The Cross-Sell
[private].[/private]Ideally, you should not have one product to sell on the internet, you should have many (but don’t forget everyone has to start somewhere). If you have just one, your potential income and impact will be extremely limited. You want to have more than one product, more than one page, and you want people to find as many of them as possible.
Cross-selling is simply a technique that allows you to promote your other products and services when someone is interested in and ready to purchase a specific product of yours. You can cross-sell to customers once they start buying and you can keep cross-selling. Cross-selling includes:
Upselling: This is when you promote a better version of what the customer is purchasing or you offer upgrades, accessories, or anything to make the perceived value of the original purchase better (basically any little additional item for sale that “sweetens” the deal and earns you more). Be sure to see the entire section on “upselling.”
Popular products: This is when you promote other products directly, indirectly, or not at all related to the one the customer is purchasing. Basically, you have a few products that you know are good sellers or other products that people who have bought the current item have also been interested in.
High-margin products: You can also promote your high-margin products when cross-selling. This is a way to bring your customers’ attention to products that will bring a higher return than your average product. These are the ones you really want to sell because they mean higher profits and more money in your pocket.
Think of Amazon. They cross-sell right on the description page you see when you look up a certain book. They will say something like, “People who have bought this book, have also bought these titles.” These are always books on the same or a similar topic as the one you are considering and Amazon makes it very easy to access them and put them in your shopping cart as well.
Cross-selling allows your customers to:
** Find precisely what they are looking for because you are offering them options, thus resulting in a happy customer.
** Find accessories and/or other products that will increase the dollar amount of their order and put more money in your pocket.
Now that you know what cross-selling is and how it works for you and the customer, I want to talk about how you present the cross-selling options to customers. There are a number of ways to cross-sell and I will explain each one of them.
Sale/products page: Be wary of giving your customer too many options on your sales page. You’ll have to split test these options for your specific product/niche, but typically giving too many options to your customer will result in indecisiveness where they will end up buying nothing!
Thank You Page: Display cross-sell options right on the Thank You page. After all, people have already purchasd something from you by the time they see this page. When you have other options available to them at this stage, you’ve already earned their trust and if you offer other high quality items they may very well be interested.
Email: You can cross-sell to people who have opted-in, but not purchased your product. You can offer them the product with a promotional deal attached to it or you can offer them a similar product that might suit them better. You can also cross-sell to existing customers via email. Be sure to include brief descriptions of your multiple products in your email promotions.
Cross-selling allows you to exhibit everything you have to offer in different areas of your website, in your communications, and in your marketing venues. This is just one more method to get extra eyeballs on your various products.
