What is one cross selling technique you’ve used to successfully boost revenue from existing customers?
To help you improve cross-selling to your customers to boost revenue, we asked marketing professionals and business leaders this question for their best ideas. From offering existing customers additional services to creating a product bundle with discounted prices, there are several techniques that would help you become more effective in cross-selling to your existing customers for more revenue.
Here are nine cross-selling techniques these leaders use to boost revenue:
- Offer Existing Customers Additional Services
- Send Handwritten Thank You Notes
- Improve Feature Discoverability Using Pendo or Candu Apps
- Make Follow-up Calls and Send Emails
- Ask Customers What They Need and Then Give It to Them
- Pitch the Cross-Selling Item as Appropriate
- Ask for a Referral
- Develop a Strategy for Cross-Selling from Customer Purchase History
- Create a Product Bundle With Discounted Price
Offer Existing Customers Additional Services
Cross-selling is a sales technique that we use to boost revenue from our existing customers successfully. We offered them additional services that they could purchase to supplement the products and services they were already buying from us. This strategy successfully increased our revenue because it encouraged our customers to buy more products and services from us. It also helped us build stronger relationships with our customers, which resulted in more referrals and repeat business.
Aviad Faruz, FARUZO New York
Send Handwritten Thank You Notes
Thank you notes are a great way to show your appreciation for a customer’s business, and they can also be a powerful tool for boosting revenue. In fact, one study found that customers who receive a handwritten thank you note spend 33% more than those who don’t. There are all sorts of different ways to use thank you notes to boost revenue, but here are just a few ideas:
– Send a thank you note after the customer makes their first purchase
– Send a thank you note after the customer makes a repeat purchase
– Send a thank you note with an upsell or cross-sell offer
– Send a thank you note with an invitation to join your loyalty program or VIP club
Rick Elmore, Handwritten Thank You Notes
Improve Feature Discoverability Using Pendo or Candu Apps
Many of your SaaS users may not know about other tools and features they can take advantage of. Typically, customers have 1 or 2 initial use cases that drove them to adopt your product. However, as those use cases become routine, it’s important to demonstrate other ways your product can be deployed. While many teams use email marketing to accomplish this, using tools like Pendo, Candu, or Appcues allow you to customize your in-product experience and highlight areas for them to explore.
Peter Zawistowicz, Pace
Make Follow-up Calls and Send Emails
Follow-up calls and emails to the customer is one of the effective cross-selling strategies. Follow-up helps to understand whether the customer is enjoying the product or not. Based on the satisfaction level of customers, businesses can cross-sell supplementary products to the customer. If a customer has already made and enjoyed a purchase, companies get an extra opportunity to recommend the cross-sells. Follow-up emails and calls give the idea about whether they need an extra feature or service and what types of products they can buy immediately.
Karen Cate Agustin, Investors Club
Ask Customers What They Need and Then Give it to Them
The best cross-selling technique I’ve used to boost revenue from existing customers successfully is actually pretty simple: just ask them what they need by sending them a post-purchase survey and then send them a discount on those products. It seems easy enough, but you’d be surprised how often businesses forget to do this basic step. They are trying to upsell or cross-sell the latest, greatest or complementary product, but they forget to find out what the customer actually needs. And if you don’t know what they need, how can you be sure that what you propose will be of any use to them?
Sure, you might make a sale here and there using high-pressure techniques, but you’re not going to build a loyal customer base that way. In the long run, it’s always best to just ask your customers what they need and then give it to them. It takes time, the right automation, and segmentation, but customers will appreciate your honesty and straightforwardness in the end.
Tomasz Bartczak, PhotoAiD
Pitch the Cross-Selling Item as Appropriate
While tacking on a customer, initiating the cross-selling is the game. The best way is to tell the customer to choose the add-on to make the product more feasible. Like while buying a laptop, you can suggest buying the bag for extra care and carrying purposes. With this instinct, the buyer is less likely to say no to it. Additionally, you can tell them to purchase the anti-virus.
Letting the customer know its importance is the key to making them buy the product. The plan is to pitch the cross-selling item when you are confident that the client will probably buy the first one. This process will make them think less and buy the add-on easily.
Agnes Zabawa, Insurancenavy
Ask for a Referral
When you are talking to prospects or clients a powerful question to ask, when they are convinced about the value of your product is: “Who else in your network do you think would benefit from our tool?” This allows you to open up a new lead, with a really warm intro from your contact. I would recommend doing this when you close the sale, the client had a wow moment or just received value from your product (a peak moment). This will increase the number of referrals you are going to receive and the willingness of them reaching out to that contact for you.
Joran Hofman, Reditus
Develop a Strategy for Cross-Selling from Customer Purchase History
Provide your sales team with helpful maps to guide them in deciding which services and products to recommend to customers at each stage of the customer life cycle. Develop a strategy for upselling and cross-selling by looking at what your current customers have bought and sorting them into groups based on their demographics and the items or services they have used. In addition, every one of your employees, including salespeople, account managers, and support staff, should be well versed in what it is that you sell.
Billy Parker, Gift Delivery
Create a Product Bundle With Discounted Price
We’ve tried multiple ways to increase the cross-sell within our platform. And the one that gives good results is EmbedSocial Plus – a bundle that includes all the products at a discounted price. With the bundle, customers can create a one-click free trial for multiple products and try each of them in a single account. We’ve seen that many users choose this option at first and decide later if they will use the entire bundle or just a particular product. Of course, the customers that keep the bundle will pay less if they’ve bought the products separately, but we get to have customers who try more products and divide to use them all – although they came to use one at first.
Katerina Bojkov, EmbedSocial
