If you’ve gone through a drive-thru, you might have been asked “Would you like a drink with that?” This is a classic tactic used to upsell customers. Most businesses focus on funding their advertising initiatives, with most large-scale companies spending around 10% of their budget on advertisement.
However, you don’t need new clients to earn a steady income as a company.
Many companies spend more money and time on upselling their current clients than getting new clients altogether. This is done by all great companies around the world. And upselling can work for you too.
Getting repeat business from your customers is the golden nugget of any business. In this article I’ll show you how to get more projects from your existing clients as a WordPress developer.
What Is Upselling?
Upselling is encouraging a customer to purchase something additional to their current order. This makes the price of the purchase go up, since there are additional purchases stacked on top of the initial purchase.
An example of upselling is when a customer purchases a smartphone from a tech shop. The salesperson from the tech shop may ask the customer if they would want a charger and earphones to go with that purchase. Since the customer is already in the tech shop, it wouldn’t hurt to accept the offer. Therefore, the price of the purchase goes up because of the additional earphones and chargers, and the business gains more profit
Why Upsell?
Upselling is one of the best ways to generate more revenue if done well, and so most businesses upsell their products or services. However, it’s important to understand that upselling is not a dirty sales tactic—it can also bring a multitude of benefits to the customers. Upselling is a win-win situation if you are keeping the customer’s best interest in mind.
Therefore, you suggest upsells, additionals, or premiums to enhance the customer’s experience while generating more revenue for your company. As a result of the customer’s satisfaction, the likelihood of their returning increases, and your business gains a regular customer and more profit.
Moreover, it is much easier to upsell an existing client rather than acquiring a new client. This is because a new client isn’t initially interested in your products or services. In contrast, an existing client is already interested in you, they know your rates and what they can expect from you. In other words, customers already trust that you have their best interests in mind.
Upselling to new clients is the way to go if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on marketing or a lot of money on advertising to people who won’t necessarily be interested in you anyway.
Benefits of Working With Existing Clients vs Acquiring New Clients
As a WordPress developer, working with existing clients is a great budget-friendly way to earn more money. Focusing on existing clients brings many benefits both to you and the client, as I’ll show you below.
Existing Clients Are Already Interested in You
An existing client means they have purchased a product or service from you previously, meaning that they are already interested in doing business with you.
This makes your life much easier, since you don’t need to work on setting a good impression or establishing trust. Instead, you can focus on building a relationship and working toward a point where you can have a conversation about upselling.
Established Relationship
Since existing clients have already bought from you, you have set the foundation of a professional relationship that can be built upon later.
However, with new clients, you don’t have this relationship to start with. Therefore, it is much harder to upsell new clients because they don’t trust you. People need to feel they can trust you before making important purchases, and that comes from establishing a relationship.
Having a relationship with your existing clients also ensures that you know how they operate, and you know how to work with them. This avoids misunderstandings, errors in work, or worse, a negative review—all of which take additional time, energy, and resources to help correct.
More Repeat Business
Repeat clients are clients who have purchased your product or services multiple times on separate occasions. Gaining repeat clients is, self-evidently, harder with entirely new clients compared to existing clients. This means that it’s much more likely to turn an existing client into a repeat client than an entirely new client into a repeat client.
Repeat clients are also more likely to want something more from your services. This is because repeat clients tend to purchase the same thing, but when a new hot deal comes around, repeat clients tend to be the first ones to try it first. This is because they trust you and expect a good experience with you.
Unlike new clients, repeat customers already have trust in you and your skills. This is a huge benefit for you, since one the most important elements of every high-ticket purchase is trust.
If you have already built someone a website or improved their current one, they have also benefited from your skills. It’s a win-win scenario. So why not offer additional services that will help your client be better off?
These kinds of upsells aren’t limited to just a single instance. You can always reach out to your clients in 3-6 months and offer a service that might be helpful to them. For instance, once you’ve built them a website, you can offer to build and grow their blog, which will help their marketing efforts. After that, you may help them build their email list by adding lead-magnet forms throughout their website.
