How Does PIM Help Ecommerce Stores in Creating Effective Cross-Selling Recommendations?
Cross-selling becomes more common among online shopping portals; you may have encountered this many times while shopping in the virtual world. However, you may not be aware this is cross-selling. Apart from just increasing profit margin for shop owners, cross-selling creates awareness to customers about the presence of the products which are relevant to the items they added on carts.
Let’s discuss more on cross-selling products and what shop owners can get through cross-selling optimization. Also, how modern PIM solutions assist store owners to achieve the best cross-selling experience.
What is Cross-Selling?
In the online shopping world, Cross-selling is an effective sales tactic used by brands or online stores to increase their sales profit margin by suggesting additional products which are relevant to the items which customers intended to buy.
Cross-selling is a successful sale tactic but stores need to be more careful on driving good strategy on suggesting cross-selling products. In general, cross-selling seems to be more effective on attempting checkout pages, and success pages of carting items. Also, store owners must remember too much-promoting products will create frustration among visitors.
Benefits of Cross-selling in Ecommerce
For business people who look to generate more revenue without spending a penny on their eCommerce business can use cross-selling optimization Cross-selling is the best option to execute the product recommendation which is relevant to the items sought by the consumers. Cross-selling product recommendations yield maximum benefits to the store owners.
Here are the lists of a few attractive benefits stores can avail of through cross-selling
1. Helps to Connect With Customers
Best cross-selling optimization enables customers that brands or stores have understood their personalities well. For example, if a customer buys a pair of shoes, stores can show them matching socks along with matching jeans. This will create more connections and enable more sales.
2. Builds Customer Loyalty
Cross-selling creates more connections between customers and stores; they would likely stick with the store and keep shopping in the future. This will build loyalty among customers and even turn customers into brand ambassadors.
3. Increases Revenues
Once customers start visiting again and again because of a good experience, this will eventually increase sales and revenues for the store. In addition, best cross-selling optimization will motivate customers to purchase relevant products which they do not look to buy initially; this will increase the profit margin of a single sale for the store.
Do you want to explore more benefits of cross-selling recommendations for your eCommerce business and how PIM helps you create the right cross-selling strategies?
Examples & Best Practice of Ecommerce Cross-selling
As discussed above, cross-selling is a powerful weapon for encouraging customers to shop more from the store than the products they look for. Modern eCommerce stores can utilize cross-selling in many ways.
Store managers can use them, while customers are looking for their needed products, when customers added their desired products in carts, during the checkout process, and even cross-selling can be introduced post-purchase too.
Here in this section, we illustrated best practices to follow for introducing cross-selling in eCommerce along with perfect examples.
1. Recommending Relevant Products
Utilizing the power of data is the most significant advantage of cross-selling. Cross-selling ensures recommending the products which are relevant to the data which are gathered from customers or the products.
Once customers find it relevant to the products which they are looking for, there is a high chance of buying along with the products they are looking for. Also, shop owners can recommend products that are relevant to their previous purchases too.
Example: The UK-based online grocery selling & logistics business Ocado Group perfectly uses this cross-selling recommendation. They recommend products that are relevant to the previous purchase made by the specific customers during the order checkout. This will be useful for buyers if they have forgotten something they usually purchase.
2. Recommend Cross-selling Items without Interrupting a Purchase
Often the cross-selling recommendation products are added at the point where customers have already decided what to purchase. So, while displaying cross-selling recommendations you may have the risk of interrupting the shopping process of the customers.
To avoid such risk, make sure you are showing cross-selling recommendations with the option of adding to the cart without breaking the checkout process.
Example: While purchasing laptops or any tech gadgets from Laptops Direct, they display a pop-up window showcasing all products added to the cart along with a cross-selling recommendation. This will create no interruption; also buyers can easily add recommended products to the carts from that pop-up window itself.
3. Cross-selling through Products Bundling
Product bundling is one of the most successful tactics for cross-selling products. Through product bundling, stores can offer extra offers/discounts for buying relevant products together with the ease of adding them to the carts.
In this way, store owners can sell a bunch of relevant products to the customers easily. However, this cross-selling product through building products will force owners to offer extra discounts to the buyers.
Example: The British-based electrical retailer Currys uses this product bundling way of cross-selling products. If a buyer buys a camera means, on cross-selling recommendation buyers would get extra discounts for adding film rolls. In this way, both store owners and buyers benefit.
4. Cross-selling through Free-shipping Threshold
The free shipping threshold is a great way to encourage customers to shop more. If customers are close to getting a free shipping threshold, then offering a relevant cross-selling recommendation for availing of free shipping would be a great way to push buyers to add more products.
This method of using cross-selling recommendations too helps both store owners and shoppers.
Example: The UK-based online luxury & designer handbag seller MyBag uses this method with perfection. Almost every online shopping now started to introduce this method of cross-selling products through recommendations & by offering free shipping benefits.
Do you want to implement the product information management platform that allows companies to enable the buyers with free shipping benefits for the cross-selling products?
5. Recommend Cross-selling Products as Key points through Customer Journey
Cross-selling recommendation plays a key role when customers are pretty sure about what they are going to purchase from your online store. However, recommending cross-selling products on the product detail pages won’t produce the desired results.
So, experts suggest enlisting the cross-selling products as key points at the checkout page or in the pop-up window which displays the confirmation message of items added to the cart.
Example: Almost every online shopping portal uses this, and displays their cross-selling products on their pop-up window showing item added to carts successfully page and also at the checkout page.
