Have you ever had a potential customer walk away from a purchase because the price was just a little too high? It’s a frustrating reality for businesses. People might love your product but hesitate to buy because of the cost.
Downselling helps you turn hesitant shoppers into paying customers by offering a lower-cost alternative. Instead of losing a sale completely, you provide a product or service at a price they feel comfortable with.
In fact, DigitalMarketer converted 15% of visitors with a downselling popup from OptinMonster.
This type of downselling is a win-win: your customer still gets value, and you still make a sale.
In this article, I’ll go over 5 proven ways to use downselling to increase conversions and revenue. These strategies will help you recover lost sales, build long-term customer relationships, and boost your bottom line.
What Is Downselling?
Downselling is when you offer a more affordable product or service to a customer who hesitates to buy a higher-priced item.
When shopping for a laptop, you might find one with all the features you want, but the price is beyond your budget. Just as you’re about to leave, the salesperson shows you a slightly less powerful model that still meets your needs but at a lower price. Since the price was the only thing holding you back, you decide to buy.
That’s downselling in action, and you can use the same strategy on your website. I mentioned earlier that DigitalMarketer used this downselling popup to visitors exiting their site without making a purchase:
Every sale that this popup wins is extra revenue for DigitalMarketer, and it nurtures the visitor toward a potential larger purchase later.
Why is downselling so effective?
- It removes price as a barrier. Instead of losing a customer due to cost concerns, you give them an option they can afford.
- It builds trust and loyalty. Customers appreciate businesses that offer solutions instead of just pushing expensive products.
- It increases future sales. Once a customer buys from you, even at a lower price, they’re more likely to return and buy again.
- It’s a powerful psychological trigger. When people see a high-priced product first, a lower-cost alternative feels like a great deal in comparison.
No matter how you approach it, downselling can be a game-changer for your business. Now, let’s look at 5 ways to use it to drive more conversions.
5 Ways to Boost Profits With Downselling
Below are 5 actionable techniques you can use to generate more profits with downselling. And each of these strategies can be built with OptinMonster, the world’s #1 lead generation software.
Our mission is to give small and medium-sized businesses the tools they need to increase conversions on their site. Whether you want more sitewide traffic, more email subscribers, or more sales, OptinMonster can make sure you’re getting the highest conversions possible.
To learn more about how OptinMonster can help your business grow, check out this article: How Does OptinMonster Work? 3 Use Cases.
Ready to get started? Sign up for your risk-free OptinMonster account today!
Now let’s dive into our tips.
1. Use an Exit Intent® Popup on Product Pages
One of the simplest ways you can get into downselling is with a simple exit intent popup. Exit Intent® technology is something that OptinMonster uses to trigger popup campaigns.
When a customer is looking at your website, your popup will appear as they attempt to leave the browser page. This is a super effective method for recovering abandoning visitors.
Just check out these examples of OptinMonster clients who saw massive success with exit intent campaigns:
- Rich Page Increased Conversions by 316%
- Bonjour Lisbonne Doubled Its Email Subscribers
- Fastrack Recovers 53% of Its Site’s Visitors
But how does any of this relate to downselling?
You can target specific product pages on your website that are sold at a high price point. Then, you can create a downselling popup that contains a related product but at a lower price.
If your customers were looking at an expensive necklace, for example, you may show them this popup campaign as they’re trying to leave:
If your customers were hesitant to make the initial purchase because of the price, your downselling popup will capture their attention and make your second offer hard to refuse.
2. Create a Classic Tripwire Funnel
In the past, we’ve written about tripwire funnels and how they can be a great way of boosting sales.
If you haven’t read that article yet, we highly recommend it.
One of the key components in the tripwire funnel is the downsell offer. Here’s how tripwire funnels work:
- Your customer puts a very low-cost item in their cart
- At checkout, you show them a limited time only upsell offer (another product at a lower price point)
- If they decline the upsell, you show them a downsell offer that costs less than your upsell, but more than your original product
And here’s what makes this type of downsell so powerful: it’s actually always an upsell!
Let’s look at an example. Suppose you were selling an eBook for $5. When your customers put it in their cart, they see a popup for a private online course priced at $997.
They decide not to purchase this service, but then they see another offer for a group course at $97.
The difference in the price between these two offers makes your group course very tempting, and your customer decides to buy it.
Even though the $97 was a downsell compared to the more expensive private course, it’s still a major upsell from the original $5 eBook.
You can easily create this type of popup using OptinMonster’s Yes/No campaign. Here’s an example of what the upsell campaign would look like:
If your customer clicks Yes, they’ll get redirected to the course’s product page to make the purchase. If they click No, your downsell offer will appear:
This campaign took us less than 5 minutes to build for this demo. You can make a similar campaign and start generating more profits today.
3. Make Targeted Product Suggestions
It’s rare that any product would have everything to satisfy your customer’s needs. When someone buys a phone, they also need a charger. If they buy a suit, they’ll need a tie. Or if they buy sunglasses, they’ll likely need a case.
The point is that many products require accessories that can function as downsells.
You can create targeted product suggestions for all of your product pages. Then, when a customer adds something to their cart or makes a purchase, you can trigger your popup to show a related–but less expensive–product.
If your customer added a jacket to their shopping cart, for example, you could show them a popup recommending another item of clothing:
Again, OptinMonster allows you to make targeted product recommendations for your downselling offers in a matter of minutes.
That way, you can save time and energy to focus on other areas of your business while watching your profits grow.
4. Remove Premium Features for Downsell Packages
One form of downselling is to create product packages that are essentially stripped-down versions of more premium products.
So let’s say you have a training course that offers live support, 1:1 weekly calls, a video course, and access to group forums. This is your premium product that sells for $497.
You can easily develop a downsell offer by removing a few of the premium features and creating a more cost-friendly package. You might remove live support and the 1:1 weekly calls, for example, to sell the video course and forum access for $97.
Now you have 2 products: the premium version and your downsell offer. Here’s an example of what this kind of downsell campaign may look like:
This works particularly well for online products and SaaS companies. But this also works if you sell anything that comes in packages such as gift baskets, flower arrangements, food assortments, and more.
5. Use OnSite Follow Up Campaigns®
OnSite Follow Up Campaigns® allow you to show offers based on how users have interacted with other campaigns on your site.
That means you can use your customer’s behavior to create personalized downsell offers. If you know that a user has interacted positively with an offer for a coupon, for example, you can later target them for similar products at a lower price point.
You can also use Smart Tags to highly personalize these follow up campaigns. This allows you to grab your user’s attention by referring to them by name or location.
The more personal you can make your downsell offers, the more likely you are to increase conversions.
This type of downsell campaign could look something like this:
Onsite Follow Up Campaigns® are an incredibly effective tool for boosting conversions. In fact, it’s the exact tactic that the travel agency Travel Anywhere used to recover 56% of abandoning visitors.
And that’s it! These are 5 ways you can get more conversions through downselling.
We hope you found this article helpful. If so, you may be interested in using OptinMonster to boost profits in other ways. For that, we recommend you check out the following posts:
- How to Boost Your eCommerce Revenue With an In-Cart Upsell
- The Ultimate eCommerce Optimization Guide: 13 Steps to Instantly Boost Revenue
- 15 Smart eCommerce Personalization Examples That Boost Sales
These posts will have everything you need to learn how OptinMonster can start bringing in more profits to your business today.
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