We have learned from thousands of successful Boost Sales customers, gathered all interesting tips & tricks, and brought all to you in this definitive guide. – Beeketing
I. Introduction
Back in 2006, Amazon reported that 35% of its revenue was direct results from upsell and cross-sell efforts. It’s decades ago, and now almost all big E-Commerce websites in the world apply upsell and cross-sell strategies to boost their sales to the maximum.
Read this article if you are not clear about the differences between upsell and cross-sell tactics.
In this article, we will introduce to you all tips and tricks that help you get the best results possible from Boost Sales app. These tips and tricks do not come out from our imagination, but are lessons learned from our successful customers, many of whom now even earn nearly $267K extra sales with just upsell and cross-sell offers.
II. Upsell Offers:
1. How Upsell offers work:
When customers view a product and add it to cart, a popup will show up in the middle of the page to offer upsell items that customers likely want to buy.
– Smart Upsell: collect all sales data history, analyze and automatically suggest upsell items for all products on your store. This is accomplished by our big data technology and smart recommendation system. The auto recommendation gets better and better gradually overtime as it gathers more sales data from your store.
– Custom Upsell: show up-sell products that you create offers for your own purpose. You can freely choose to upsell a single product, a number of specific products or the whole collection.
You can watch our tutorial video here on how to create an up-sell offer with Boost Sales app.
2. Tips & Tricks to create best upsell offers
2.1. Create more than 1 upsell offers for 1 target product
Instead of offering only 1 upsell item for a target product, give your customers more choices in the upsell offer. The more choices you offer, the more possibly that you successfully increase their cart value.
As in this example, I suggest 3 complementary accessories a customer can pair with their swimsuit to complete the look. They can buy 1 item or all 3 items, each at a great discount.
2.2. Choose best sellers as target products
The purpose of this tips is to maximize the number of times customers see your up-sell offers, thus increase orders and sales. As offers only show up when a target product is added to cart, best sellers would logically be the best target products.
2.4. Offer great discount to your unpopular items to clear them out as soon as possible!
Let’s say in this example, the Red Swimsuit is a best-seller item, and the Sunshine Flip Flop is an unpopular item that cannot sell. Create an upsell offer as above will help:
- Increase views for the unpopular item because it shows up every time a customer adds the best-seller to cart
- Sell the unpopular item more easily because now it is 70% discount if bought with the best seller
Just make sure the unpopular item is a good accompany for the best seller product that you pair with, so they can sell together.
2.5. Pricing rule of 25
According to the rule of “25”, when you upsell products, the additional value customers have to pay more should not exceed 25% of the price they pay for the target product. For example,
- If a customer pays $100 for a dress, you should suggest accessories whose (discounted) price are $25 or lower.
- If a customer buys a dress of $100, you should only upgrade them to a similar dress of $125 or lower. It is not very likely that she is willing to pay $65 more, to change to another item 65% more expensive than the one she intends to buy in the first place.
III. Cross-sell Offers:
1. How Cross-sell offers work
In cross-sell offers, you bundle up different products that go together. When customers view any of the bundled products and scroll down a bit to see details (indicating that he is interested in that product), a popup will show up in the right bottom corner of the page to cross-sell the whole bundle.
You can watch our tutorial video here to create a cross-sell offer with Boost Sales app.
Let’s see what you can (and should) do with cross-sell offers to make them storm out of stock!
2. Tips & Tricks to create best cross-sell offers
2.1. Only bundle up complementary product
Imagine that, when you buy a KFC hamburger, they offer a combo of hamburger + fried chips + coke. Cross-sell offer of Boost Sales app is the same. It helps you increase cart value of customers, by offering complementary products in a combo.
If customers want to buy a camera, probably they will be looking for battery product. Instead of waiting for them to come back later for batteries, or worse, to buy in another store which offers a better price, you offer them a combo of camera + battery at a discounted price.
2.2. Don’t bundle up over 3 items. 4-5 products are too much
Most of our customers usually bundle up only 2-3 products in cross-sell offer. Here’s why bundling 4-5 products does not work well:
- The total price increases too much. It violates the pricing rule of “25”.
- Customers are more hesitant. They just intend to buy a camera in the first place. Buying a battery is fine, but if you also offer a camera holder, a power grip, and a remote control, they will have to think hard and be very hesitant. This hurts your conversion rate.
2.3. Multiple cross-sell offers: leverage the art of convincing
We learned this very interesting trick from a customer who earned $3200 in a week with multiple cross-sell feature of Boost Sales. This example illustrates what he did:
Create 3 cross-sell bundles for one best-selling product:
- In the 1st and 2nd offers, the best-selling product is bundled with 2 equally attractive accessories, each at a small discount.
- In the last offer, all 3 products are bundled at a big discount. If customers like both accessories, they might be willing to pay a little more to get both accessories with the target product
This is such a clever art of convincing customers to pay more, isn’t it?
2.4. Again: the pricing rule of “25”
Remember the rule of “25” mentioned above. This also applies for cross-sell offers. You should not offer a combo whose price is way more expensive than the target product customer intends to buy in the first place.
If you want your cross-sell offers to sell incredibly, lower your margin a little bit in exchange for many bigger cart size, and loyal returning customers as they know they can find the best prices in your store.
IV. Set up Sales Motivator to Gamify shopping experience on your store
1. Smart Upsell & Smart Cross-sell
“Smart Upsell and Smart Cross-sell” uses data from your store to recommend products based on customer’s interest and your sales history. Applying machine learning and big data, Smart upsell and Smart cross-sell has generated more than $3,579,000 in extra revenue for Boost Sales customers since its release.
To take the most advantage of this feature, we’ve applied smart up-sell and Smart cross-sell in the last step of your upsell funnel, which helps to boost your order value to the max.
This way, upsell and cross-sell offers will appear when customers hit “Add to cart” button on the product page to suggest the most relevant items based on their sales history and customer’s interest.
You can activate these features in two sections “Up-sell Settings” and “Cross-sell Settings” of the app:
It is recommended that you turn on both Smart upsell and Smart cross-sell for better results, as our app will follow visitor’s journeys on your store to suggest products they’re most interested in.
2. Sales Motivator
This is one of the most interesting features of Boost Sales app, in which we have applied gamification design to make customer experience more exciting, thus brings more fun to your customers and more sales for you.
Instead of seeing normal upsell offers, Sales Motivator shows a progress bar to make customers feel their purchase as an achievement, which urges them to add more items to cart to reach the goal.
You can set it up under “Last step up-sell option” or refer to our instruction here.
Game design technique is applied in smart coupon popups to motivate your shoppers to add more products to cart in order to receive offers. It helps to increase user engagement on your store, motivate customers to spend more, come back & refer you to their friends.
Thanks for reading until the end!
You’re way ready to create awesome Upsell & Cross-sell offers with Boost Sales app.
Our customers see thousands of extra sales in a month just by optimizing their upsell and cross-sell offers little by little until perfection. Will you do that to achieve the same?
Email us at [email protected] if you need support from our Marketing and Engineering experts, we’ll reach you within 24 hours and get everything started right away for you!
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