How to Create the Perfect Upsell

An upsell is one of the greatest weapons in a marketer's arsenal, but what is a perfect one?

Essentially, an upsell involves recommending another product to the customer to add to their shopping cart before they reach your order form. You may have noticed that McDonalds upsell all the time in the form of "would you like fries with that" or similar.

Without an upsell, you are making basic sales and restricting your profits. However, *with* an upsell, you are maximizing your sales and also helping people out with new and relevant products.

And that's the key to a perfect upsell, to be relevant. Without relevancy, your upsells will get a very low conversion rate and may even drive the customer away from buying anything at all.

For example, a visitor is at a website and is about to buy an information product about how to make money online using Internet Marketing. Before they get to the order form, the website will suddenly upsell them with a dog training book. Now even though a lot of those buyers may own dogs, this is not what they came to the site to buy. Instead, the website owner should upsell them with something relevant, such as another valuable video course or a series of live tuitions.

And that's my next point. Whatever product you're upselling must be valuable to your customer. So it's no use trying to upsell them a PLR e-book which everyone already has stashed on their hard drive somewhere. They must find the product to be good and useful.

Finally, here's a mistake which I see all the time. If you're going to implement an upsell, don't have any more than 2 upsells, as this will mostly likely make people leave even before buying your product.

Also, the amount of upsells is determined by how much pre-selling the customer has gone through. For example, if there has been several e-mails about it and the customer is really excited to buy it, he/she won't mind skipping two pages. However, if it's a random encounter and they see 3 or more upsells, then they may even see your website as a 'spam site'.

In summary, the key to a perfect upsell is for the product you're offering to:

1) Be relevant
2) Provide value
3) Don't overdo it!

Now get going and implement YOUR perfect upsell!