There are a number of ways to increase your eCommerce website’s revenue. Most of them, however, won’t do much to help your profit or will actually hurt your reputation. Fortunately, you’re not completely out of luck. Cross-selling is a very simple method for giving your customers more of what they want while increasing your bottom line too. It essentially means offering a customer an extra product with their original purchase.
It’s important to note that some people use upselling and cross-selling interchangeably. However, whereas upselling refers to any method for adding more to the receipt, cross-selling specifically refers to doing so by adding more to their cart.
If you don’t already have a product line that will make cross-selling possible, you need to start there. Sometimes cross-selling works with the same product if you offer them a discount on their second purchase. However, if that’s your plan, you’ll have more sales by just advertising a “buy one, get the second…” prospect upfront.
So be sure you have socks to sell with those shoes, balls to go with that racket, sharpeners to go with those culinary knives, etc.
Next, only offer cross-sales that make sense. If you’re trying to get rid of a certain product, it can be tempting to offer it with any purchase. This is generally looked down upon, though, and could lose you customers (it shows you care more about money than them).
One way to help figure out which pairings to match up is by looking at your analytics. When people buy socks with their shoes, which ones do they pick? It probably makes sense to offer those to anyone who buys those shoes. Then check to find what people are most likely to buy when they get those socks and shoes and add that cross-sale in whenever people put both in their cart. There’s no end to how many sequences you can attempt to optimize.
Now if you really want to ramp up your cross-selling success rate, offer free shipping or some kind of discount at a certain price. This will encourage people to purchase more as they’ll notice that if they add those socks, they get the whole thing without having to pay for delivery. Feel free to point this out to them too, of course.
You have a number of options when it comes to SEO and converting visitors into customers. Don’t forget to optimize the actual sale though, too. Cross-selling is a great example of how to do it.
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