Want to increase your sales up to 20% to 30%?
Yes, you read it right 20% to 30%!
Today, we will let you know about a straightforward strategy to boost your business sales. You don’t have to do anything special about it. Just stick to this page and read this article till the end 🙂
What Is Cross-selling? A Complete Definition
Cross-selling is a smart route to improve small business sales. It is a technique that persuades customers to spend more by purchasing a product that identifies with what individuals are already buying.
Basically, it is a process of selling products correlated with the current purchase, like shampoo with conditioner, memory card with the phone, bread with butter, etc.
Some Shocking Facts
Cross-selling has worked for organizations of all sizes, small, large, and medium.
“Did you know that Amazon attributes up to 35% of their sales from cross-selling?”
Source: Business2 Community
4 Effective Cross-selling Strategies for Small Businesses
If you have a new startup or already running a small business, then follow these 4 effective cross-selling strategies to boost your company’s sales funnel.
Let’s have a look at cross-selling strategies in detail:
Strategy No#1. Map Out Your Client Journey
Time matters & it eventually proves true. Even the most relevant offer can flop if not served at the right time. So, it is recommended to map out customer journeys as it helps you to identify the best touchpoints for repeat interaction and cross-sell.
Now the question is how to create a complete customer journey map?
Here are the top 3 ways to do so. Just go through them:
- Nail Down Buyer persona: The initial step in creating a client’s journey map is to understand who your customers are. It is true that having only one buyer persona is not sufficient for any business. Every individual is unique; therefore, their purchasing needs or behavior also differ. So it is good to distinguish between the buyer who has been doing market research for a few months and is ready to make their purchase and the purchaser who recently began thinking about purchasing some particular products.
- Understand your Buyer’s Goals: After building a buyer’s persona, the next step is to understand what each customer wants to achieve?
- Some essential points help you to understand the buyer’s objectives:
- Conduct survey, interviews of different customer groups.
- Study client support emails.
- Try to understand your client query in each phase.
- Use customer analytics tools to gather information.
- Map out Buyer Touchpoints: Mapping your client’s touchpoints is one of the best ways to make improvements in your business strategy to keep your customers happy. It is good to take account of all the communications via phone, online or person-to-person. By doing this, there is hardly any chance to miss anything important and prevents you from repeating your mistakes.
Strategy No#2. Use Behavioral Segmentation
According to this strategy, try to serve personalized offers based on the customer’s behavior they exhibit on your website. Now, you must wonder how’s that possible? Simply group your website visitors or customers based on their interests or previous shopping experiences. It helps you a lot to better understand their goals and challenges. As a result, you can give product recommendations in real-time.
A digital marketing team uses behavioral targeting to create a pool of tailored audiences. It allows them to create multiple campaigns with different personas in mind. Suppose a digital marketing agency found 500 visitors on its website browsing for PPC services (250 visitors) and SEO Services (250 visitors). So, based on their browsing history, the company should divide its visitors into two groups, i.e. SEO visitors or PPC visitors. And offer them personalized services according to their interest.
Strategy No#3. Offer Complementary Products, Not Essential Items
Always try to offer complementary products rather than essential ones. Because it irritates the client, and sometimes, it leads to the cancellation of the current purchase also. Make things simple, offer a product or services; it’s the customer’s choice whether they want to purchase it or not. For example, as a digital marketer, try to offer SEO services to the clients who are currently getting a PPC service from you. It depends on the client, whether they want to continue with optional offered services or not.
Strategy No#4. Order Thresholds
According to this strategy, you’re not actively recommending a complementary product to your clients. However, you are incentivizing them to spend more by notifying them about an order discount on the purchase of some other product. While implementing a cross-selling method, first ensure that your offer is relevant. Set your primary aim to offer more value to clients, not to cause hesitation and unnecessary friction.
Approach your Best Customers
A good approach is a game-changer. Keep it short and simple. Follow the below-listed tips to make a client & product-centric approach.
- Create Attractive And Convincing Client’s Case Study: When you add facts or stats in your sales pitch, it helps a lot to convince customers. So, it is good to get a client’s feedback and use that review to assure another client. Such feedback also helps you to show the potential customers how getting the two services together helped the existing client.
- Offer Trial Or Discounts On Your Products/Services: Who doesn’t love discounts? Don’t you? There is no such individual who doesn’t like to shop during sales. So, it is suggested to offer your products or services at a discounted price to attract a large number of visitors.
