The humble 1-click upsell can be a serious AOV and CLTV booster. It can also be EXTREMELY high-ROI. All your customer has to do is check a box to hand you a bunch of extra money.
Still, your 1-click upsell shouldn’t be a throwaway.
Remember, succeeding in online businesses is about tweaking, refining, and optimizing. Even a seemingly simple tactic like a 1-click upsell can use some work.
So with that in mind, here are some ways to sell more with the 1-click upsell.
(NOTE: I’m talking about the pre-purchase 1-click upsell here. The little checkbox you see on order forms. These are slightly different from the post-purchase 1-click upsell, which you can also implement to great effect.)
1. Think Ahead
Selling is all about problem-solving. What burning, painful problems do your customers have, and how do your products fix them?
But when you’re doing a 1-click upsell (or any upselling, for that matter), you take things. a step further.
You look ahead to their future problems.
After they use your main offer, what new issues will arise? What new goals will they have, and what obstacles stand in the way of those?
This can go all sorts of ways.
Let’s say you’re selling a course teaching copywriters how to get clients (real original, I know).
The course itself might teach all the strategies, but then the students run into another problem: how do you actually structure that cold email? How do you write a project proposal?
Boom: make some templates for those, and you have a 1-click upsell.
Or maybe you have a continuity product, like a coaching program you bill monthly for. You could simply upsell them on, say, 6 months of coaching for a discount. That’s upselling, too.
And who doesn’t like a discount?
2. Make it Semi-Prominent
You want to strike a balance with your 1-click upsell’s prominence.
It needs to be big and bold enough to see, but not so big that it distracts from the best part:
Their credit card.
One tip is to put some sort of bright-colored arrow (usually red) pointing at the checkbox. If it blinks, that’s even better.
Try to use bold, italics, and underlines to draw attention to particular words as well.
A few visual techniques like these will catch more eyeballs.
3. Put It Near the Buy Button (and After Payment Information)
You want your 1-click upsell to come after the payment information boxes, not before.
Let me explain:
The more complicated the ordering process, the easier you could lose the sale.
See, your buyer already had the mental debate over buying your product, and you managed to get them to your checkout page.
Throwing another product at them before they do the mundane task of entering their payment information could make them lose focus on the original offer…
Ponder the upsell…
And cause them never to enter their payment information. Then, they close the thing entirely and don’t buy.
On the other hand, say you put that 1-click box at the end.
Now, your customer goes straight from the sales page to entering their information.
Only after all their payment details are there, do they see the 1-click box.
You “throwing them off track” with a new offer isn’t as bad since the labor of entering their info is done and they’ve “microcommitted” to buying.
If they don’t want the upsell, they can skip it and click buy since their payment info’s all ready to go. You made some money at least.
4. Be Specific and Dimensionalize
I recently bought myself a nice Samsung TV from Best Buy.
Toward the end of my order, Best Buy asked me if I wanted to donate to St. Jude (the hospital specializing in children’s cancer and other diseases).
This, right here, is kind of a 1-click upsell.
But they didn’t just ask me, “Please donate to help children fight cancer” or anything vague like that.
No — they got specific.
First, they used the names of real children who might have been in need of treatment at the hospital. That’s specific (and, in this context, tugs at your heartstrings).
They laid it out something like this:
- $2 pays for IV bags for children undergoing treatment
- $5 pays for (something I honestly can’t remember now)
- $10 pays for new toys and play areas within the hospital
Each option had a radio button so you could just click and select your donation amount, along with an “other” option.
See what they did here? They got specific and dimensionalized your donation. They gave specific items your dollars would pay for.
Of course, money is money. It’s not like the $2 donations are put in a separate “IV Bag” fund…
But this helps the buyer attach a concrete result to the dollars they donate. They’re not just donating money, they’re providing something good for a child in need.
You can do something similar with your upsells.
Instead of just telling them what they get, you can infuse real-world benefits for getting your upsold product. They aren’t just getting a product, they’re buying the benefits of that product.
5. Make the Discount Count
The discount shouldn’t be scant. It needs to really tug at the customer to be effective.
That means different things are difference price points.
A 10% discount on a $1,200/month coaching program is much different than 10% off another $20 of some physical product.
This may require some testing, but the bottom line is this:
Make the discount = some serious savings.
6. Really Hone the Copy
There’s no getting around it: a 1-click upsell box is a wall of text. You can’t
Do
Repeated
Line
Breaks
Like
This
Like you can with other forms of copy.
Thus, invest some time really honing the copy. Say as much as possible in as few words as possible. Emphasize the urgency. This is their one chance to get this great deal, after all.
Review, trim, and repeat until you have a few concise but compelling sentences.
Master the 1-Click Upsell and Watch Revenues Soar
Who would have thought there were so many ways you could improve the pre-purchase 1-click upsell?
If you want help implementing or improving 1-click upsells…
Or need some assistance in general with finding upselling opportunities in your business…