It doesn’t matter what sector we’re talking about these days. All the headlines point in the same direction: product cross-selling (and Big Data) will be the online store’s priority in 2013. The second topic has already been discussed by The Fik Initiative; it’s now time to investigate cross-selling, one of the best ways to take advantages of synergies in and in between companies.
Various purchases in one
Some shops call it “our suggestions”, in others, whilst we are doing our shopping, send us messages in the lines of “other clients have bought…”. The ultimate goal is to increase the showroom samples in realtime that could be of interest to the client, following in the big store’s footsteps. In that way, if a client’s shopping cart contains a guitar, the ideal thing is for him to be able to buy a case, a spare string or a plectrum from the same webpage, with no need to exit. This is called cross-selling: to be able to offer visitors on a webpage the possibility to not only find what they were looking for, but also find a set of complementary products in which they might be interested.
This marketing strategy contributes to retaining the consumer creating a feeling of loyalty to the brand; if used correctly it also provides a bigger service efficiency when showing the client products of his interest.
Cross-selling provides an added value for the client: service efficiency. Source: Blue Know.
This cross-selling model, that shows other products while buying your own articles, is constructed thanks to the information about your purchase as well as the articles that other visitors have looked at. That’s why it’s only recommended for online stores that have enough orders, because if it’s a newly opened store the statistics wouldn’t work or would not be very reliable.
Persuasion and customization
The key to being a good merchant is evident: to think about the good consumer with requirements and demands. In our business we must step into the buyer’s shoes to analyze adequately his interests and psychological conditions when loading up the cart. How to convience the client that it’s a good idea to add some of the suggested articles to his cart? For example, with the promise of saving a part of the shipping costs .
It’s also obvious that, the bigger out offered and crossed products list is, the bigger our number of internal links will be. And if there is a good indexing, there will also be a better positioning in search engine results.
Optimists consider that up to a 30% of ecommerce sales increase is thanks to cross-selling– recommended products. The expectations are even bigger in other areas of online sales, like the hotel sector. According to the international investigation The Big Benefits of Cross-Selling, by Forrester Consulting for Amadeus, complementary services would increase up to a 41% in five years, from 2010 to 2015, thanks to an improvement in the offers travellers receive. Sadly, today not even United Kingdom has been able to manage this: only 37% of the hotels offer the possibility to ask for extras during online reservations –as would be champagne, flowers, or even a table at the restaurant–, according to the Micros Independent Hotel eCommerce Report 2012.
Cross-selling can be used with any kind of product or service that is commercialized. All that is needed is to guess the correct product cross in the store or offer, through agreements with other stores, those products that can’t be found directly at our shop. This format has nowadays extended to physical retail commerces, thanks to loyalty cards, amongst other marketing tools. Now we have to find a way to make it work exactly as on Internet.
Keys to exploiting cross-selling
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Additional products are offered as soon as a firm purchase is made.
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The extra purchase suggestions should never surpass the 25% of the main sale article.
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Only offer products related to the one the user chose in the first place.
Do you apply the cross-selling technique in your business? Tell us how!