Once upon a time, an affiliate marketer had a website on which he promoted a $25 product via an agreement with a merchant.
One day, a potential customer entered the affiliate marketer’s website and looked around. Reading the website content about the product, the customer was sold. Clicking on the affiliate’s link, the customer purchased the product from the merchant, and the affiliate marketer received his commission. And they all lived happily ever after.
And the next day, it rained.
Okay, that last line may come from a smart aleck (guilty as charged). But it raises the question: “What’s next?” You don’t want the customer to be a “one-hit wonder,” buying the product and never entering your website again. You may have more to offer the customer than just the initial product you sold, or the customer may need to purchase the product again down the road. Plus, your affiliate agreement may allow you to receive commissions for all purchases made by your customer within, say, 30 days.
Regardless, you need to provide enough incentive for the customer to revisit, and to make additional purchases on, your website. Enter the concept of upselling.
Upselling involves offering a higher-priced product or service to a customer who has already purchased through your website. Other sales circles define upselling as the act of convincing a customer to purchase a more expensive product than the one the customer originally considered. But that definition focuses on hard-selling new customers and, in my opinion, potentially turning them off.
Upselling in affiliate marketing involves selling a low-price product now and a higher priced product later. However, it’s more than that. Beginning with that initial sale, you are developing a sense of trust with the customer through the effective delivery of content and services. You are building a relationship.
Through that one sale, you receive information about that customer that could help in developing upsell possibilities. It could involve the customer’s interest in information related to the initial product. Or, you could discover the customer’s potential willingness to receive that content from you in the future. That content could take the form of a follow-up email or a viral report, for example.
In order to keep your customers interested in and willing to spend money on what you have to offer, upselling the affiliate marketing way is a great approach. For more about upselling and how to apply it successfully to your affiliate marketing efforts, I heartily recommend Anik Singal’s article on the subject in the October 2005 issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine.