How to Create Videos to Improve Your Upselling Game
“Would you like fries with that?”
This is the traditional upsell that we all hear when we go into McDonald’s and ask for a Big Mac. It’s a simple way to give additional value to the customer whilst extracting all potential profit during a transaction.
Upselling is getting your customer to make a higher cost purchase than he or she originally planned. It is a sales practice that aims to entice the customer to purchase more expensive items or upgrades in order to make a more profitable sale.
It’s a great way to increase business profitability without finding new customers. According to marketing metrics, the probability of selling to a new prospect is between 5-20%, while the probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60-70%. This highlights the importance of upselling.
Upselling is not just limited to fast-food chains and retail stores. The practice of upselling can help to dramatically improve sales online, too. Perhaps you sell a small business phone service with big business features. You can harness vast amounts of customer data and analytics to present them with targeted upsell offers.
But what is the best format to present these offers to your customers online? Over 70% of marketers say that video has a higher conversion rate than any other form of content. Videos grab people’s attention and engage viewers. They improve brand recall and are also more memorable than emails and other text-based content.
So how can you politely yet effectively upsell to your existing customers through video? This article will go through the best ways to do just that.
Make the upsell relevant to the customer’s original purchase
Going back to our McDonald’s example, the server offers fries or a soda to accompany your burger. These upsells are relevant to your original purchase. Relevance is the key to upselling. If you sell a knife, upsell a knife sharpener. If you sell online courses, upsell exclusive tuition. If you sell credit cards, upsell a personal loan or overdraft solution.
People who buy your product to solve a certain problem are probably going to be interested in related products, and are already primed for purchase.
Video is a great medium to upsell related products as you can show these products being used. The benefits of using the upsold product with the initial product could also be easily demonstrated. The video could even take the format of a tutorial. For example, a phone service provider could make a video showing customers how to get a vanity phone number.
Where is the best place to put this type of video?
Videos that upsell related products or services are suited perfectly to post-click landing pages. This is the page where your customer lands after making their initial purchase. Instead of sending your customer to a standard page which simply thanks them for their purchase, you can send them to a dedicated page where they can watch your video and browse products related to their purchase.
It is important that the upsell offer be made after the first sale and not before. Never crush a client with upsells before they have even completed their checkout for the initial sale. For some customers this is a salesy turn-off and damages customer experience. The main reason why customers abandon online shopping carts is because of added or increased prices before checkout.
As a simple alternative, don’t require customers to input their payment information a second time in order to complete their second transaction. This makes it easy for the customer to make another purchase, and removes the risk of losing the initial sale.
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Solve a new problem
Your product or service solved a problem that your customer had. Chances are, now that they have solved the first problem, they are going to start dealing with the next related problem. It’s time to give your customer praise for solving their initial problem with your product, but inform them of their next hurdle.
For example, if your customer has lost lots of weight they may have sagging skin or stretch marks. Perhaps they are getting so much traffic to their website now that their servers are crashing. Or maybe their business is growing so quickly that they are having trouble demand forecasting. You can create videos to discuss these problems and how they can be overcome with one of your other products or services.
Doing this also helps the customer see the tangible benefit of the initial product that they purchased. When you initially sell your products or services, you get to talk about all the benefits your new customers are going to enjoy. Now, in your upsell sequence, you’re speaking as if they’ve already solved the problem, because they did. They purchased your product or service and experienced the benefits you promised them. This fosters customer loyalty.
Essentially, every time you solve a problem, there is a new problem that arises. You can upsell a product to customers to help remedy this new problem which arose from solving their previous problem.
Where is the best place to put this type of video?
This type of video is great to create and post to your social media pages as part of your content strategy. Informative videos such as these provide free value up front to your followers and build trust so that your customers don’t feel like they are watching an advert.
Video marketing like this engages your customers whilst remaining an effective platform to upsell solutions to your customers’ problems.
An advantage of using social media to present these videos to your customers is that you can also post videos that other customers have shared. Seeing a product being enjoyed by other people can have a tremendous impact on someone’s decision to purchase it.
Social proof is important, which is why if you were to buy a teleconferencing solution, for example, you are likely to search for VoIP services reviews. The best part is that you aren’t spending any time or money creating these videos; your followers are upselling for you!
