How to Use Reviews as an Upsell Opportunity

Upsells increase customer lifetime value and AOV. Here’s how you can leverage reviews to create powerful upsell campaigns every single time.

Reviews form an integral part of the sales cycle. They instill buyer confidence, add social proof, and push on-the-fence shoppers to buy.

The majority of brands implement reviews in the pre-purchase stages, like on product pages to entice new customers to become existing customers. But reviews can be used at the point of sale and post-purchase to increase average order value (AOV) by promoting upsells.

Why Upsells Are Important (and How Reviews Fit In)

Upsells essentially encourage shoppers to upgrade their purchase to a bigger, better, or more fitting option. For example, someone buying a phone might be encouraged to upgrade to a better model with more storage and a better camera.

Upsells put higher-priced products in front of customers, but they come with a range of other benefits for merchants too:

• Increase AOV by upping the amount customers spend at checkout
• Increase profits and revenue (in fact, upselling increases revenue by 10-30% on average)
• Increase customer lifetime value
• Increase product exposure and visibility on higher-priced items
• Expand interest in different products or product lines
• Provide customers with better-fit options

It’s important to get upsells right by serving relevant and well-timed options based on a customer’s unique needs. Reviews and other user-generated content examples help establish trust and give customers the information they need to determine if a product is the right fit for them.

How to Use Reviews to Promote Upsells

Review Capture Forms to Collect Zero-Party Data

Zero-party data can give you volunteered insights into the behaviors and attributes of your customers. When you collect this kind of information during the review generation stage, you can create intelligent upsell opportunities. For example, if a customer shares that they have curly hair when they leave a review, you can use that information to create personalized upsell campaigns that promote products specifically for people with curly hair in the future.

This is crucial today since 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. Collecting maximum zero-party data at the review collection stage means you can create personalized upsell campaigns for each individual customer.

This brand can use the attributes gleaned at the review stage (like the customer’s height, age, and clothing size) to serve personalized upsell suggestions.

Use an Enhanced Review Capture Form from Okendo to make it easy for customers to share their experiences. The easier the form is for customers to fill out with prompts and pre-filled sections, the better the review generation conversion rate is which leads to more reviews and more zero-party data.

Incentives to Increase the Quality of Reviews

Everyone likes to be rewarded for their time and effort. When collecting reviews, offer customers an incentive like a discount, a coupon code, or a limited time or secret offer that will increase the AOV of their purchase and encourage them to try more of your products.

Incentives are also a great way to generate better quality reviews. For example, you can offer a higher incentive (like a bigger discount or a more expensive free gift) to customers that leave photos and videos alongside their written reviews.

Place Customer Reviews on Upsell Product Pages

Reviews are a common form of user-generated content marketing on regular product pages, but incorporating them into your upsell pages can be a great way to increase conversions. Whether you’re promoting upsells via email, at the point of checkout, or on separate landing pages, reviews can cement trust and add social proof – especially for high-ticket items.

Convincing a customer to purchase a pricier product than the one they originally chose can be tricky, but reviews give shoppers the reassurance they need to buy. In fact, the conversion rate increases by 380% when higher-priced items are placed alongside positive customer reviews.

Reviews Are the Perfect Upsell Opportunity

Reviews give customers the confidence to move quickly and confidently through the buying process, but don’t limit your use of them to pre-purchase pages. Instead, sprinkle customer reviews throughout the sales cycle, including at the point of purchase and post-purchase. This can help increase AOV and promote better-fit products for customers.

Using reviews as an upsell opportunity is a great way to collect zero-party data you can use to personalize future campaigns, generate higher-quality reviews, and create upsell pages that convert over and over again.