Cross-selling and upselling are both ways to add additional revenue to your bottom line. Both attempt to get the customer to spend more money by adding more products.
An upsell adds more products from the same category. For instance, let’s say you are selling an eBook called “How to Lose Weight the Easy Way.” You could then upsell a book plus a super-sized DVD package of the book that shows examples of the author cooking the menus and doing the recommended exercises. You could also add on a membership to a group coaching forum, and then the chance for one-on-one coaching, all as an add-on to the book to help the buyer to use the book properly. You have to buy the book to get the other products.
A cross-sell adds more products from a complementary category that may or may not be related to the same category, and the buyers aren’t required to make the other purchase to get it. For instance, you’ve sold a book called: “How to Lose Weight the Easy Way,” then you recommend other products, or cross-sell items such as vitamins, nutritional supplements, exercise equipment, exercise clothing, etc…. All are related in some way to the product, but you cross categories from books to other products.
All of this is value added selling. Every sales person does some form of these types of selling to improve their bottom line. That’s why when you go to a fast food franchise they always suggest an additional item to the customer, no matter what they get. Sales people in department stores, and every type of business across the country does it, just in different ways.
Upselling Ideas
Upselling requires some product planning in order to work. You’ll need to offer your product in a few different forms so that when customers click on one product they’ll automatically be recommended to buy the better super-sized package of the same product with more benefits for them.
A great way to offer upsell items is to do it in the shopping cart, if possible after the customer has made the decision to purchase the item already. Simply offer some more choices within the cart to add on to the purchase that they’re already making. If you cannot do it that way, send them to a thank you page that offers the additional items to add to their package to get the super-sized version of the product.
Cross-Selling Ideas
Cross-selling is really a natural state of customers purchasing any items. If you are selling eBooks, a natural item you could cross-sell are eBook readers, reading lights, eBook cases, and anything related to eBooks in general.
What’s more, if you sell eBook about specific topics, you can cross-sell items related to those topics. For instance if you sell diet cook books you can then also sell vitamins, pedometers, calorie calculators, tennis shoes and more.
As long as what you’re cross-selling is somehow relevant to your customer, you can recommend it. A great way to recommend items is to make blog posts about product recommendations that are related to your main money maker, but aren’t your main money maker. You can even, if you have the right type of shopping cart, show customers a list of items other customers purchased when they bought their item. The chances to earn more money through cross-selling are limitless.
Cross-selling and upselling need to become part of your entire sales funnel. If you don’t offer upselling and cross-selling opportunities, you’re missing out on a larger income stream.