6. Use High-Margin Products as Cross-selling Recommendation
This method of cross-selling recommendation will help store owners to get a high margin over the products on which they don’t get a high margin. Also, stores or brands can utilize this option to offer mega discount offers during special occasions.
Example: Many online shopping portals use this method of cross-selling recommendation for offering mega discount offers during the festival. As we are on the verge of celebrating Christmas and New year, almost every online shop would make use of this.
7. Post Purchase Cross-selling Options
Cross-selling will trigger customers to shop more even after the post-purchase. Yes! By enlisting the recommended products and relevant products based on the previous shopping of specific customers will encourage them involved in the shopping process.
This can be done by sending post-purchase emails or SMS to the individual customers by enlisting all those recommended products with discounts and offers.
Example: The international home décor company Crate & Barrel uses this post-purchase cross-selling method to attract their customers to shop again by sending relevant cross-selling products through post-purchase emails.
8. Avoid Overdo Cross-selling
Finally, this is the most important thing to be remembered by store owners. Cross-selling may find as useful for buyers and also for store owners to sell more products. However, overdoing cross-selling recommendations will irritate customers and even force them to boycott the shopping process by ignoring carted products.
To avoid such cart abandoning activity by customers, each retails should determine the exact threshold point of cross-selling recommendation. Proper analysis of the data will help to find out whether cross-selling really deters your customers or it is not effective as expected.
Example: Petshop – An UK-based online shop for buying pet accessories uses cross-selling wrongly. You can find lengthy cross-selling recommendations during the checkout process on this site. The recommendation list goes beyond the 6 to 8 steps; this irritates buyers and ignores the cross-selling recommendation.
Are you looking for a PIM solution that supports your cross-selling strategies and drives more sales and revenue for your business?
How PIM Helps Brands on Cross-selling Optimization
As modern technology has changed retailers’ business in an impeccable and also the behavior of new generation customers, business owners and retailers need to be more cautious & innovative to be successful.
Cross-selling is an important asset for eCommerce businesses, if it is done correctly businesses involved in eCommerce activity will yield high benefits. Introducing Cross-selling recommendations in online stores will provide maximum value to customers and also increase the business sales value without causing any extra cost, especially in marketing channels.
The demands of modern customers not only focused on product visibility assortments but also the quality of product content/information/details. To tackle those challenges and to manage, organize and share the product content in digital across multiple channels, eCommerce businesses require this automatic tool PIM (Product Information Management).
Recent study reports point out that online businesses utilizing the power of cross-selling witnesses about 44% of the increase in their sales. This section will illustrate how the quality content distributed by the Product Information Management system helps to improve customer experience and also supports businesses in offering cross-selling recommendations.
1. Connection between CX (Customer Experience), Product Content & Cross-Selling
The Customer Experience (CX) points to the connection between potential buyers and the brands or stores. In today’s digital world, the eCommerce experience faced by the customers lays the strong foundation for the success of the particular business/brands/stores. Once customers are satisfied enough on purchasing their desired products from a store, they start rating that store and it builds loyalty among them.
Experts suggest a loyal customer generates around 300% of income for a brand/store. However, winning customer loyalty isn’t that much easy, it is directly related to the quality of product content that brands place before them. The accuracy and completeness of the product content/details/information trigger customers to make a positive buying decision.
By knowing the importance of delivering quality content to customers/visitors, several top companies & brands prefer to cut their marketing/advertising costs and invest more in creating more quality & meaningful content. Having more accurate, meaningful, and up-to-date product content is the key to cross-selling success.
So, to achieve this success brands should take initiatives to move away from their traditional practices and utilize the power of modern PIM tools.
Read How PIM Solution Improves Customer Experiences (CX) Of Your Business?, to get insights into how PIM creates the best CX for your target audience.
2. PIM – The Most Comprehensive Management Tool
In-depth, PIM solutions act as a centralized repository for delivering all contents which customers face in the market. A PIM system apart from enriching the product data encompasses products and enables product syndication.
In today’s business world, brands are facing the below-mentioned problems in managing their product content.
- Data Integration from various sources
- Analyzing content effectiveness
- Creation of more compelling content
- Distributing or publishing data on various customer touchpoints
PIM helps brands to distribute the product content to multiple sources, sales channels, and various touchpoints from a centralized single location automatically. This enables brands to handle a large volume of product content with more efficiency.
To learn more about product information management, don’t miss to read What is PIM? – An Ultimate Guide for Product Information Management Services.
Also, to achieve comprehensive Customer Experience (CX) & better cross-selling, brands should be able to do these aspects
- Frequent update to meet the current requirements
- Optimal integration of product & analytics data
- Optimal environment to manage and effective handling of product data
- Performance analysis & performing data optimization according to the recommendation/expectation
- Integrating & publishing various format content in multiple channels
All those above-mentioned aspects are handled effectively by the PIM system and it solves all those challenges faced by a brand or business involved in the eCommerce business.
Do you want to discuss how a product information management platform helps you deliver effective cross-selling recommendations and improve the customer experience?
Bottom Line
Businesses that invest in PIM solutions will be able to solve all those accumulated problems of the modern eCommerce world. PIM system acts like a prolific content management system and helps brands to improve business profitability by retaining customers and driving more sales.
In conclusion, the PIM system provides a great opportunity for brands or eCommerce businesses to achieve development through accurate data management and effective cross-selling management.
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