The Oxford English Dictionary defines cross-selling as:
“the action or practice of selling among or between established clients, markets, traders, etc.”
When put to use, cross-selling can be a powerful tool to engage your readers or customers – and persuade them to buy more of your product or read more of your content. You are maximizing and enhancing your visitor’s experience with your site.
Cross-selling products
If you are selling products online, then cross-selling can be a very powerful and simple way to increase your revenue. By showing products that relate to what your visitor is looking for, you can (often) increase the number of products they buy from you. Promoting other products that you sell that relate to what the visitor wants to buy, can have a huge impact on your revenue and profit.
For example, let’s assume that you are selling cell phones on your website. While customers may intend on purchasing a cell phone from you – they might also be interested in buying a cell phone case, car charger, or any number of different items that you may sell. Instead of your customer only purchasing a cell phone, they may end up buying a few accessories from you as well.
Amazon’s cross-selling strategy
Amazon.com does an excellent job at cross-selling their customers with their products. When shopping on their site you can see how they implement the strategy very well:
Displaying items that are “Frequently Bought Together“
Displaying items that other customers bought along with the product
This not only provides a better customer experience (because you are showing visitors products that relate to their interest), but brings big returns on revenue and profit for the company. Instead of your customer spending only $20 they may end up spending $30, $40, $50 or more – and effectively increasing your income per order/customer.
The Netflix $1 million prize
To even further reinforce how much of an impact cross-selling can have – I want to give you one more example.
Netflix (the online movie rental company) proposed a challenge and offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could improve their movie recommendation system. As posted on their website for the prize:
Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: CinematchSM. Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies. We use those predictions to make personal movie recommendations based on each customer’s unique tastes. And while Cinematch is doing pretty well, it can always be made better.
Netflix has an excellent understanding of the power of aligning people with the right products. Not only does effectively promoting related products increase usage and consumption of a company’s services, but it provides for a much more loyal, enthusiastic, and satisfied customer base.
The same amount of work… for more results
By setting up a system (no matter how simple or basic it might be) to cross-sell your products, you are maximizing your marketing and revenue-producing efforts. You have done the hard work to get them to your site and have a captive audience. It is not unusual to see revenue and profits increase dramatically when you implement this tactic.
It’s not just for the big guys
This strategy is not just reserved for the major retailers and global brands – even the smallest or most specialized websites that sell products can implement this strategy. To get started you don’t need complicated algorithms and teams of engineers – simply cross-linking pages on your site to related products is a great start.
If you have an online store, implementing a way to cross-sell your visitors your products can have an amazing impact on your bottom line and something every online retailer should look to implement.
Related posts you might also be interested in:
- How to sell Digital Products With WordPress
- E-Junkie: A great shopping cart alternative
- Ecommerce Theme – A WordPress theme for an online store
- The power of a “Thank You”
- You are not your customer
- Following up with clients and customers
- Technologic – An excellent WordPress theme for featuring products
