Increase Revenue Through Up-selling and Cross-Selling

August 6, 2009 | By Marc Porcelli | 1 Comment »

Online businesses are always looking to increase revenue. Trying to increase revenue during a recession makes it even more difficult. Fortunately there are a few tried, tested and proven methods that can increase your revenue per user. There are two methods  I am referring to; up-sells and cross-sells. To effectively incorporate these methods, you need to understand what they are.

Up-sell – To get the customer to spend more money. This is often done through offering upgrades. Think about when you last bought a computer online through Dell or Apple, there are a ton of up-sells such as a better processor or more memory.

Upsell Example

Up-sell Example

Cross-sell – This is all about offering your customer items that can complement their purchase.  A retailer could offer software such as Microsoft Office, or perhaps a keyboard.

Think about when you are on Amazon.com and you see “Best Value” with the book you selected (in the below example the book, The Time Traveler’s Wife) and get another book (A Long, Long Time…) at a bundled price – a great cross-sell. Amazon also uses, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” which is another cross-selling opportunity.

Cross-sell example

Cross-sell example

These are just some basic strategies that can help you increase your revenue per user. As you can tell, these are all primary up-sells and cross-sells. They occur before the credit card is submitted. You can also incorporate secondary up-sells and cross-sells post-transaction, or after the user has submitted and completed their order with a credit card.

Post-sale transactions typically have a lower take rate, but nonetheless increase  your revenue. Post-transaction is also a good place to promote newsletters and free offers to increase your revenue.

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Category: Marketing Strategy, Monitization, Recession Marketing

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1 Comment »

Pingback by Online Sales To Increase Almost 200 Percent Between 2008 and 2012 | Marc Porcelli
2009-09-08 21:19:35

[...] Our children (not mine of course) are also spoiled, we provide them at times too often with what they want NOW. As a marketer, you have to recognize this trend and market effectively towards it. This includes, strong calls to action, reinforced value propositions throughout the buying cycle and keeping the sales process simple, don’t distract your users till you get that credit card processed, then up-sell and cross-sell. [...]

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