Onboarding new clients is exciting, especially after marketing and sales have worked so hard to capture their attention, show why the solution is the right fit, and close the deal. But as marketers know, that’s just the beginning.
The real work starts once your prospect becomes a customer. It’s about making sure they feel good about their decision and planting subtle seeds about other ways you can help them. The sales team is skilled at cross-selling and upselling. But do you know what else helps? When marketing can put some of that work on autopilot.
Many marketers already use automation for lead nurturing and top-of-funnel campaigns. But it’s also a powerful tool for growing existing relationships. You can use it to create automated journeys, build stronger connections, and naturally introduce new products or services. We’ve gathered top upselling strategies to help you upsell more effectively and make the customer experience even better.
Upsell Effectively with Industry Segmentation
If you serve many industries and have multiple buyer personas, you have a significant opportunity to drive revenue by segmenting your new customers and personalizing their experience.
Let’s say you’re a manufacturing company that sells industrial equipment across sectors like automotive, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. Each industry has its own set of challenges, goals, and regulatory requirements, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t fully capture your cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Marketing automation allows you to segment customers by industry and automatically trigger onboarding emails or product education journeys. With this segmentation, you can address a customer’s specific needs by industry, speaking to their pain points more deeply, and make product recommendations that feel like a perfect fit.
Use Survey-Driven Campaigns, Mapping to Business Challenges
Have you ever gotten an email and deleted it immediately, not because you didn’t like the brand but because the content wasn’t that important to you? It happens. And it’s also a missed opportunity.
A strategy to improve cross-sells and upsells is to understand what specific customers care about and then send them content that matches. An easy way to do this is by creating a survey-driven campaign tied to specific products. Start by sending a quick email asking customers about their current challenges. For example, if you’re a marketing automation company and some of your customers struggle with email marketing, let them tell you that.
From there, you can use marketing automation to route those contacts into customized nurture campaigns that highlight features or upsell opportunities that solve their specific problems. This allows you to send customers more relevant content and product offerings that help improve cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Upselling Strategy for Your Power Users
Your most-engaged users likely love your products or services, which can create entirely new opportunities for upsells and cross-sells. Take a financial institution, for example. If a customer regularly uses mobile banking and sets up multiple savings goals in the app, that might be a good sign they’re financially engaged and ready to expand their relationship.
An automated journey could celebrate those milestones, like hitting a savings goal, while introducing relevant services, like a higher-yield savings account, financial planning tools, or even mortgage options that match their life stage.
Aligning offers with the usage of your products and customer behaviors allows you to build stronger trust, add value, and grow relationships and revenue.
Create Feature Adoption Series Based on Product Gaps
Have you ever used a tool for months, or maybe even years, only to suddenly discover a feature that makes your life so much easier? We’ve been there too. The good news is you don’t have to wait for customers to stumble on those moments. You can create them.
A great way to do this is by building a “feature adoption” email series based on product usage gaps. For example, let’s say you’re a financial software provider and notice that many users haven’t tried a budgeting tool. You could trigger a personalized email series that highlights how to use it, shares quick tips, and even links to a short video demo.
Maybe customers who use this feature are more likely to upgrade to the version of your product that includes advanced financial planning tools or real-time spending alerts. By highlighting how the budgeting tool can improve their daily money management, you not only improve feature adoption but also create a path for introducing higher-tier offerings that align with customer needs.
Upsell by Teasing Higher-Tier Products
The customers most likely to stay with you the longest and grow their business are the ones seeing strong results from what they’re already using. A great way to support that is by creating educational content mapped to their customer journey.
For example, Georgia United Credit Union built a “next best product” cross-sell program using marketing automation that focused on recommending complementary financial products. They created segments based on each member’s profile, including details like current products and credit score.
Each month, a personalized offer was sent automatically by email, tailored to that specific profile. These programs helped the credit union cross-sell thousands of new products through automation and increased application volume by 96 percent.
Growing Relationships and Revenue
Marketing and sales teams work hard to bring in new customers, and naturally, you want to keep that momentum going. But if you also focus on improving your cross-sell and upsell efforts, your revenue potential can grow quickly. After all, it is often much easier to generate new revenue from existing customers than to find brand new ones.
Automation can be a big help with these efforts. It allows you to provide more value to current customers, support them in ways they may not have considered, and improve the performance of your campaigns.
Do you want to learn more creative strategies to drive more revenue? Check out our guide breaking down “revenue marketing” and detailing how to answer many of the current challenges that marketers face.