If you’re looking to give your customers better service while improving your company’s sales numbers, you’ve probably considered various cross-selling and upselling strategies for your sales force.
After all, you may approach one customer with one offer, only to find that another offer is more relevant to them. Or that they could use more than one of your products to effectively solve their need.
This concept isn’t anything new, of course. But there are plenty of companies that, when developing their strategies for upselling and cross-selling, don’t even consider their company’s top sales rep: their website.
Challenges In Upselling From Your Website
Traditionally, upselling involves two elements that are particularly challenging to apply to your business site: the ability to respond to feedback, and the ability to control the flow of the sale.
Responding To Feedback
In a traditional sales interaction, a sales rep can listen to and respond to customers in real time. If they don’t respond well to a particular offer, or if they have more questions about a pitch, the sales agent can provide the appropriate suggestion for a cross-sell or upsell opportunity.
Your website, on the other hand, may not have that inherent ability. If your landing page isn’t relevant, your customer may not find one that is.
Controlling The Flow Of The Sale
Perhaps more important than responding to feedback is the ability to control the direction and flow of the sale from the outset.
If you’re working a sale, you can start by discovering a customer’s need, and shepherd them through the various ways that your product provides a valid solution for each of those needs. If you take your customer through the proper journey, you can show them just how much sense your solutions make. If you run into resistance, or see opportunity, you can cross sell or upsell various different products accordingly.
But with your website, you don’t have a salesperson showing your visitor where to click. They’re in control of their own sales process. How do you make a suggestion or offer alternatives and add-ons?
Upselling Strategies For Your Website
Even though there are challenges in upselling or cross-selling from your site, there are still ways to do it effectively. After all, a customer goes through a sales process, or funnel, whether they are talking to a salesperson or interacting with your website. Your goal is to recreate that process digitally. But where do you start?
Website Upselling Strategy #1: Educate, educate, educate
People come to your website to learn more about your product or your brand. So don’t hold back! Make sure that you answer all of your customers’ questions somewhere on your site.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you should put up giant blocks of text, or try and put absolutely every piece of relevant information on your homepage. Part of effectively answering your customers’ questions is establishing a good content hierarchy… organizing your content so that it’s easy to navigate, skim, and take in.
How does education help? Simple: most people who abandon a shopping cart do so because they don’t have enough relevant information! They balk at the price, not because your product is expensive, but because they haven’t been shown the value.
Making sure that all the info is located on your site, and is easy to find, is key to making sure that customers are ready and willing to make an informed buying decision by the time they get to the shopping cart.
Website Upselling Strategy #2: In-Cart Offers
Let’s say you’re buying a fancy pillow. You go through the website’s sales process and are completely sold on the pillow. It will prop your head up in such a way that your neck won’t hurt, it’s exactly what you’re looking for.
You get to the shopping cart, and before you submit your final order you get a friendly offer: add an anti-snoring mouthpiece to your order and get it at 20% off.
You didn’t come to the site for an anti-snore system. You came there for a pillow. But since your partner has complained about your snoring in the past, and it’s such a great deal, and you’re already primed to buy the pillow, you add it to your cart.
Your website just upsold you on an additional product through using a compelling offer.
Not all such offers will fit every customer, but they will make an impact if they are relevant offers with a lot of value.
Website Upselling Strategy #3: Use Chat
The most effective way to make a website interactive and responsive to a customer’s immediate needs and questions is to incorporate a chat feature.
In a way, you’re gaming the system by helping the visitor get the same personalized service that they would from a personal sales rep, without needing to navigate away from the site to do so.
The chat could be live, or it could be a well-programmed AI Chat feature. The important thing is that the chat needs to be able to answer any given question related to your product or service and be able to offer an effective cross-selling or upselling solution.
DontGo is a great solution for an exit-intent AI Chatbot that helps keep people engaged with your site and is able to offer relevant solutions. It can help you regain control of the sale by truly engaging your potential customers and spiking their interest.
DontGo’s AI Chat feature can discover a visitor’s pains and answer their questions… and guide them into an upsell solution either before or after the purchase.
U.S.Patents 8949377, 8738739 and 7962578