So, a customer visits your website and shows some interest in a product. They add the product to the cart. As an e-commerce website, you have to suggest to your customers some complimentary products or help them buy a better product than what they choose. This is where upselling and cross-selling come in.
Upselling and cross-selling are practices by which you can make better sales without going through the conversion funnel. Since customers have already demonstrated their trust in you by buying from you, you can leverage their trust to uncover additional needs, ultimately driving your revenue and enhancing their experience.
But how can you use these strategies to boost your revenue? Let’s explore. However, let’s first try to understand the difference between these two types of sales.
Upselling refers to getting an existing customer to spend more in a single transaction by presenting them with more appealing and expensive products. On the other hand, cross-selling offers related products to the customer to address the different needs that usually accompany their initial purchase.
For instance, imagine you own an online coffee store, and someone adds coffee beans to your coffee store’s cart. Cross-selling in such a situation would be offering some coffee machine filters and beans. On the other hand, upselling would entice your customer to purchase more expensive beans or two instead of just one.
Now that you might have understood the fundamental difference between upselling and cross-selling let’s discuss some easy ways to make these sales tactics more effective.
1. Be An Expert On Your Products
When you suggest a product upgrade or an additional product, your customer would want to know how credible the source is. If the source is trustworthy, it lends credibility to the information.
You need to know the stuff you sell in detail. Each product you are trying to sell must be known to you in and out. When you know your products well, you can use this information to recommend the right products to your customers by evaluating their issues.
2. Know Your Customer
Knowing your customer is the key to higher sales. To accomplish better upselling and cross-selling of products, you must first understand what situation the customer is facing. When you know your customer sufficiently, you can use this information to suggest to them the most relevant and valuable products.
To know your products well, the foremost step you need to take is to get your hands on the customer data. Use this customer data to understand everything about your customers. Customer data can provide you with a lot of information about the customer, including their age, the products they’ve been purchasing, etc.
Consider their lifestyle, age, and habits. Also, analyze if your options would be relevant to the customer in a cross-sell. Will upselling or cross-selling for their needs? You can request your customers to submit feedback. Don’t just assume their habits; you could otherwise lose out on potential opportunities.
3. Choose The Right Time
Upselling and cross-selling are all a matter of time. To maximize these sales tactics, you must crack the right time. Use the conversion funnel to track the actions of your customers. When you feel the time is right and when the customer is all set to make a purchase, that is precisely when you slide in some additional products and try to cross-sell them.
You should be able to track the customer through the conversion funnel. When you try to upsell or cross-sell the products at the time of purchase, the risk of cart abandonment reduces.
4. Suggest Bundles
Your customer should be able to see the benefit of purchasing any additional product or service. By offering your customers bundle packages, you can showcase the use of buying a product through added discounts. If you aren’t already offering bundles, you need to start planning the different products or services that will work well together to boost customer experiences. You can then pitch these bundles to your future customers. Also, help your customers visualize the value of buying bundles from you through graphics.
5. Offer Complimentary Products
Nothing in life comes for free. So, ensure that your complimentary products or services are relevant and valuable. For example, instead of giving away the milk for free, let your potential customers get a taste of it to see the credibility of your products and understand what they might be missing out on. This will drive them back to you for more while expanding your reach as they refer you to other people.
6. Keep Your Suggestions Highly Relevant
Upselling takes your sales to new heights, and that too with lesser efforts. But the key to upselling is, knowing what to upsell. As an e-commerce website, you cannot suggest any random product to buy to your customers.
The product you’re trying to upsell to the customer should be relevant to the customer’s needs. When you try to sell an irrelevant product, the customer moves away from the brand.
7. Enhance The Customer experience:
Make sure that you focus on improving the customer experience. Recommend them products that are good for them and the products that offer maximum benefit for the most reasonable price.
If your customers are impressed by your services, they might suggest your brand to their friends and family and consider a repeat purchase.
8. Be There For The Customer
If the customer comes to you with a query, make sure you resolve it quickly and satisfactorily. Also, keep sharing valuable information and insights about relevant products with the customer.
This will help you maintain a relationship with your customer and never go out of sight. Throughout their customer lifecycle or the conversion funnel, the content you share with the customers will help them move smoothly through it and finally result in a purchase.
9. Keep Your Pricing Transparent & Reasonable
Nothing seems shadier than hidden costs. Regardless of how excellent your products are, your customer would be instantly turned off if its pricing is exponentially higher than the options offered by your competitors. By giving your customers visibility into your pricing, you can establish your credibility.
10. Use Social Proof
The onus of proving the worth of your products or services is on you. Find out the social media channels where your customer base is most active and display your products, services, and testimonials there, using relevant hashtags. If you’re just getting started, post introduction videos to show your brand so that your customers can get to know you.
Bottom Line
The most significant missed opportunity in e-commerce lies in not knowing the customer’s requirements. Not fully understanding their needs often leads customers to choose a different provider, thereby leading to your loss of valuable sales dollars. Customer acquisition has become increasingly expensive, with the glory days of super-low CPMs and dirt cheap traffic long gone. Therefore, as an e-commerce business owner, you need to capitalize on the buying potential of your existing clients; you must increase the amount of money your customers are spending on each transaction.
Hopefully, these ten tips mentioned above will come in handy the next time you try to cross-sell or upsell to drive your revenue.
If you’re still unsure how to leverage the power of upselling and cross-selling to drive your revenue substantially, take up Wigzo’s free trial to understand how you benefit from these sales tactics fully.
