Cross Selling

Finding new ways to sell products to customers can be challenging. In the world of ecommerce, it is essential to discover new ways to achieve more sales while keeping the customers satisfied. There are various ways you can do this, one of them is cross selling.

What is Cross selling?

Cross selling can be implemented into almost any kind of business, as its core principles remain the same. It is widely spread in other business areas like finances and insurance. For example, bank visitors who open savings accounts are often also offered a credit card. When people purchase car insurance coverage, they are also offered to purchase life insurance in addition.

From these examples, we can see that cross selling is a sales technique that is used to get customers to purchase products that are related to already bought products or services. Often the cross selling definition is mistaken with “upselling”, which offers customers better and more expensive versions of the products. Despite having distinct benefits, both can be used effectively in tandem.

Cross selling provides more options by offering items that satisfy additional needs that aren’t entirely fulfilled by the initially purchased product. Generally, this technique presents the products that customers will buy anyway. For example, if a customer purchases toothpaste, he also requires a toothbrush. However, the secret to using this technique successfully is to find a way to offer products in a timely fashion that will encourage the sale.

Cross selling tips

In the ecommerce business, this technique is most commonly used during the checkout process. When done correctly, it can be highly effective as it stimulates customers to make repeat purchases. Not only that, but it allows us to demonstrate the broadness of the product range to customers. It shows people the products that they might have missed or simply didn’t even think of while looking through the catalog. Cross selling can easily notify customers of products they didn’t even know you offered. This, in turn, can lead to more purchases and a higher level of customers satisfaction.

However, to pull this technique off, your actions are required to be subtle, timely, and precise. If you don’t do it correctly, you’ll most likely scare off the customer.

• Recommend additional services or products

Remember that some products require additional elements to work properly, and these elements simply don’t come with the initial product being bought. These are the products like power cords for computers that don’t come in the box.

• Bundle products

Offer your customers products in bundles so that clients won’t have to look for them separately. You can also provide discounts on bundled products to encourage immediate purchases while saving money.

• Showcase the products

Provide a short demonstration of how these products can be used with the product being purchased. When searching for something particular, people don’t even think of how a certain product can work with other items.

• Make subtle suggestions

You can subtly use cross selling by setting up automatic emails. Sometimes it is best to wait for a little before offering your customers something they could buy. Wait a few days before selling them on any other service.

Simply set up a campaign via automatic emails that will inform your customers about complementary products over time. Following this approach, you won’t come off as an aggressive salesman. Rather, you will subtly suggest what they can buy in addition to their original purchase. Not only will you satisfy their additional needs, but also get more likely to establish a customer-friendly relationship.

Please note that if the customer is a recurring one, you probably won’t experience trouble sourcing their email address. However, if it is the customer’s first time shopping in your online store, you need to find a way to collect their email. This can be easily done, too – you can offer them coupons on future purchases, or a subscription to receive notifications. Though, to do this, your store requires additional service setup.

When to cross-sell

Knowing when to implement this strategy is just as important as the sale itself. If you provide an offer at the wrong time, you might just scare away the client and ruin your relationship with them, which will result in no sale at all.

There are no common rules that can tell you the best time to use the cross selling technique. However, remember that offering your customers a product that complements their original purchase is a good place to start. From there, you can evaluate customer behavior towards the suggestions and estimate the correct timing for the offer.

In the ecommerce world, cross selling is used to identify related products to create offers that will be appealing to customers. This helps to generate more sales and satisfy the customers in the process. The end goal of cross selling is to achieve more sales and higher profits while keeping the customer satisfied.