“Would you like to have fries with that?” is without a doubt one of the most used cross-selling sentences we get to hear in our lives. Cross-selling is the practice of selling extra products or services to an existing customer by recommending items that are related to what’s being bought already.
The first and most important part to start cross-selling is to use the data your website provides you with. This data will enable you to get a better look into your customers and what items they’re buying together. Once you know this, you can start to link products and kickstart your cross-selling.
Let’s dive into some smart upgrades that will improve your customer experience and could make you add your fries to their shopping cart.
Last-minute shopping cart fillers
When a visitor is ready to complete his order and reviews his shopping cart, you have one last shot to cross-sell some of your products. Grab this opportunity and guide your customers towards products that might enhance their purchase.
Everyone loves a good deal, and we love it, even more, when it adds value to our purchase. One of the practices that you could use to boost your sales is recommending relevant products that are currently at a discount. Bargain deals always catch our attention, whether it’s in-store or online.
Another way of using recommendations to boost your sales is to guide customers towards items that usually go hand in hand.
If I buy running shoes I might also need running socks, running shorts, a running jacket, etc. Recommending these items right before the payment might seduce the customer to add them to his shopping cart seconds before checking out.
If your customer isn’t eligible for free shipping, cross-selling some items might come in as a handy solution as well. Tailor your recommendations to the products in their shopping cart and the budget that’s missing for free shipping.
Customers would rather add an extra item to their cart than pay for shipping. This gives their money some extra value because they get something in return instead of just wasting it on delivery fees.
Show what improves a purchase
Another way to boost your sales is to recommend the right products, at the right moment throughout your whole website. This goes way beyond the shopping cart and stretches to product pages, the homepage and search pages.
The product page is the perfect page to suggest complementary items. If the product you’re looking at is not exactly what you’re looking for, another one on the website could be.
Let’s say you’ve been looking for white sneakers and clicked a pair of Nike’s. You browse the specs, pictures and reviews and decide it’s not the pair you’d like to buy. A webshop that sells sneakers undoubtedly sells at least 10 different pairs that are similar to the one you’re looking at. One of them might be exactly what you’re looking for.
Adding recommendation boxes to your product pages not only allows you to showcase your other brands, it also makes it easier for your potential customer to click through to other options. This will not only boost your click-through rate, it will also increase your sales.
You can recommend other relevant products from the moment a customer has added something to his cart as well. Knowing what he’s going to buy makes it easy for you to recommend products that bring greater value to his purchase.
You can easily do so by activating a pop-up that says the item was added to his cart and that shows goods that might be of interest to him.
If you’re going to buy a new phone, for instance, you won’t need a TV or Playstation to go along with it. Products that could be of extra value to you would be a screen protector, a case, a wireless charger and so on.
An important thing to keep in mind while cross-selling is the financial aspect. Don’t offer something extremely expensive as a recommended item but something that complements their purchase.
If a customer is going to buy an expensive phone, he might not be willing to add an item of €100 to his cart straight away. Recommending such a product is completely irrelevant and will irritate your customers.
Showing the right recommendations at the right time will result in a 12% increase of products added to your customers’ baskets.
Focus on guiding your customers
Don’t annoy your customers, guide them in their buying journey and don’t make them feel like you’re just trying to take their money.
Cross-selling brings a lot of different opportunities to boost your sales when it’s done the right way. Recommending relevant items at the right time adds to the customer experience and might turn them into loyal customers. Doing this the wrong way, however, might result in them not engaging with your website ever again.
The best sales conversions are those where you are helping your prospect without actively pushing your brand.