Increase the Spend with Post-purchase Upsells

Upselling is a serious marketing strategy that significantly boosts the sales of a brand by simply making relevant and meaningful recommendations to customers who have already bought an item from a brand.

Sucharita Kodali, a Forrester Analyst, emphasizes that upselling accounts for almost 10 to 30% of the sales revenues on e-commerce. That is huge, considering how little brands focus on this strategy.

Upselling also comprises enhancing the consumer experience of an e-commerce store by assisting their shopping journey in a way that covers all the bases. Many brands are resorting to artificial intelligence as a predictive, pattern-based tool for generating product recommendations that form the foundation of upselling strategies. Let's dig deeper.

Upselling Vs. Cross-Selling

While both these sales strategies are intentioned towards increasing the sales of a brand, they differ in their base concept. Cross-selling involves analyzing the type and category of products that a consumer has carted and suggesting purchases related to this item that would complete the picture. For example, for a customer purchasing a GoPro, the cross-selling recommendations engine would suggest buying a pair of batteries and a protective case for the device. This helps boost sales.

On the other hand, upselling consists of increasing the value of a sale a little higher than the previous purchase a customer had made. For example, on purchasing a 12oz pack of coffee, an upselling engine would recommend the purchase of a 2lb pack with some offers or freebies.

While increasing the value of a sale for the business, the AI engine still delivers value for the customer through offers/discounts/freebies, etc. Also, If you'd like to cut down on your paid ads spend which is eating away your margins you can try out platforms like Expert Llama to hire top SEO experts.

Compelling Reasons to Implement Post-Purchase Upsell Strategies

Post-purchase upselling helps steadily increase the order value of an average purchase that a customer would make on an e-commerce website. There are quite a few other reasons as well that make AI-assisted post-purchase upselling a necessity for brands:

Improve Customer Retention

Exploring customer retention involves exploring what your customers like to shop for and how they come to this decision. This knowledge can help you sell more and higher value products through post-purchase upselling.

A customer who buys from a brand more than once is likely to come back for more – using AI engines to identify their shopping preferences and items helps craft a good post-purchase upsell strategy.

Reduce Customer Churn

Customer churn is inevitable. However, it's possible to reel it in a little bit using upselling as a strategy to pitch better products to your customers after they complete a purchase with you.

Employing intelligent AI engines to "understand" their needs and crafting a recommendations list to suit their tastes keeps them coming back.

Upselling Helps in Upscaling

Sounds unbelievable, but this isn't what BombTech Golf thought. By deploying a super-effective post-purchase upselling strategy, this company raised their average order value to a little over $60, reduced their cart abandonment by 10%, and increased their conversion by 45%. This helped the company increase its marketing and ad budgets to try and scale up its operations.

8 Great Ways to Prompt Post-Purchase Upsells

Upselling is a great way to encourage your consumers to come back to your brand for more and better products. However, the way you do it needs to be subtle and encouraging, not intrusive or overwhelming. Here are 8 ways to achieve that:

Expression of Gratitude

A little pop-up message that thanks the customer for shopping with you does wonders to retain them as well. This pop-up can be skillfully used to upsell products with an encouraging message to come back and shop.

You can also include a discount coupon for a future purchase to retain the customer.‍

Encourage Product Reviews

It's a well-known fact that consumers evaluate a product based on the reviews it has received. Reviews are a great way to initiate an upselling strategy.

After a purchase is complete, push an email to the consumer to review the product on the website. It is then possible to embed product recommendations of similar products you wish to upsell to the consumer in the email.

Show Customers You Care

A great way to get a customer to buy more from you is to openly express that you care for their patronage. Soon after their purchase is shipped to them, you can initiate a short survey asking them about their experience with your brand.

This goes a long way to express how you care about your service quality and are willing to improve. This survey is also a great place to embed product recommendations or coupons.

Leverage Iterative Sales

Upselling can be a great success where repeat sales can be achieved.

For example, when someone purchases a printer, the store can get an AI engine to send ink cartridge refill reminders to their email. This can include suggestions of inks of various brands, i.e., the value you would like the customers to purchase.

Seasonal Upsells

Seasonal upsells work great where the clothing industry is involved.

It is possible to send reminders to your consumers' emails about the season's latest trends or about great discounts on the off-season garments. This generates interest among the consumers, encouraging them to come back to the store and have a look.

Celebratory Upsells

If your brand has data regarding a consumer's birth or wedding anniversaries, it's possible to leverage personalization and set up upselling campaigns on a recurring basis each year, reminding them to come to the store and splurge on offers for the occasion.

This works very well because anniversaries are generally a time when people like to spend more.

Complemented Upselling

This strategy works best for the electronics and fashion industries. Complemented upselling consists of curating a set of items that best complement the product that a user has purchased and adding value to the whole deal.

Myntra's "Shop the Look" concept has this nailed down pat. Employing a comparative carousel of similar (but higher value) products is also a part of this upselling method.

Milestone-Based Upselling

Myntra has also implemented a genius concept to encourage its shoppers to keep coming back.

With every purchase, Myntra awards points to its consumers, which build up to milestones that they achieve to unlock special benefits like free shipping, discounted prices, sales previews, etc.

The more the consumers shop with Myntra, the more benefits they unlock.

Best Practices for Great Post-Purchase Upselling

You can make the most out of your upselling campaigns by following the best practices mentioned below.

Create an Urgency for Purchase

Great upselling campaigns create a sense of urgency in the user's mind regarding a future purchase. For example, gifting a discount to your customer for the next purchase intrigues them into coming back – adding a validity period to the coupon (7 days, 15 days, one month, etc.) induces a sense of urgency to use it within a given time.

This urgency helps drive conversions with more efficiency than you would imagine. A study found that this technique improved conversions for a brand called Bob & Lush by 9.1% and improved their revenue by a whopping 27.1%.

Add Value and Relevance to the Purchase

Ultimately, customers only really buy what they want to – no brand or strategy can convince them out of their money. However, using AI/ML, you can create personalized offers or product recommendations that add value to the existing order or purchase and are highly relevant.

For example, if a customer purchases one bottle of serum, one upsell option would be to encourage the purchase of 2 bottles instead of 1 for a greater discount.

In another strategy, say a consumer purchases travel kits, the upsell could recommend travel-sized toiletry items, grooming kits, travel-friendly packaging, etc.

One-Click Post Purchase Upsells can be Tricky

One-click post-purchase upsells need to be mastered before they can be implemented. They are placed after checkout, and before the thank you message; the pop-up prompts a user to add another item to the cart before sealing the sale. This technique could backfire – the customer could feel overwhelmed with the variety and abandon the cart.

On the contrary, since there isn't much action to be undertaken on the part of the buyer to purchase the recommended product, it could actually end up increasing the cart value. The trick is to time this upsell right.

Strategizing with a view to increasing sales is the only way e-commerce can hope to grow. Upselling and cross-selling are great strategies. However, in today's fast-paced world, a little assistance from AI and its implements is needed for data analysis and personalization. Glood.AI provides customer-centric solutions powered by AI and ML to assist a brand's journey towards higher sales.

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