This week we’re sharing the second video from our 8-part series on maximizing profits for your tour business. And in this video, we’re covering a simple but powerful tactic: Upsells and Add-Ons.

What are Upsells and Add-Ons?

Upselling means suggesting higher-priced alternatives or extras to enhance the customer’s experience. It’s all about increasing the transaction value and the lifetime customer value by giving guests more of what they want.

One-click Upsells are incredibly common in the tours and activities space. Once again, your booking software is going to make the adoption rate even higher as you give your customers the ease to quickly add on extras during the checkout flow with a simple click of a button.

Of course, your sales team can offer these over the phone, but the real magic comes with your online booking software.

It’s important to note that Upsells are different from bundles or packages where you’re putting multiple products together. Here, we’re talking exclusively about things that are offered during the checkout process. However, it’s also entirely appropriate to describe these Add-Ons or experience enhancers right there on your tour description pages.

The Power of Digital Goods

Keep in mind that many of the most profitable one-click Upsells are digital goods, such as digital photos or a PDF guide, which can be set to automatically deliver when the purchase is made. These are essentially pure profit beyond the initial creation of those tangible goods.

Not only that, but one-click Upsells actually enhance the customer experience because you’re able to give more options and flexibility to your guests to choose what’s important to them and what might be a meaningful change in their tour experience.

The Secret Sauce: Increasing Lifetime Value

We highly recommend this profit-boosting tactic because Upsells have consistently proven to increase your average order value with minimal effort, meaning that it’s found money from each booking. You’re not going to have to pay a bunch of marketing agencies to go and get more customers. The secret sauce here is really about increasing the lifetime value of each individual customer.

Real-World Best Practices

1. Know Your Guests: Don’t just blindly upsell or come up with ideas off the top of your head. Offer relevant, attractive choices that are tailored around the interests, needs, wants, and desires of the people you are serving. Understanding what is actually going to be valuable to your customers drastically affects how much success you can have with these.
2. A Balance of Choices: To optimize upselling, offer no more than three options during the checkout process. Too many options will overwhelm or potentially deter some of your customers, and there might be abandoned bookings if they need to go and check on something.
3. Test and Optimize Your Upsells: Listen to past guest feedback to identify potential Upsells and constantly swap them out to see if one offer converts higher than the other. If you are not converting at a minimum of 15-20% on some of your Upsells, there is room for innovation to find something that’s really going to resonate with your guests.
4. Capitalize on Holiday Spending Trends: Booking software companies consistently report in their data that the average order value from customers shoots up around public holidays. Customers and guests are willing to spend more during these times, so make the most of these trends. Consider festive and seasonal Add-Ons that are available for a limited period of time.
5. Go Digital: Consider having at least one of your upsell options be entirely digital. That way, it’s entirely automated, meaning that when somebody adds this to their cart, you can set up your booking software to deliver this email automatically. Because of the low cost of digital goods and the ease of delivery, these can be some of the most profitable Upsells that you can offer.

Upselling in the B2B Market

Many people think of experience enhancers as just something for direct-to-consumer sales, but this is not the case. If you’re doing a lot of private events, if you’re in the corporate market, perhaps doing holiday parties, team building activities, or in the reward and recognition space, take the time to add experience enhancers across the B2B market.

Taking Action

If you have Upsells in your business right now, have a look at them and check their performance. Are you hitting that 15-20% opt-in rate? If not, come up with some creative solutions. Is at least one of them digital? If not, you know what to do.

For those of you that don’t have any Add-Ons in your checkout flow at the moment, block off some time in your calendar so you can set that up.

If you’d like us to have a look at your tour business a little bit more closely, you’re more than welcome to grab a free strategy call with one of our tour business coaches.