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Adding upsells to our order form. That’s right, regardless of all the different traffic techniques in the world, even with proven sales copy and conversion methods in place, even with years of studying and applying various direct and indirect marketing approaches, the one thing I have found that brings in the most money to our company is the ability to upsell each individual customer on an additional item they did NOT intend to originally purchase.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term “upsell,” let me use an example from one of the world’s most famous companies to illustrate this point:

When people walk into the fast-food giant, McDonalds, to order a simple hamburger or a Vanilla shake, without fail they are presented with the phrase that has helped this company dominate the fast-food market:

“Would you like fries with that?” Other fast food outlets will ask you, “Would you like a drink or an apple pie with your meal?” This is another very effective example of an upsell.

These fast food giants sell millions of dollars worth of extra food and drinks worldwide every year because they know how to effectively use an upsell. So now you may be saying that that is all well and good for McDonalds, but I am in a totally different business. I don’t sell fast-food.

Upsell for internet marketing success

Upselling your customers is simply providing the next logical solution to your customer’s next logical need. It’s your job to always create that next logical need and continually sell and sell. There’s always one more thing to sell.

One of the major mistakes I find in dealing with small businesses is that they believe once their business has provided their product to the customer, that’s the end of the process. There’s nothing that could be further from the truth.

Every sale needs another sale because every need that’s satisfied will create still another need sometime in the future. The conclusion you should draw is that you need to create the upsell and continue creating upsells as a neverending logical step in the launching of an effective marketing mission.

You might say, I don’t have any product or service to sell as an upsell. My answer to that is, develop one.

Even if you don’t produce the product or service, someone else does and that someone else gladly will pay you to allow them to have access to your client base so they can upsell your customers. There’s always something else to sell them.

The practical implications to upselling will most likely result in forming joint venture relationships. Businesses today operate differently than before.

Another good example can be seen in mail-order flowers. On the average, there’s actually 6-10 days from the cutting of a flower before a customer receives it and puts it in a vase in his/her home, whether as a gift or simply to brighten up the home. The lag time is caused by the traditional distribution system of wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. A real entrepreneur, who worked literally for years on an idea for flower delivery in up to 9 days, created a direct from the grower to the customer via Federal Express. Today, that generates $10,000,000 in sales. What was the entrepreneur’s product? It was an idea worth $10,000,000.

That business is merely a series of relationships between a catalogue company, Federal Express, and several independent flower growers throughout the United Slates. It’s a business of joint ventures. Even though this guy didn’t actually have the product or service, he created one.

This leads us to finding Your Business Within Your Business. A real powerful concept is to challenge yourself, your clients, vendors, and employees to constantly search for new businesses within your business.

There are an unlimited number of offshoot businesses you can create. You can have an offshoot of consulting to those people you sell to. You could then communicate and market and also do seminars and workshops.

For car dealers, they can provide extended warranties and insurance to new car owners. For a contractor, whether it’s heating and cooling, pools, pest control, or whatever, they can also provide annual service contracts.

An example would also be a pool contractor, who for instance, might use upselling through the offering of an annual service contract to clean and service a pool four times a year. This can dramatically improve his bottom line. In fact, this can actually double the value of your customers by an added income of 40% when they sign an annual contract.

Let’s say the service call for a pest control or pool service call is $100 and there are 100 customers per year. There’s a gross of $10,000, which is $100 per customer. The upsell strategy is an annual contract where you’re going to visit four times a year. The cost for each visit to the customer is $100, so the total cost at this point is $400 (before giving a discount.)

If they buy today, you give them a discount of $150, so $250 is the cost to the customer. If you close just 40% of these people, your new revenue is $10,000. 40% of 100 is 40 people times $250 which is the cost of the annual contract.

So, the new value of these 100 customers is $20,000, $10,000 for the service call ($100 x 100 customers) and another $10,000 for the 40 people who paid $250 for the annual contract. The value per customer is now $200. You made $20,000. You still have the same 100 customers. They’re now worth $200. That’s double the value.

What service can you upsell to your clients? Virtually every business can add a newsletter or an extra month of a diet plan for half the original price. Maybe a consulting service could be provided. The possibilities are endless. Let your creative mind work for your business instead of limiting it to just one product or service.

