Cross-Selling Techniques That Really Work
One of the most effective ways to grow your business is by expanding your services with your current customers. They know you, so the cost of cross-selling an existing customer is much lower than acquiring net new business. By adopting this super effective strategy, you will experience a much higher response rate than before.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, let me define cross-selling.
What is Cross-selling?
Cross-selling is a technique of selling additional products or services to an existing customer by suggesting an additional, related, or complimentary items to a customer. Or in other words, cross-selling helps you identify a product that satisfies the additional needs of your customer.
Finding a new customer is much more difficult than to sell something to an existing customer. In that case, cross-sell helps you to sell more to an existing customer. For example, a mobile phone case could be cross-sold to a customer who purchased a mobile phone. The most straightforward example of cross-selling, McDonald’s asks, “ Would you like Fries as well.”
Benefits Of Cross-Selling:
Cross-selling has benefits for sellers and customers, as well. As an entrepreneur, when people purchase more products from you, they become loyal to your brand, the more likely they will buy more from you in the future. The following are the main benefits of cross-selling.
Cross-Selling Build Customer Relations:
Cross-selling helps a customer to solve their problem. That builds a good relationship. Continuing with the previous example, if you sell a mobile phone to someone at a competitive rate and then cross-sell them the case, that means you have access to a product that can solve their problem for them.
This will help you build a loyal relationship with your customers as you are fulfilling all your customer’s needs in one place.
Sellers Get More Sales:
Cross-sell gives discounts that might look like it hurts your average product cost but if you look closely, you might not have that sale in the first place without cross-sell. So instead of losing sales, you make less on that product but still increase overall profitability.
A research conducted by Bain’s identified profitable shoppers for cross-selling and concluded that, on average, cross-selling the new product would improve individual customer spend and profitability significantly.
Benefits For Both Sides:
If you talk about sellers, it might seem as they are in a complete loss but in reality, it allows them to sell more.
More sale = More revenue
Additionally, It ties their customers to the products, and make them buy again.
It is also advantageous for customers since they can buy required supplementary products in one place, which saves their time.
Cross-Sell Process Cycle:
Keep this process cycle in your mind while creating an effective upsell offer.
Techniques Of Cross-Selling:
All marketing Techniques has some restrictions and a proper way to reach that success. Cross-selling also has some appropriate methods through which you can make it useful. I can tell you some of these techniques, by using these you can make cross-sell effectively.
Show Value To The Customer:
Offering too many products at the same time can confuse your customers, and you can lose their attention. Offer only a few items that provide a clear benefit to the customer.
Showing value to your customers is also sufficient. That builds a strong relationship between you and your customers.
Sell relevant items:
Irrelevant items distract your customers and create useless informational noise. At that point, your customers may leave you. For example, If someone is purchasing a gaming mouse from your store, and you are offering Coffee cup as cross-sell. The Coffee cup is totally irrelevant.
Make sure that the offered items are related to the original products or create additional value with it. This will increase the interest of customers. Let me continue my previous example. You can offer a mousepad as a cross-sell with a gaming mouse
However, relevancy in your post-purchase offers actually allows your customers to get the most out of your products.
Offer Loyalty Perks:
Create structured possibilities for shoppers to win perks based on their purchasing patterns. Customers who buy more should get rewarded with more.
For example, if your customer buys three or more than three products or services. They should get 30% - 40 % off. That makes your customers stay with you.
Bundle products:
Bundling products is a common technique to convince your customers to purchase the whole set of complementary products. With price breaks, this technique works amazing and also allows you to sell even stuck items, which would possibly be never bought in other circumstances.
Conclusion:
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to cross-sell your current customer. It can be one of the easiest ways to increase revenue and grow your business. While there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for doing this, the above guidelines should help get you thinking about how you can start building campaigns for your current clients.