How to Upsell Clients with an Automated Upselling Process

How to Upsell Clients with an Automated Upselling Process

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4 Steps to Build an Automated Upselling Process

There is hardly any trained salesperson in the world who wouldn’t try to upsell prospects or existing customers! From the server who is taking your order in a restaurant to  mobile food ordering apps that will ask if you would like to add some dessert to sweeten your order, everyone attempts to upsell.

This is one of the oldest sales techniques in the book: add a bit more service or one more product to an existing client’s order. However, not everyone is successful. In fact, there are many cases when desperate attempts to upsell customers resulted in losing nearly closed deals.

Why? Because many account management personnel or sales representatives often fail to comprehend their customers’ needs.

There were times when upselling strategies were built based on pure instincts or anticipated needs. Salespeople would try to understand what customers want by analyzing their interactions, history of explorations, etc., and then offer them something that may or may not align with their requirements.

However, in today’s digital era, upselling is no longer dependent on anticipations or wild guesses. Using data and structured information, a sales rep can easily find out what their customers are looking for, what additional services may be beneficial, and what kind of pain points customers may have. These insights can be generated on an individual level. Then, using these insights a sales rep can easily pitch an idea to drive an upsell, benefitting both the company and its customers.

But, there is still a question! If you want to do informative, strategic upselling, you will need to do a ton of work. From collecting information to pitching personalized ideas to customers, there are hundreds of tasks involved. If you only have a handful of customers, you can get the job done manually. I mean, it’s still a lot of work but it’s doable.

What about the scenario when you have thousands of clients in your list? It is certainly not a feasible idea to speak to them one by one and pitch customized idea for each individual. That’s an insane load of work and no sales rep or account management team has the time to pull this off.

But then again, you cannot abandon the upselling process because it helps drive revenue growth.

In this double-edged scenario, there is only one solution: automating the upselling process. Why? Because when you automate your upselling process, you are essentially delegating nearly every single manual task in the process to a digital system. As a result, you can upsell to a significant number of clients without spending extra time and resources.

Setting up an automated upselling or cross-selling strategy is not that complicated. If you know the right upselling strategies, the relevant digital tools to complement those strategies, and how to measure your upselling metrics, it is only a matter of finding the time to set up your automated upselling process.

In this blog, we are going to explain how to set up an effective automated upselling strategy to you in four easy steps. Following these steps, you can easily create your customized upselling strategy that runs on its own with little to no human intervention.

Here we go:

Step 1: Capture Clients’ Interests

As mentioned before, knowing what your customers want lays the foundation of your upselling process. You certainly do not want to annoy your customers by providing random add-ons that do not add value to them at the point when you are reaching out to them. You will need to ask them questions to learn what is bothering them, what services they need, or what additional products can complement their existing solutions. Only when you have that information, you can analyze the situation and suggest additional products or services.

Let me share an interesting story here. A little while ago, I was chatting with a sales rep to purchase a phone for my wife. The rep sold a brand-new phone to me after asking a few questions about what features I require, if the phone will be used as a camera or for work, etc. Then, this amazing thing happened. My toddler started throwing a tantrum at that moment. When the situation calmed down, the sales rep politely asked me if I want to buy a military-grade phone case, because it is only natural that the phone will be dropped quite a few times! I bought the idea and ended up buying a case and a screen protector!

You are getting the idea, right? Information is everything here!

Now, if you have thousands of clients, you cannot go for a personalized conversation like this every time. You will have to improvise and adopt a system that will help you extract information from them. Fortunately, there are tools available to help. For instance, you can send your customers an email or a SMS with a link to an online form that works as a quick survey to gather relevant information. You can easily design the form the way you prefer to collect the information you want. As soon as a customer submits the form, all the data will be recorded in a CRM. This way, even if you have hundreds of thousands of customers, you can easily obtain valuable data from all of them in the shortest possible time.

