Upselling techniques proven to maximize holiday sales

Searching for simple ways to boost your holiday sales? Look no further!

In this blog post, we’ll cover 5 easy tactics that are guaranteed to increase your sales this holiday season. How can we guarantee it? Because we've had over 100,000 Shopify stores use our Upsell app to run these exact promos. We've seen them work, and we have the data!

5 proven techniques to increase sales this holiday season

#1: Post Purchase Upsells

How'd you like to increase the size of your orders by 30-40%? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it's not! Post Purchase Upsells are a powerful tool that can significantly boost your sales.

Post Purchase Upsells happen immediately after an order is placed—it's a page between the checkout and the order confirmation page. The customer can select any options required, and with just a click, it's added to the order they just placed. It shows up as a separate charge on the customer's card, but is merged together on the same order.

Why we love Post Purchase Upsells:

• Seamless shopping: Post Purchase Upsells appear immediately after a customer completes their purchase, offering additional products or upgrades without interrupting their shopping journey.
• Higher conversion rates: Selling to your existing customers converts better. In fact, some studies show 5x better! They've already bought from you and trust you, so they're more likely to accept the offer.
• Reduced friction: There's no checkout or credit card required. It's a simple click to add to the order they’ve already placed.
• Optimal timing: The highest rush of dopamine and the peak release of endorphins during a shopping experience is the moment a customer clicks "Complete Order". Presenting an offer at the peak of their excitement post-purchase maximizes effectiveness.

How to set up Post Purchase Upsells

In the Bold Upsell app, click "Create Offer", and give it an internal name. Let's call this the BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) Post Purchase Offer. Then, select your trigger event as "Post Purchase".

You can then choose to make the offer appear only when specific products are purchased, or for any products in the store. You can get creative here, but we recommend having the offer show for every item purchased. The goal here is to increase AOV (average order value) on as many orders as possible!

Now that your trigger is set, select a title and description for your offer. Then select the product you'd like to offer. Try to pick something you think will appeal to the broadest audience, and if you don't have something that applies, consider a Mystery Box! These convert like magic! (More on this in a minute.)

That last thing you'll want to do is give your offer a discount. We notice stores that offer a 20% discount see as high as 40% conversion on their offers. Offer whatever you can, but the higher the better.

If you want, you can also set a date range or dollar threshold. If you don't want to oversell, toggle this switch, or leave it off if inventory isn't an issue.

That's it! It's that easy to add one-click Post-Purchase Upsells to your store for the holidays.

If you’re not already using Bold Upsell, you can try it on your store completely free for 30 days.

#2: Email Upsells

Email Upsells are another powerful way to increase your sales. By sending targeted offers to customers immediately after their purchase, you can capitalize on their excitement and encourage them to buy again.

When the email comes, it's just one click directly to checkout, and with ShopPay it's only a click to checkout.

Why we love Email Upsells:

• Personalized offers: Tailor your email upsells to each customer's unique preferences
• Easy to set up: Set up email upsells within your email marketing platform using tools like Bold Upsell
• High conversion: Customers who have already purchased from you are more likely to accept additional offers

How to set up Email Upsells

Email Upsells are set up just like any other upsell offer. First, click  "Create Offer" and give it an internal name. For the trigger event, select "Post-Purchase Email Upsell". Then select if you want to target the offer for specific products, or the entire store.

Once that is done, you set details of the offer for the email template. Give it a compelling call to action and you can use HTML here if you need. As usual, if you want to set a date range or dollar threshold you can. If you don't want to oversell, just toggle this switch, or leave it off if inventory isn't an issue.

Click save, and just like that you've got Email Upsells running for the holidays! One of the easiest ways to increase roughly 8-10% of your orders!

#3: Mystery Box Upsells

Everyone loves a surprise. Just walk down the toy aisle in any store and you'll see half the shelves full of surprise boxes—LOL Surprise dolls, Hot Wheels surprise cars, Lego surprise boxes—the list goes on. At Target alone there are 3,064 results for "kids surprise toys"!

Every year we check the hundreds of thousands of offers our merchants run to see what the highest converting upsells are, and almost every year without exception, it's a mystery or surprise box at the top of the list.

And best of all, Mystery Box Upsells are not just awesome because their conversion is through the roof, they're great for getting rid of inventory that's hard to move! Truly a win-win!

