You’ve already set up your very own store, and that’s a feat enough by itself. Still, at some point, you have to ask yourself, “What else can I do to get a higher response rate from my current clients and increase my sales revenue?”
There’s an easy and cost-effective solution to this: you want to upsell or cross-sell to them.
You see, the great thing about catering to your existing clientele is that they already know your products and trust you. You’ve already captured their interest, and so your sales cycle will be shorter and the costs of it much less.
If you haven’t explored marketing to your already hard-won customers, then it might be time to do so. It’s a surefire way of ramping up your sales and getting the most out of your store.
Defining upselling and cross-selling
Before we get down to the how-tos of implementing cross-selling and upselling strategies, let’s define what these are and how they can help your business.
Upselling
This is a sales technique where you entice your customer to upgrade their item/service so you can get more revenue. For example, your customers have just purchased a 10-day fitness plan from your store and you send them an offer to upgrade it to a month-long plan at a discounted rate. It’s a matter of offering them more value for a reasonable hike in the price of their original purchase.
Cross-selling
This is a sales technique, much like the previous one, that helps you get more revenue from your existing clients. However, this differs from upselling because then you will be selling a different service or product to them. Let’s use the same sample here: they just bought a 10-day fitness plan. You can cross-sell to them by offering them another 10-day diet plan that can complement the workout schedule that you sent them.
How these strategies can help your eCommerce/Shopify store
We’ve defined these strategies, but how can they help you exactly?
#1 You capture your audience interest by providing solutions
Why do people scroll through endless pages of online stores in the first place? Sure there are some who do so just to kill idle time, but for the most part of the population, it is to solve a problem. But even as they have clearly defined their problem, they might not be completely sure of the solution yet.
Steve Jobs explains this succinctly when he said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
This is the premise from which upselling and cross-selling heavily banks on.
It is suggesting to your customers that you understand their problem and are there to show them solutions. When done right, you appear much more aware and sympathetic to your customers’ needs.
#2 You will be able to boost your store’s Lifetime and Order Value
Recent studies report that you have more chances of selling to your existing clientele than in enticing new ones. Not only is it much more cost-effective to take care of your current customers, but it’s more likely that they will be converted again and again too.
How to start upselling and cross-selling
Ready to ease the decision-making process for your customers and boost your sales at the same time? Here are some of the strategies that we find work best with most types of consumers:
#1: Narrow their choices for them
As much as we want to bombard our customers with products/services that you can choose from, you don’t want to end up paralyzing them. What you want to do instead is to treat upselling and cross-selling as gentle suggestions. After all, these are not supposed to be aggressive sales strategies. They are meant to add value to your customers and to help them along in making a purchasing decision.
#2: Consider offering products/services in bundles
The whole idea of presenting upselling and cross-selling as gentle suggestions should take precedence over any tactic surrounding this sales strategy. And so, in keeping with this, you should strive to take the complexity out of your customer’s decision-making process in every step.
Bundling is one such way to go about this. This allows your consumers to buy multiple products that are related to each other so they won’t have to choose each individual item.
#3 Automate your upselling and cross-selling strategy
Upselling and cross-selling strategies are employed to help your customers make decisions much quicker, even suggesting solutions to problems that they might not be aware of. It’s a great strategy, for sure, but it can be quite tedious too.
For those of you who make upselling and cross-selling suggestions manually, now would be a great time to automate your system. You can do this seamlessly with the help of an app, such as Plus One. It will help you save time and be more precise in upselling or cross-selling certain products or services for you.
How to start using PlusOne
Manually upselling/cross-selling can be daunting. Automation through PlusOne takes this burden from you by helping you categorize your products and tagging them in away that makes sense to you and your customers.
How can you start using PlusOne? We’ll break this down into 2 steps:
Step 1: Set up in under two minutes
Simply choose your plan to get started. After this, you can just group your products or services and hit save--your customers will then be able to see your offers with just the click of a button. What’s great about this app is that you can personalize the look and feel of your upsells and cross-sells too.
The messaging, the design, and the coding will all be up to you.
Step 2: Monitor your store’s performance
Our app’s analytics will help you identify what works in your strategy and what doesn’t. You’ll be able to see the performance of your offers and pinpoint if they’re going to succeed in the long-term or not.
With more feedback through tracking and analytics, you can easily beef up your plan or tweak it as needed.
