Last updated - September 12, 2022
Are you a WooCommerce store owner? Then you might be familiar with Cross-selling and upselling. These are very popular eCommerce terms that can significantly impact your average order value (AOV), customer retention, or customer lifetime value (CLV) metrics, increasing overall revenue and benefiting your business in many ways.
And no, we’re not going to repeat the same story of metrics and statistics. Instead, we’ll focus on some excellent ways of cross-selling and upselling WooCommerce products via email marketing.
Why?
Because email is the best marketing channel out there, and with many amazing personalization options, most email marketing clients allow you to reach the right people with the right offers!
What makes upselling and cross-selling an effective sales tactic is that often it’s easier to sell to customers who trust your brand. According to studies, existing customers are 70% more likely to buy your products than a new prospect. With that being said, let’s dive into upselling and cross-selling WooCommerce products via email marketing.
Things to consider before cross-selling and upselling
Often, sellers go all-out with upselling and cross-selling. They try to upsell or cross-sell almost any and every product they have. But several obvious reasons suggest that you should avoid this kind of approach in email marketing.
Two significant reasons are that you have to create hundreds of email templates if you have many products, and the emails may end up in the spam folder if too many emails go unnoticed. You might also end up annoying your customers if you send upsell and cross-sell emails every time a purchase happens. So it is wise to start with a few products to create upselling and cross-selling emails.
Also, you simply can’t persuade someone into buying home decors who bought shoes. As awful as it sounds, this can happen if you don’t ensure a personalized experience. And that’s exactly why upselling and cross-selling begin with segmentation.
Upselling and cross-selling success depend on multiple factors. Your customer behavior, products, and timing, all impact how your customer will respond to your upselling email. Besides, delivery time and shipping fee also affect upselling and cross-selling significantly. So unless you want to end up sending an awful upsell or cross-sell email, you must examine all aspects of your WooCommerce store and email templates very carefully.
How to Cross-sell and upsell products?
Cross-selling is the method of selling additional items to your customers, for example, selling keyboards, or headphones, etc., to a customer who bought a PC.
On the other hand, Upselling refers to selling a more profitable item to a customer. For example, selling a higher level subscription to your customer has a lower level subscription.
Here are some excellent ways to cross-sell your WooCommerce products:
Say thank you
Suppose someone bought a product. But you didn’t send a thank you email or communicate at all. That’s not a good practice in marketing books. It’s vital to build a relationship with your customers, and a small thank you can lay the foundation for relationship building.
So how does that connect to cross-selling or upselling? A thank you can go a long way if you can prepare your thank you emails for cross-selling and upselling. This way, you can convey your gratitude for making a purchase while keeping your business on top of mind.
WooCommerce plugins to customize thank you pages.
Reward loyalty
A great cross-sell strategy is to reward your customer for purchasing a product. For example, a small discount on your customer’s next purchase. If you are selling books on your website, it is a good gesture to offer a discount on the subsequent purchase of a book by the same author to your new buyer or something similar. People consider discounts as bargains, and with a small gesture such as a discount, you can win their buying decision and make them feel valued at the same time!
This also allows you to create a reward program as your long-term sales strategy by enabling you to sell more products quickly. People often come back to where they feel valued. So once you feel like you can start a loyalty program, don’t forget to set it up!
You don’t have to cross-sell physical products
Whenever someone learns about cross-selling, they start thinking about money, and how they can sell more physical products. But you don’t always have to cross-sell physical products. Instead, you can focus on selling services. For example, if you’ve sold a computer, you can cross-sell servicing, customization, or additional warranty period. Most services cost less or nothing, and they can be a great source of revenue.
Offer free shipping
Like we have mentioned earlier, people like to get bargains. If that comes with free shipping, they’ll consider this even better. According to a study by walker sands, 9 out of 10 customers say that free shipping triggers them to shop more!
How does this work in upselling or cross-selling emails?
You can simply offer them free shipping for their next order. Much like the loyalty reward tactic, this allows you to ensure higher customer retention while boosting revenue!
Configuring free shipping in WooCommerce.
BOGO deals
Apple’s recent iPhones do not come with a charger or AirPods, or earphones. Does that mean people won’t need them? Of course not, they’ll have to purchase these instead. What if people had an option to buy a bundle of all these products right after they purchased the iPhone?
Yes, that’s exactly what Apple does! Buy one get one deal can be a great source of making more upsell or cross-sell revenue. Like Apple, you can also cross-sell your products by packaging cross-selling items together.
Ensure urgency
Are you giving out too many simple offers?
In upselling or cross-selling, this can sometimes backfire as people might not be interested in spending more immediately after they have purchased something. And that’s why you should create a little urgency in your discounts.
Now, we’re not saying you need to create a shopping mall environment. Instead, you can give them offers for a limited time. This tactic is called FOMO, aka fear of missing out.
Think about it, sometimes people hesitate to make a decision even after they are interested in a product. FOMO makes these decisions happen because you’re not simply giving out offers, you’re creating a sort of urgency by allowing customers to grab the offer within only a limited time.
This tactic can also be productive in cross-selling and upselling. Because once they receive your offer, they’ll know that they have a limited time to respond to the offer.
The rule of three!
People respond better to patterns. The rule of three is a popular marketing tactic that utilizes this psychology. It works because people are likely to absorb information in group of three’s. This means, if you promote three items that belong to the same product category, the customers are more likely to notice the products. The pattern will activate in their brains and often drive them into making a buying decision. Your cross-sell or upsell emails can also utilize this tactic.
Generally, the sales cycle of an eCommerce or WooCommerce store is pretty straightforward. The customer explores a website, visits the product pages, reads the descriptions, and ends up buying one or two products. That’s about it. They don’t like to hang around.
However, cross-selling and upselling adds an extra selling cycle that can go a long way to increase customer retention, boost customer lifetime value, and prevent customers from leaving your business for someone else.
After you’ve set up cross-selling and upselling emails…
What separates emails from your WooCommerce store’s general cross-selling and upselling tactics is that email performance statistics will always be more accurate, and you can tweak your email copies anytime without much hassle. Such statistics and functionality help you figure out the gaps and maximizes your chances of increasing your store’s revenue by providing a personalized after-sale experience.
Hence, unless your cross-selling and upselling emails perform miraculously, you need to regularly measure your upsell and cross-sell email performance and keep tweaking your email copies for improvement.
Using expensive email marketing automation tools?
You don’t have to! According to popular WordPress enthusiasts, WordPress is finally ready for a complete email marketing automation tool. Turns out, FluentCRM is the tool we’ve all been looking for. It comes with all the necessary modules that the top marketing automation tools come with.
FluentCRM’s features at a glance:
- 360° contact overview
- Dynamic segmentation
- Email campaign management
- Email sequencing
- Marketing automation
- Granular reporting
- A/B testing
- Link tracking
The best part about FluentCRM is that it does not require any extensions for integrating with your WooCommerce plugin. It automatically integrates with such WordPress plugins, removing the complexity of configuring your marketing automation software for data centralization or communication. Hence you can personalize your customer’s experience better and set up marketing automation for your WooCommerce store effortlessly.
What makes FluentCRM a much better marketing automation tool is its flat and incredibly budget-friendly pricing. It costs only $129 per year; there’s no hidden cost, growth cost, or sending limit.
So hands down, FluentCRM is one the best CRM solutions, especially for those who were looking for affordable CRM functionality within the convenience of WordPress and can be a handy option for automating your cross-selling and upselling email strategy. With that said, we wish you all the best for your business. Leave us a comment if you have a query.
