eCommerceFest 2021 Series #3: The Importance of Upselling and Cross-Selling for Your eCommerce Growth

Let’s continue to the second topic of eCommerceFest Series #3, ‘The Importance of Upselling and Cross-Selling for Your eCommerce Growth’! Before we dive deep into this topic, have you read the previous topic on our blog?

If you have not, click here to study the first topic, you will gain lots of useful information from it.

As a business owner, most often than not, we are focused on getting new sales from new customers.

However, it’s also a must to focus on existing customers (customers who bought from us before).

In this session, the moderator and panelists discussed the effective ways to generate more revenue from existing customers through cross-selling and upselling.

Let’s go through the key takeaways of this session. 

1. Reach out to the customers 

When you are upselling or cross-selling your products or services to the customers, it is very crucial to reach out to them personally instead of bombarding them with tons of messages.

What you could do is figure out a few strategies to reach out to your customers by doing a research on the customer database to understand their habits and preferences. 

2. Make good use of customer database

If you already have your own customer database, use an internal base channel to reach out to them.

The database you have are the people that are relevant to your products or services, so it is crucial to reach out to them using a personalized message.

3. Upselling does not affect the conversion rate negatively

Upselling does not have to affect the conversion rate in a negative way. If you upsell the right product, you are offering more value to the customers.

Furthermore, upselling can actually increase your basket size as it doesn’t matter if the conversion rate increases or remains the same, you are bringing the customers in. 

4. Prevent customers from abandoning the shopping cart 

Customers might abandon the cart when you constantly bombard them with sales messages.

To prevent this from happening, you have to identify the right design to use in your sales materials and perform multiple trials to figure out the right channel and way to upsell or cross-sell your products.

You can also target a focus group, perform AB testing and find out the best solution to do upselling and cross-selling based on your test results. 

5. The potential negative outcome of upselling and cross-selling 

The worst that could happen when you upsell and cross-sell is customers unsubscribing your emails, hiding your ads or turning off the notification.

When that happens, the only way to get them back is through Google or Facebook paid ads.

Therefore, be extra careful when you upsell and cross-sell on marketing channels.

You could also get feedback from your customers and find out what made them unsubscribe. 

6. Startups in the early stage

If you are a startup in the early stage and want to focus on getting sales, you need to spend on Google or Facebook ads to generate sales.

When you start to have more online exposure, more people are going to visit your website, this is where you can start to capture their data.

Make good use of the customer database and start sending them newsletters with valuable content or offer them free coupons.

This is the best way to generate sales, apart from creating great content that can go viral online. 

The Bottom Line 

Having an effective strategy to upsell and cross-sell your products or services to existing customers is important.

Although they have already purchased from you before, it’s still important to do AB testing to understand them well and know their preferences in order to craft an effective upselling and cross-selling strategy to boost new sales from them. 

In this session, the panelists, Zeeshan Khan, Head of Marketing of LEGOLAND Malaysia Resort and Ravi Shankar, Chief Growth & Digital Officer of AirAsia shared their valuable insight on upselling and cross-selling to increase revenue. 

Keen to learn more? Watch the full video of this panel discussion!