Posted 17.06.2022
Cross-selling is essentially a way of encouraging customers to grab an extra item at the checkout. When it comes to online cross-selling, there are a few methods including:
The aim here is to encourage customers to add another, small item to their basket to increase your website’s average order value and number of item sales.
Cross-selling is a great strategy if your aim is to sell more items and increase your average order value with very little effort compared to other eCommerce strategies.
When a customer is about to complete a purchase, they are already in the mindset of spending money, so, if you can provide additional, relevant products that they may find of use, then they may be more inclined to add those to their basket as well.
The trick here, however, is relevancy. It’s vital that the products you recommend are linked in some way to their past purchases, the items currently in their basket or the buying behaviour of other customers who have purchased the same items.
While it may be tempting, you shouldn’t attempt to cross-sell unless you have relevant suggestions. You want to appear helpful, not sales-focused.
The easiest way to think of ‘upselling’ is to imagine you’re asking your customers if they want to ‘upgrade’ before they complete a purchase.
The item or items you’re recommending usually cost more, increasing the average order value but not the number of items purchased.
The upsell process should only be utilised when:
The general rule of thumb is that you should only recommend products that will increase your customer’s basket value by a maximum value of 25%
Again, it’s that fine line of trying to increase profits via value-driven upgrades without it being obvious that that’s what you’re doing.
So much of B2B eCommerce marketing focuses on customer acquisition – finding new customers and convincing them to make an initial purchase from your business.
Less time and effort are focused on existing customers.
The process of finding, qualifying and converting new customers can be five-to-25 times more expensive than encouraging current customers to spend more with your brand.
Upselling and cross-selling products is a lower-cost sales technique that can leverage incredible results.
Another benefit of encouraging an existing customer to make an additional purchase, or swap out an item for a higher quality product that may cost a little more but will provide a better service and experience will ultimately increase trust and loyalty in your brand.
Higher trust combined with a better experience can boost revenues because customers are more likely to return and spend more money on your eCommerce website either through repeat purchases or buying a different product entirely.
Getting started with upselling and cross-selling takes a little organisation, but, the great news is that after the initial setup, processes can be automated, which we will touch upon a little further down the page.
When getting started with upselling and cross-selling, we recommend the following:
No one knows your products better than you, so the first step is to look through all of your products and map out complementary items if you’re implementing a cross-selling campaign.
If you’re looking into an upselling strategy, group together all of your similar products and ascertain the price difference between each (as a percentage).
Now you’ll have a great starting point for your strategy.
In order to do this well, you need to look back at why your customer needs the product they are about to buy. Using that as your basis, consider how:
And incorporate this information into your online sales strategies. How are you going to communicate these benefits to your customer in an efficient and convincing way?
Demonstrating the value of investing more money is vital to an upselling and cross-selling strategy.
For B2B eCommerce websites, visitors don’t have the benefit of a sales representative helping them understand which items will best suit their needs or what items will complement each other.
The key to effective upselling and cross-selling as sales tactics online is simplicity. Making things as easy as possible will increase the chances of shoppers biting and making that additional investment that boosts revenues.
Communicate all of the benefits in a simple and easy-to-digest format.
Cross-selling and upselling campaigns can be quite straightforward for smaller sites with a limited number of products, but when you get to a considerably large website with hundreds or thousands of product pages, things can get quite complicated and time-consuming.
Brands in these circumstances could likely benefit from automation to continue increasing average order values and number of items sold without losing vast amounts of time to this strategy.
At the beginning of this post, we mentioned the different ways a cross-selling technique can look on your website (jump back to it here.) And all of these can be achieved through automation.
At Evolve Trader, our customer order portal can be highly personalised, including automating your cross-selling and upselling. If you’d like to find out more about how our platform can elevate your sales strategy, you can get in touch with us here.
