How to Upsell to Boost Sales: Insights from Ryanair

If your entire brand positioning is aimed at affordability, while your acquisition and signups might be initially high, you might need to increase your prices to scale. So how do you do this without chasing away your target market? Upsells.

This post will share practical ways Ryanair is currently upselling to maximize profit and some key takeaways you can implement for your own business.

What Exactly is Upselling?

Upselling is a marketing and sales technique focusing on convincing customers to increase their average spending by buying a higher-end product. A higher-end in this case could be a more expensive paid plan, a warranty, or more features. It’ll vary based on your business.

While being one of the cheapest airlines to fly, in the fiscal year ending March 2023, Ryanair reported over 10 billion euros in revenue and 38% of that was generated from its upsells on baggage, food, retail and more as you’ll see in this case study.

How Ryanair is Upselling to Boost its Sales and Revenue

Ryan Air is an airline that prides itself on being cheap. In fact, you’ll see from its hilarious content online it does not care about offering quality services — just an affordable one. This leads to the first trick:

1. They understand their customers

You need to understand who your customers are to be able to properly upsell. Don’t try to sell an 85-inch flat screen to someone who lives in a tiny apartment. No matter what you do, they will always go for a smaller size.

Personally, I’d recommend using the tools at your disposal. Some include;

• Reviewing data on past purchases, buying habits and demographics on your CRM.
• Take the responses from your surveys to know what they really want — their preferred features and how much they are willing to spend on it
• Use social listening to understand consumer preferences and upsell that

A great example is how most people don’t like the middle seat on airlines and when on a couple/group trip, they prefer to sit together. Ryanair sees an opportunity in this, so since its service doesn’t provide this option by default, you can pay a little extra to get this preference.

It also doesn’t just stop with a disclaimer. When you choose random allocation, they let you know, you can be stuck in the middle because they know it works.

2. Inducing urgency through limited time and offers

Most people can’t help but procrastinate. And when a customer hesitates before completing a sale, that can be bad for business. So like most businesses, Ryanair creates a sense of urgency by offering limited availability or discounts to prompt its customers to act now.

The check-in bag is currently £25.99, but the brand shows that customers may likely pay twice as much on a regular day or when they need it most. So the cheapest you can get it is now. At this stage, most people would just opt to get this check-in option.

3. Bundling products together on one plan

This strategy is quite popular with SAAS business models but it can also be quite effective for other business models like eCommerce especially since you can mix-and-match more than one product to create a bundle. Product bundles are successful because customers think that they are getting a steal for the price.

With Ryanair for example, by adding an extra £46.99, you can get a reserved seat, a 20kg check-in bag and free check-in at the airport. Each bundle is different from the next, so customers can choose whichever one appeals best to them.

For businesses, upselling through bundles is a great way to push your least-selling product. So, if you have a feature or stock that isn’t getting the traction that you need, pair it with your best seller to get more returns on it.

The way you place it also matters. The psychology of middle option bias shows that customers are most likely to go with the middle option when faced with multiple pricing or product bundle options.

4. Using regret as a weapon by showing possible consequences

Nothing instils fear than a “what if” situation. So show your customers how you can save them so much trouble with your upsell.

As you’ll see from our example above, Ryanair does a great job of reemphasizing to its customers who don’t want to pay for extra luggage that they would be fined for it. This deterrent would make people ordinarily re-think their choices and go for a safer option which is really just the upsell.

5. Giving the people what they actually need before they need it

One unique upsell Ryanair offers is location-based upsells. When booking this flight, my location was set to the United Kingdom. Taking this into account, Ryanair shared that due to my originating country and destination, I needed travel insurance and then showed me an upsell.

So, depending on your business model, think about what your customers would need due to their region or demographic. Upsell what they’d actually need before they look for it elsewhere.

6. Knowing that everyone loves a good discount

While car hires weren’t exactly relevant to me in particular, I do love a good discount. Ryanair knows this and capitalizes on the 15% discount that comes with booking on their platform.

This upsell in conjunction with the price anchor, shows how much anyone would save when choosing it. So when creating an upsell for your business model, try to find ways to incorporate discounts no matter how cheap. People would be more inclined to take advantage of it that way.

Tips for Applying These Upsell Techniques to Your Business

Before transferring everything Ryanair does into your own business, here are some things you should keep in mind to be successful at upselling.

• Make it easy to add these upsells to their checkout. Your entire options should come after they’ve chosen what they wanted and not before.
• Always prioritize offering value. While your end goal might be sales, try to emphasise how your upsell will benefit your customers
• Be transparent in the pricing. Don’t surprise your customers at the checkout. Instead, show how much every single add-on will cost.

Upselling only works when there’s a win-win for both the business and customers. So always try to keep a balance when creating your upselling strategy.