Why we love Mystery Box Upsells:

• Element of surprise: The unknown nature of mystery boxes can be highly appealing to customers.
• Inventory management: Mystery boxes are a great way to clear out excess inventory.
• High conversion rates: Mystery Box Upsells often have impressive conversion rates.
  

With Bold Upsell, you can show Mystery Box Upsells just about anywhere. It could be on a product page, in the fly-out cart drawer, or even as part of a funnel. If you're on Shopify Plus, you can display a one-click upsell directly in the checkout, and as a post purchase offer as well.

If you're also using Bold Subscriptions, you can offer a Mystery Box Upsell in the subscriber customer portal with Customer Portal Upsells. With 92% of subscribers visiting their subscriber portal at least once, it's a great place to offer them. You can also offer them in the upcoming subscription order email with Subscription Email Upsells.

The amazing thing about offering it to subscribers is they don't need to enter a credit card, and they don’t even need to checkout. They just click to accept the offer and it adds it to their next upcoming shipment. That's the beauty of the integration between Bold Upsell and Bold Subscriptions.

How to set up Mystery Box Upsells

Setting these offers up is just like any other offer. Select where you want it to show, what should trigger it, and then give it a compelling call to action. Try something fun like making 1 out of every 500 boxes contain a $1,000 product, or a bonus prize! Surprise boxes by themselves convert like magic, but add a chance to win big and they'll be irresistible!

#4: Upsell donations

This isn't something people typically think about when it comes to upselling, but it's great for many reasons. When you take a donation on behalf of a customer for $20 or less, you get the donation tax credit. This is why every retail store you shop at asks you to donate $2, or round up for charity. It's only $2 bucks to you, but thousands of people doing it allows the business to make a very large donation, and then get the tax receipt to go against income tax.

More importantly, it's a way to give back to a charity you’re passionate about, and aligns your business with a cause, which has been proven to increase customer loyalty.

Why we love Upsell donations:

• Positive impact: Contribute to a cause that matters to you and your customers.
• Boost your brand’s reputation: Showcase your company’s commitment to the community.
• Tax benefits: Receive tax benefits for your charitable donations.

How to set up Upsell Donations

Bold Upsell makes this easy. When a customer goes to checkout, you share the cause your company supports and ask if they want to donate a few dollars.

Create a special product in your Shopify store that will be the donation product. Add variants for the different amounts people can choose to give, and then images for the different variant amounts if you like. Then use that product when you're creating your upsell. It's just like creating any other offer with Bold Upsell.

At the end of the year, run a report in Shopify to see how many of that specific product you sold, and that's what you need to donate.

This will raise a lot of money for a good cause, align you with a cause which increases loyalty, and as a nice bonus it will give you a tax write-off at the end of the year from charitable donation.

#5: Upsell funnels

Upsell funnels let you offer one product to a customer, and depending on whether they accept or decline, follow up with a different offer. Funnels used to be a feature only available to merchants on the premium plan, but are now available to everyone, even on our free plan!

Funnels come in all shapes and sizes. One example is an integrated upsell offer, where the product being offered upgrades and replaces the original item, and then moves into cross-sells for the rest of the funnel. You might offer an upgrade to a coffee maker, then add on coffee filters and descaler.

Or, funnels can be just cross-sells. For example, if they accept or decline the first offer you make, you display another product, or maybe a less expensive version.

Funnels are like mini shopping experiences. Customers can add multiple products from one part of the funnel, then more from the next. These work especially well if the product you're selling has a lot of complementary products or accessories.

If you're not sure what to offer in your funnel, try creating a "holiday bundle" of some of your products and promote it as a great hosting gift for that Christmas dinner party. Then in the funnel, offer gift wrapping.

With a few minutes of effort you can create killer funnels that will do wonders this year.

Why we love Upsell funnels:

• Create personalized shopping experiences: Offer customers more of the products you know they’ll love!
• Increase average order value: During the holidays, customers are in the mood to shop. Suggest add-ons and upgrades to boost AOV (average order value).
• Easy set-up: Easily create high-converting upsell funnels in minutes

How to set up Upsell funnels

Creating funnels is easy. You can create funnels on product page offers, or cart page offers. They're just like any other offer, the only difference is you create multiple offers depending on whether they accept or decline the previous offer.

Funnels are an extremely powerful tool that are available to every Upsell user on any plan.