GUIDE: GROW YOUR BUSINESS | STEP THREE:

Customer Retention & Upselling

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Customer retention is all about offering great customer service alongside great products and services. But, before you can retain a customer, you have to get one first. When you get that customer, you might as well try and upsell them!

Upselling is essentially offering additional products and services on top of what the customer was initially willing to purchase. Most business experts suggest that the price of the upsell shouldn’t be more than 40% more than the item they’re already looking at or buying. Others argue that it shouldn’t be more than 25%. This is all about your type of customer and the product you are selling — so test the waters!

Here are some tips to keep in mind when crafting your additional offerings:

Choose the right upsell

Does the customer need a more robust service to achieve their goals? What about product protection? Can you bundle multiple items together to convince them to buy more?

Always offer the upsell — if it makes sense

Just because a customer can buy multiple products from you doesn’t mean it is relevant to their current needs. If someone is buying a popcorn maker, why would you pitch them on a $35k car? If they are buying a popcorn maker, it would make more sense to offer bags of seeds, bowls to eat out of, etc.

Don’t be pushy

Have you ever been on a website where you were asked to buy more at every step of the purchasing process? Of course you have! We all have — and it’s annoying. Understand who your customer is and if they seem like they are willing to buy more. If not, make note and come back later… You don’t want to lose the customer before you have the check in hand!

Use urgency

Buy now! On sale today only! These are just a few examples of ways businesses try to urge you to buy something faster than you normally would. Study your customer and understand how urgency will affect their decision making and your overall relationship with them.

Provide free shipping or installation

Sometimes giveaways are a great way to convince a customer to buy something else. To continue on with our car/popcorn maker example from before… You might convince a customer to buy your car if you throw in a popcorn maker with it. But, if you throw in a car if they buy in your popcorn maker the chances they buy the popcorn maker drastically increases.

Now, the price difference between these two items is huge… So you need to do your research before you make this sort of drastic give away/promotion for your customer. You don’t want to give away a physical product/service that costs more than the product/service the customer is actually buying — unless the lifetime value of that customer proves the giveaway financially makes sense.

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NOTICE: The information included on this website is to be used only as a guide. It is not intended to cover all provisions of the law or every taxpayer's specific circumstances.

GUIDE: GROW A BUSINESS

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