that collectively cost more than the customer's original choice, but represent a discount on what they would normally cost, or would cost when bought separately.
• Experiment to find an up-sell formula that works. Remember and record the up-sell speeches, mailshots and web pages that got the best responses and tailor these winning formulas to use again and again on all your products and services.
  
  
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