The eCommerce market in general and the Magento platform in particular is booming with the number of online stores keeps increasing. The fact that online shopping has become more and more popular to the general public brings about many benefits to both buyers and sellers, but it also means that the competition between vendors to sale products become more fierce than ever. To survive and boost sales, Magento store owners have no other way but to know how to apply appropriate digital marketing techniques. One of such is the correct tips for cross-selling. Its obvious importance has been demonstrated by Amazon, one of the world’s biggest eCommerce websites as Amazon has stated that 35% of its revenues are generated from cross-selling.
Table of Contents
To get to understand tips for Magento cross-selling, you need to know what cross-selling is first.
Basically, cross-selling is the term used for calling a sales technique whose primary purpose is to get customers to buy new products related to the products they already bought.
An example of cross-selling can be found everywhere. It could be clothes store that showcases the whole outfits that have been mixed at matched attractively instead of a single piece to get customers to buy all of them. Or it could be a salesperson that convinces the customer who buys a smartphone to buy a memory card or a selfie stick too.
On the eCommerce platform, cross-selling can appear under the form of “Recommended products for these products”; for Tiki, it’s ‘frequently bought together products” or on Amazon, it’s “customers who bought this item also bought”.
Cross-selling is a method that is widely and extensively applied in daily life.
What can appropriate tips for cross-selling bring to your Magento store?
- Increasing sales for Magento sellers: Cross-selling is no doubt able to bring significant revenue for vendors, as illustrated vividly by Amazon’s statistics and figure above. It holds great potential for development for any store owner who wishes to rocket their sales.
- Customers’ satisfaction enhancement: If your recommendation fits the demands of your customers, they will react positively by buying it and leaving positive feedback on your websites. The satisfaction level of your customers can be elevated and you can gain more trust from your clients.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) improvement for a B2B business: By offering suitable recommendations for your customer, you stand a higher chance of being successful in persuading your customers to come back to you for good services and products. In that way, you can increase CLV and sustain the development of your business as it costs less to keep an old customer than to acquire a new one.
Tips for cross-selling to boost the sales for your Magento store
1. Differentiate between cross-selling and upselling
Cross-selling, as explained above, is a technique usually used to sell complementary products in addition to the original product.
Upselling, unlike cross-selling, is the technique usually used to attempt to sell more high-end products to customers from a range of the same type of products. Upselling aims at visualising the value and the satisfaction the customers can attain if they choose to use the more expensive product, therefore, increase the value of each order.
Upselling and cross-selling are two terms that are commonly mistaken for each other; therefore to know and to apply correctly the tips for cross-selling, you should know for sure what and how both of them work.
2. Evaluate the cost for using the cross-selling tactic
According to the survey of Harvard Business Review, one out of 5 customers who do cross-buying are unprofitable, and this group of customers accounts for up to 70% of the “customer loss” of a company. To illustrate, customer loss is the term used to describe the situation in which the expense for products and marketing to targeted customers exceed the allowed revenue. This basically means that the more cross-buying said customers do, the more loss your company will receive. Therefore, the first tip for cross-selling we would like to give is that before you decide to launch a cross-selling campaign for your Magento store, make sure you remember this tip for cross-selling and estimate carefully the profit and the loss for the campaign.
3. Keep a suitable amount of product recommendations for your customers.
Using cross-selling is good for your products, but overusing it might bring reversed effects to your business rather than benefits. If the number of recommended products you offer to your customers is just a few, and they’re all useful products then it’s okay. However, if you offer your customers, for example, 15 or 25 recommended products, you risk overwhelming your customers with too many options. Since there’re too many choices, they won’t know which to choose and which can actually do them good.
* PRO Tips: take a look at our Magento 2 product recommendation extension
4. Offer no extra-expensive product (25%)
The next important tip for cross-selling this article wants to mention is about the price of the recommended products. There’s actually a principle for this, principle 25. This principle suggests that when you recommend a product to your customer, you shouldn’t choose the products that cost more than 25% of the original price of the main product. This is because when the customers buy something, they already have in the mind the budget to spend. Customers are willing to pay for additional products they find interesting or useful, but they’re not willing to pay for something that has the price, say, double the price of the main product.
5. Offer relevant and useful add-on
The next tip for cross-selling Magento store owners needs to pay special attention to is offering relevant recommended products. Cross-selling is not just about selling least-selling products. If you want to create any value that will make the customer remember and appreciate your store, you shouldn’t try to annoy and distract them by suggesting useless recommendations and information about irrelevant products. For example, appropriate suggested items for a phone should be a phone case, i-rings or earphones.
6. Group your products in a bundle
This tip for cross-selling advises you to compile your products into a combo or set. Product bundling is a widely-used technique that often goes with price break to give customers a set of many products that compliment each other. This cross-selling tip is brilliant because apart from giving customer easier chance of discovering the related products they might need, it also enables the Magento vendors to sell products that aren’t bought frequently or products that couldn’t be sold in other circumstances.
7. Combine cross-selling with other marketing methods: sell cheaper products at checkout page, more expensive at product page
To make your cross-selling more appealing to customers, you can try to combine different marketing methods. This cross-selling tip is also one of those which are frequently used by successful eCommerce stores that you should learn from. In particular, you can try to cross-sell along with giving our discounts, free shipping or coupons. The place for cross-selling also matters. Theoretically, you can place the recommended products section anywhere you like; however, the most effective and likely to bring you positive results are shopping cart and product page. Having said that, you also need to make sure that product recommendation doesn’t interfere with customers’ navigation process during their shopping experience at your Magento store.
8. Make the offer message natural and personalized
This tip for cross-selling is important because it will directly affect the result and the effectiveness of your marketing expense. By using appropriate and stimulating words, you can encourage customers to buy more. To appear to be more professional and friendly, you should try to make your message more personalised, natural and emotionally urging by using expressions such as “You might also like these” instead of “We recommend this” or “Only 2 items left” or make use of feeling-provoking verbs such as want, like, etc. You can also learn from Amazon famous’s “Customer who bought this item also bought”.
Cross-selling on Magento
Realised the importance of cross-selling to an online store, Magento does provide store owners with the “related products” feature in default. This one performs quite well in terms of basic functions, but its drawbacks are also notable.
- The first disadvantage of Magento ‘related products” lies in its inability to let customers add to cart configurable, bundle, grouped products, and simple products with custom options from the related products page. If they try to do so, they will be redirected to product pages.
- The next disadvantage is that Magento “related products” does not offer any support in purchasing separate items. If a customer wants to buy related products, they have to add the product they want to buy to the Shopping Cart first and then wait for the recommendation from the system.
- Another disadvantage of default “related products” by Magento is about notification. There’s an only notification for the successful addition of main products and none for related products. If customers want to check if they’ve successfully added the related products to their shopping cart or not, they have to waste more time to check the mini cart. This really causes considerable inconvenience for customers.
In the end, there are two ways you can cope with the drawbacks of Magento default Related Products. You can either continue with the default setting for the related product of Magento, or you can find other solutions to get rid of these drawbacks. Magento is great in the way that it can customize accordingly to your demand. Therefore, you can make use of an alternative solution, which is Magento 2 extension, and the perfect extension for you in this situation is to use the Magento 2 Recommended Product.
Wrap up
To conclude, you’re given 8 useful and essential tips for cross-selling to drive your store to the next level and catch the attention of your customers as well as the necessary information about the current situation of Magento feature to help you with cross-selling. We hope that after this article, you’ll be able to find the suitable tips for Magento cross-selling to apply to your Magento store.
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