- Leverage Bundling of Products/Services: Everybody wants more items at less price; this initiates the process of product bundling. Try to sell a group of similar items as a single product or package at a lower price than selling them individually. It is one of the best ways for eCommerce merchants to sell more products and increase their profits steadily.
- Offer Loyalty Rewards: Create structured opportunities for clients to get loyalty rewards based on their purchasing patterns. For example, customers who purchase more should get more rewards (if that makes sense according to your sales model). Let your staff or salespersons know about loyalty offerings so they can use them effectively in their cross-selling efforts.
- Suggest Related Products/Services: Suggestions or recommendations always work. So try to make relevant suggestions and make them attractive or engaging. Here are some tips to make attractive suggestions:
- Use Product Recommendation Pop-Ups.
- Make a Category-Specific Popup Recommendation.
- Use Product Recommendation Emails
- Try Behavioral-Based Recommendations.
Never try to give irrelevant suggestions, as it irritates the customer and forces them to leave your website.
- Perform Periodic Business Reviews: Periodic business reviews are one of the best ways to analyze your business growth. It helps you to become more productive and allows you to change your business strategy frequently according to the market uncertainties.
- Take Advantage of Drip Marketing: Running drip marketing leaves a long-lasting impact on your venture and pushes your leads down the conversion path with the right message at the right time. Drip marketing allows you to create a lead nurturing marketing funnel by presenting the plus points of your products and services. Furthermore, it allows you to answer the potential questions and address any objections if a prospect may have. It’s like having a sales conversation throughout multiple emails.
How can cross-selling benefit small businesses?
- Increasing Revenue: Cross-selling allows you to increase your business revenue. For this, the only thing on which you have to concentrate is the right combination of the products. The more the product relevancy, the higher the sales you will get.try to give the customer’s money value. If you get success in this, no one will stop you from getting leads.
- Better Customer Retention: By implementing cross-selling techniques in small businesses, you can retain more clients, and that too, for an extended period. The main reason is when a customer spends more time on your website or mobile app, the more they seem to browse through your already offered combinations and are likely to purchase them again.
- Customers Become More Loyal To Your Brand: When you give the actual value of the customer’s money, then there is a high possibility that the client would also make the next purchase from you. Thus, Cross-selling offers an excellent opportunity to gain clients’ trust that gives you a long-term business.
When to Cross-sell Your Products/Services
There is not any specific approach or rule that dictates the best time to cross-sell. All you have to remember is the central goal of cross-selling — to persuade a customer to buy a product or service that complements their original purchase. Simply put, the best time to cross-sell is when the sale makes sense.
How To Cross-Sell?
After discussing everything about Cross-Selling, now it turns to throw a spotlight on the very crucial concept of this amazing marketing technique, i.e., how to cross-sell your products/services? Here we have enlisted four different scenarios. Have a look!
- Run Post-Purchase Email Campaign: The best time to implement the cross-sell technique is at the time of running a post-purchase email campaign. It makes sense to ask about the feedback of already purchased products and while at the same time recommending similar products. There is a high possibility that a client would make a second purchase from you (whether the same product or any other from the suggested list). But it only happens when the client’s previous purchase from you made them satisfied.
- Remarketing Abandoned Carts: Do you know that in 2019, the rate of an average cart abandonment across all industries was a whopping 69.57%? It becomes one of the most significant issues for e-commerce brands. But it is proved that offering a complimentary item or a discount while remarketing abandoned carts gives you excellent results. Here we have discussed some of the proven remarketing abandoned carts strategies. Have a look!
- Personalized dynamic ads.
- Try to use attractive subject lines that grab the client’s attention.
- Segmenting your retargeting ads.
- Run exciting offers or discounts.
- Promote Additional Products On Your Checkout Page: It is suggested to promote additional products on the checkout page. This strategy proves very useful in cross-selling. It allows users to browse additional products that may impress customers. But don’t forget to maintain the product relevancy in the entire cross-selling process.
Wrapping Up!
All-in-all, Cross-selling is a wonderful sales tactic that helps organizations to increase their bottom line and enhance their customer loyalty. But, if not done correctly, it leaves dissatisfied clients and brings down the company’s reputation. It is not that kind of approach that fits in every business model as it is. An entrepreneur needs to do a lot of work on it according to their client’s requirements.