This process can be repeated endlessly as long as you offer something that can really help your client.
How To Identify Opportunities for Upselling Your Existing Clients
Identifying opportunities is the first key step to upselling your existing clients. Without this skill, you won’t have the chance to upsell in the first place. Remember that upselling is a lot easier with existing clients who have existing relationships with you. This is why focusing on building these relationships is a must. Without a good working relationship, you are bound to fail because trust hasn’t been built.
Acknowledge Frustrations
When you are talking to a client, you need to be very aware of their needs and frustrations. For example, you might get a client who wants a WordPress blog, but they also mention frustrations about their WordPress blog being slow to load.
You can act on this by building their WordPress blog and asking either before or after the purchase the question “Do you want me to optimize your blog’s loading speed?” Simply thinking about how you can improve a customer’s experience goes a long way.
Another example would be a customer who is having difficulty with having responsive design through all browsers and screen sizes. You can act on this by asking “Do you want me to design a cross-compatible website with responsive design through all screen sizes?”
Asking such questions is a great way to upsell because you acknowledge your customer’s frustrations, showing them why you can provide value.
Gather Information About Your Clients
If you have a way of contacting your clients, consider reaching out and giving a survey. This survey needs to have a way to gather information about all the frustrations and needs of your customers. Include questions like:
- “What are you most frustrated with about your WordPress website?”
- “What are the problems you need to fix with your WordPress website?”
- “What do you wish you had on your WordPress website?”
- “How can I make my services work better for you?”
Open-ended questions like these encourage your existing clients to answer because you are putting their best interests first. However, if you are struggling to get your existing clients to answer the survey, consider adding an incentive such as a gift card or a free additional service.
How To Get Extra Projects From Your Existing Clients?
Using the two methods mentioned above, you should have a pretty good idea of what your customers want the most and what they are most frustrated with.
Now it’s time to start upselling.
There are three phases in the purchasing process where you can start upselling. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Before Purchase
The before-purchase phase is where you can extract information on what the customer needs. If any frustration is mentioned—such as slow page-loading times, unresponsive or poor design—upsell them to an additional service that fixes their frustration.
Ex: client is frustrated that their website is not ranking. Upsell them by offering an SEO-friendly website.
During the Purchase
While you are creating, developing, or re-designing your WordPress website, you might find errors on their current website or additional features you can add to your current design. Instead of adding it free of charge, kindly asking for an upsell won’t hurt.
Ex: You are designing a WordPress website for a client’s e-commerce business. Upsell by asking if they want a social-proof section such as a “People also bought this …” area.
After Purchase
After the purchase is where most upsells happen. After they purchase your WordPress product or service, do some research to find any flaws or to determine how they can improve on their WordPress website. Then offer upsells.
Upsells could also be done by reaching out to them after some time, such as with a follow-up email. Many companies do this by scheduling a time to send out an offer to customers who have purchased from them. An example of this would be a follow-up email containing the following:
Hi [name],
I noticed that your WordPress website is working great, and I’m happy that everything is going well. However, I can’t help but notice that the last time you debugged your website was 14 days ago when I delivered the WordPress website.
I suggest that you check out my “WordPress Debugging Service,” which is an add-on to clients who have purchased my services before. I recommend this to clients who haven’t debugged their websites for at least a week. If you’re interested let me know!
Thanks!
Sincerely,
[your name]
Upselling Is a Win-Win Scenario
Earning money is much easier from your existing clients compared to new clients. Earning money from existing clients can be done by upselling, and as a WordPress developer, you need this skill to maximize your earnings.
In this post we saw what upselling is and why it’s beneficial. Remember that upselling, when done properly, is a win-win scenario for both you and your clients. I also showed you how to identify opportunities for upselling and the three phases where upselling can occur in the purchasing process.
Ultimately, working with existing clients is easier than acquiring new clients. Although new clients are of course always welcome, the best way to gain upselling opportunities is by building good working relationships with your existing clients.