3 Solid Ways to Boost Your Email Marketing Upselling

Not getting the results you want for your email marketing enterprise? Come with us as we offer up three effective methods to boost your upselling abilities.

If you’re running an email marketing enterprise and you’re not getting the kind of sales you were expecting when you set out, a great way to improve your numbers is with upselling. It’s certainly not a new concept in the business world and it’s something that you get to experience first hand each time you visit your favorite fast-food drive-thru and get asked “do you want to go large?”.

So, What Is Upselling Exactly?

Basically, upselling is an effective sales technique whereby a vendor encourages customers to spend more with them than they otherwise would have. This could take the form of additional or higher-spec products related to those they were intending to buy.

For example, if a customer walked into a car showroom and wanted to buy a pickup, a good salesman might upsell them to also buy an extended warranty, a more expensive paint job, or a higher-spec automobile altogether. It’s something of a staple in the world of sales and one that’s proven to add value for your customer and boost your bottom line.

To learn additional tips to boost sales, check out this resource on increasing sales with email marketing.

Applying the Concept to Email Marketing

Source: Klaviyo

The good news is that when you’re running a Klaviyo email marketing campaign, the same principles of upselling can be used to create a significant amount of additional revenue that can really make a difference to your online retail success. So, it stands to reason then that knowledge of how to do it would be a handy thing to possess, right?

Ok, so that’s what we look at here, and to help you in your marketing efforts, we now offer up 3 handy tips on how to upsell to your customers in a way that works. By reading and practicing these tips, you will have a much better understanding of how successful marketers do things.

1- ALWAYS Try and Upsell!

It may be a very simple notion, but absolutely always offering an upsell - without exception - should be your first tactic. It’s an obvious thing to say, but it’s something that many online retailers forget and the fact is that if you want your customers to buy higher-rated products, you have to offer them. You can’t just expect them to work it out by themselves. If you do, you’re going to be disappointed.

This rule of thumb really does work and one of the main reasons for this is that customers go for the cheaper option because they don’t completely understand the value of the more expensive one or they don’t know it exists. In this scenario, most customers are price-led too, so you have to be very clear about the benefits involved in spending more.

Most often, people that you market to will have no clue that there are better options available if you don’t tell them. You know what the different tiers of your products offer, but your email readers don’t and when you give them a side-by-side comparison, you might be surprised by just how many people see the extra benefits as a justification for the extra cost.

2 - Be Precise With Your Subscribers

If you’re an experienced email marketer, you’ll most likely understand the idea that you can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach with everyone. Segmentation - something that Klaviyo excels at - allows you to analyze behaviors, past purchases, and all kinds of other data to offer a highly personalized customer experience. It’s one of the cornerstones of successful marketing.

There’s a wealth of usable data out there that’s being continually generated by your readers and it’s possible to utilize that insight to make upselling recommendations. Instantly, your email readers are going to have the perception that you understand their needs better than if you were to send the same messages to everyone on your list.

Try and upsell to a large group of people in one single way and a large percentage of those people are going to get inappropriate or irrelevant offers. Keep doing this and it’s not going to be long until they get fed up with your emails and reach for the dreaded ‘unsubscribe’ button. Just remember upselling doesn’t necessarily have to be a product upgrade, as it can also take the form of associated protection products like extended service warranties.

3 - Engage With Soft Sell Email Marketing

There’s a time and a place for the hard sell and it’s invariably not in the sphere of email marketing. If your emails are just trying to sell all of the time, you’re not going to create much in the way of engagement. This is the case whichever type of communication channel you’re using, be it blogging, social media, or indeed email marketing.

In this scenario, you have to think creatively in the construction of your upsell offers. They should be informative - for sure - but they also need to have an element of mild entertainment about them too. What you absolutely should not do is be too pushy, as that’s a fast-track to getting ignored by your subscribers, which obviously should be avoided.

It’s all about nurturing the relationships you have with your readers and successful campaigns most often involve a softer approach and a degree of storytelling where you gently explain the benefits of every level of product that you offer.

That’s also why you should make your emails clear and easy to understand (meaning not too much-complicated jargon) and try to make them feel like you’re speaking with them person to person. When they trust you, they’re going to be much more likely to listen to you and actually comprehend the advantages of spending more.

Upselling = More Revenue From Your Best Customers

What shouldn’t be forgotten in the whole scheme of things is that upselling is not just about making more money for your bottom line. It’s also about having better-served customers, as the benefits of more expensive products are just that…benefits. If you sell an extended warranty and their product malfunctions during this extended period, you’ve actually done them a favor by selling it to them!

Of course, there’s a whole mountain of tactics to use when trying to upsell to your email subscribers and we’ve only just scratched the surface here. However, even if the only tactics you employ are those we’ve described here, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t see a significant upturn in revenue if you’re selling a good product.

You just have to be a little bit savvy, targeted and subtle about how you do things. Small changes can lead to big things and they can literally mean the difference between a failing enterprise and a successful one. Worth thinking about, wouldn’t you say?

To learn more email marketing tips and tricks, check out this resource on recovering lost sales with abandoned cart emails.