Step 2: Send Customized Offers Automatically

Once you have obtained your customers’ information, it is quite easy to learn what they want or what their pain points are. Using these insights, you can easily create customized offers and send them to your clients.

Let’s bring up an example. Imagine you own a gaming store and you have just sent out a survey to learn about your customers’ needs. You asked your customers about any issues they are facing with their current gaming machines. You included three options: slow loading time, lower graphic resolution, and insufficient storage. Now, your survey responses are being stored in the CRM and you can clearly see which users are getting bugged for which issue and it’s easy for you to send them customized offers, right? You have three groups who are facing three different challenges. So, you send a customized email with relevant products or add-ons to each of these groups.

Then again, are you going to send emails one by one to all your customers? I mean, sending thousands of emails manually will take time. On top of that, if you are sending personalized emails to every single user, that’s a big deal! Doing so manually will cost you days or even weeks. What’s the solution then?

Automation!

You simply automate the entire customized offer sending. To do this, you will need to create three different upselling email templates. For instance, you create one email template that features offers for next generation gaming consoles with higher processing power; you create the second one that features an offer for a high-graphic processing unit-based gaming console; and in the third email, you feature an external solid state drive (SSD)! You can connect your survey form to the CRM and the CRM to these email templates.

Now, as soon as a customer fills out the form (say he or she chooses the slow loading time option), that info will be saved in the CRM. The automated system will detect this option and trigger the upselling email template that features the next generation gaming console with higher processing power! A similar process will take place if a customer says that they are having trouble with graphic processing or lower storage. They will get offers relevant to them.

Not only that, each of those customer’s personal contact data will be pulled from the system and used in the email template so everyone will receive a personalized copy of the email.

You are getting the idea, right? You do not need to spend time manually intervening in the process. The upselling automation process will do it for you. With all the time that is being saved; you can spend it on building high performing upselling email templates.

Step 3: Automatically Follow Up with Customers

So, you automatically sent customized and personalized emails to all your customers. What’s next? Maybe, automatically following up with them? Yes, this is also doable and it will definitely help you stay top of the mind with your customers.

For instance, a customer did not respond to your upselling message. You can set a condition that if anyone opens your email but does not respond, another follow-up email template will be triggered automatically. Similarly, you can create an email template that will be triggered as soon as someone makes a purchase through your email.

These actions might seem small, but they can have a large effect. Using these micro-engagement activities helps to increase the bond with customers and build a long-lasting relationship that opens doors for further upselling.

Step 4: Measure Upselling Effectiveness

Finally, you need to check continuously if your upselling process is doing well or whether it needs improvement. For instance, you may want to know how many people received your email or SMS upselling messages, how many opened these messages, and how many of them responded.

If you know these metrics, then you will know how your upselling campaign is doing. If you find that people are not opening your emails at all, then you may want to try changing your subject line. If you find that they are opening emails but not responding to them, editing the email content might be a good idea.

Once you have gathered enough insights, you can easily modify your existing upselling process to make it more effective or build high-performing upselling campaigns in the future.

And that’s it! You should have your own, customized upselling process with state-of-the-art upselling strategies integrated within it. There is a bit work in this process though. You have to find the right digital tools that fit your needs, streamline these tools, and ensure that any integrations are working perfectly because even if one step is not working, the whole process will break.

Or, you can take the easy path: using SimplyCast’s Upselling Solution!

That’s right! We have built an automated upselling solution to help you drive revenue growth by using our in-house marketing automation platform, email marketing software, CRM, landing page generator, and digital form channels. Depending on your business requirements, our solution can be customized nearly every way possible.

Our upsell automation solution is 100 percent ready to go and fully streamlined, so you do not have the hassle of finding relevant digital tools and streamlining them. Since you are getting all required tools under one platform, you can also save on additional subscription costs.

Interested to learn more? Speak to our experts today.

Book your one-on-one demo now by clicking the button below!

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