Measuring the benefit of your product or service means putting a specific value on the advantage it offers. For example, it’s ineffective to say your light bulbs are brighter and last longer than the competition’s. You’ve got to let people know that they’re 50% brighter and last two times as long! Your dry cleaning methods aren’t just better, they’re three times more likely to remove stubborn stains than traditional methods. Your chiropractic techniques aren’t just effective, they’re clinically proven to reduce back pain for 95% of patients. And so on.

The more specific you are about the superior performance, benefit, or advantage of your product or service, the more successful your marketing message will be, regardless of the medium you use. The reason is simple: Consumers hear claims of product superiority all the time. They’ve become immune. They’ve learned to tune out this generic fluff.

But a specific claim carries much more weight. It gives credibility to your arguments. It resonates with the potential purchaser and makes your claim stand out from the rest.

Think about it. All other things being equal, if you’re buying a product or a service and one does very little for you and one does seemingly two or three times more for you, which one are you going to buy? The choice is simple.

But how do you measure the value of your product or service? Start by examining what goes into your product or service. If you are not the manufacturer or creator of it, you must go to whomever is, you must go to the source. Ask them to share with you all their data, all the clinical, technical, research, testing, and compatibility data they may have accumulated on the product or service in application.

You need to focus on three things:

1. What was the product engineered to do and why?

2. What components went into it to assure that it would perform?

3. What process did they go through to create the product or service?

In other words, if the purpose of a manufacturer’s pipe is to transport fluid underground and last for 30 years, what makes the manufacturer think it will do that? Well, they probably tested it. They probably manufactured it with material that was corrosion-proof and resistant to freezing under temperatures far below zero. You’ve got to find out all those factors.

In addition, you’ve got to analyze the process that was necessary to create the product or service. For example, if you own a clothing store, perhaps you traveled 20 times around the country and attended over 60 different trade shows to find the best merchandise, or get the best values for your customers. Perhaps you looked at 150 separate manufacturing lines to be able to choose 25 that were unique and fashionable enough to be sold in your store.

Once you have analyzed what went into the creation or production of the your product or service, the next thing you want to do is ask, “How does it compare against the competition. For example, if you are offering a suit that’s $500 and a competitor is offering a suit that’s $500 But yours is made with 25% silk If that difference is something that adds value, you should say so.

Remember, however, that it’s very important to translate value into an end-result benefit for your customer. In other words, don’t just say that because the suit is made of 25% silk it is better. That may be true but unless your customer is a tailor, It’s a meaningless claim. You have to explain to your customer that the 25% silk content will make the suit hold its shape better, respond to dry cleaning better, last an average of 50% longer for the same amount of money.

Don’t sell the features for any reason other than for their logical connection to a benefit or a result. The only reason features are even relevant is because they are a conduit, or a bridge for you to take the customer over to reach a bottom-line benefit. For example, if you’re selling flat screen or plasma televisions, what is the ultimate benefit? The benefit may be four times more clarity or four times more realistic picture than any other screen you can buy for up to twice the money. You’ve got to look at it that way, translating the feature into a tangible benefit for the customer.

When comparing your product or service to your competitors, according to customer survey results, the most effective comparisons deal with performance. The second most effective factor is composition, the components, elements, or ingredients. This is followed by the process that went into creating it, and lastly, the design or standards on which it’s based.

Although, these survey results apply most directly to products it also applies to services as well. For example, an accountant, may promote that he or she will save you 45% off of your annual tax bill which is the most effective (performance). Slightly less effective would be a claim that he or she would focus on 12 specific deductions that are often overlooked (composition). And even less effective would be if the accountant states that he or she has more than 400 hours of continuing education thereby keeping up on the latest accounting techniques (process).

Never overlook the value that your existing customers can give you. Interview them in person or in phone. You can have them complete questionnaires in the customer only section of your Web site or simply e-mail a customer questionnaire to them.

Explain to them that you want to know how your product or service performs in their own personal experience. In the interview or the questionnaire start off by taking them back to a time before they were using your product or service, when they were using either an alternative or nothing at all. Find out what it was like for them. The best part of getting information directly from you customers, is that, in the process, you are going to get excited about the value, benefit, and meaning you make in a customer’s life. And as you get more excited, you are going to sell with more certainty, conviction, and passion.

You’re going to realize, maybe for the first time, that your product or service adds enormous, tangible, and measurable meaning to someone’s life. The sooner you measure the value and benefits of your product or service, the sooner your bottom line will begin to skyrocket!