How to attract audiences and increase sales? Get to know simple sales techniques that are worth implementing in your marketing strategy!
The competition never sleeps, testing new ways to reach potential customers. Instead of implementing high-budget activities, you can relatively quickly introduce simple and effective methods to attract recipients’ attention. We are obviously talking about three basic sales techniques, namely cross-selling, up-selling, and down-selling. What are they and how can they help increase sales?
Cross-selling – offering complementary products
Cross-selling is one of the sales techniques whose main goal is to maximise profit from one transaction. It works in a very simple way – it consists in offering additional, complementary products or services during the purchasing process and after the first order is made. Since a user has an open wallet, he or she is more likely to choose additional products for those already purchased.
Sales techniques such as cross-selling help increase a company’s income without exposing it to costs of seeking new customers. The strategy is not only willingly used in e-commerce, but also offline. Let’s imagine that a customer orders a hot dog and a sales person additionally offers them fries. This is an extremely popular and effective sales technique that can easily provide additional profit.
In the e-commerce sector, it boils down to offering an additional product while watching the primary one. For example, when a pair of shoes is added to the cart, automatic information about complementary products, e.g. a shoe polish, is displayed. It is also worth indicating the amount over which a customer will receive free delivery as an extra benefit. This simple procedure allows for increasing the cart value by adding more products by the customer.
You can also approach this technique by implementing push advertising campaigns. How does it work in practice? Imagine that a customer wants to buy a laptop and complete the transaction. At the same time, he or she receives a notification with an attractive discount on a laptop bag.
Push advertising campaigns also work well for abandoned shopping carts, reminding potential customers of an unfinished transaction.
Up-selling – increasing the value of the product sold
Online sales are often no different from traditional transactions. For example, a customer wants to buy a new phone, and a seller offers them a higher-class solution, i.e. a model worth PLN 200 more, but having better parameters. This is an additional benefit to consider.
Sales techniques such as up-selling are extremely simple and can be highly cost-effective if skilfully used. However, it should be remembered that when using up-selling it is not worth intrusively offering much more expensive product, because a potential customer can simply go to competition. Up-selling also works after the order is finalised. How does it look in practice?
When offering software through online sales you can implement personalised push advertising campaigns and thus encourage your current customer to buy a premium version at an attractive price. Unwavering persuasions and creating needs make consumers more prone to increase the value of the order or subsequent purchases.
Down-selling – offering a cheaper alternative
Down-selling is said to be the opposite of up-selling. Online sales providers most often face the problem of abandoned shopping carts. To prevent this, it is worth introducing sales techniques, such as down-selling.
This is a good way to have a transaction completed when a customer wants to cancel the purchase. When a product or service is beyond their financial reach, it is worth offering them a cheaper solution, e.g. hardware model with similar parameters or similar product, e.g. a cosmetic of smaller volume. In this case, one should make sure that a potential customer feels that the alternative they opt for will meet their expectations.
The recipient cannot feel any loss, so it is worth offering them something that compensates for giving up a more expensive product. Push advertising campaigns are a great option if you want to offer e.g. free delivery or discount for subsequent purchases. When else is it worth using down-selling and sending push notifications? For example, when a potential customer presses a button that removes the product from the shopping cart or after pointing the cursor to an “X” that closes the browser tab.
