Conversion Step #3: Cross-Sell & Upsell
Welcome to the third installment of the conversion series, featuring tips to hook and sink customers with digital communications. After detailing lapsed buyer campaigns and cart abandonment campaigns, today we will explore cross-selling and upselling.
You’ve effectively captured the attention of a customer, but what’s next? Of course, you want to convert them to perform a particular action. While private sector organization’s concern is reaching sales goals through conversions, public sector organizations have a different prerogative, which is to activate a life-improving or life-saving action.
Whether you represent healthcare, veterans affairs, education, environment and conservation, health service, transportation, or civic service agencies, your organizational goals center on hitting specific key performance indicators. These indicators are often conversions, which luckily have a product tie in to make automation, tracking, outreach, and measurement easy.
What is Cross-Selling and Upselling?
After you have captured the attention of your “customer,” you’ve hit the agreement phase. This means that a customer has started the process of a conversion and is actively hooked. Two types of conversion tactics in the agreement phase are cross-selling and upselling, both meant to improve the value of a transaction.
Cross-selling: This occurs when a marketer offers products from other categories that are somehow related.
Upselling: This occurs when an organization offers a more expensive or feature-rich product on a webpage, promotion, or email.
These correlated techniques are used a lot in the e-commerce space, but also are very effective in the public sector.
Still confused about how these two actions work? Cue McDonalds. This fast food giant is the king of cross-sells and upsells. The phrase “Would you like fries with that” perfectly sums up cross-selling and upselling. Because a customer is already in the buying mode (placing a burger order), offering a complementary product (fries) is an easy add-on. Not only can the customer afford the additional purchase, but they’re reminded how they actually want the additional treat, thus increasing the value of the transaction.
Why is Cross-Selling and Upselling Important?
Upselling and cross-selling are opportunities where organizations can dramatically change the effectiveness of their communications. In fact, 50% of public sector organizations increase the number of new people signing up for digital updates by using cross-promotion effectively.
Here are just a few of the many benefits of this type of conversion activity:
- They improve order totals.
- They boost conversion rates.
- They expose customers to more options.
- They give customers information they need, increasing overall customer satisfaction rates.
“By effectively upselling and cross-selling you can make sure that the customer chooses the right product for them, and that they have everything they need to use that product,” notes e-commerce guru Shopify.
Real-Life Examples
If you are still leery of how cross-selling and upselling can be used in the public sector, check out these examples of how you could leverage these techniques across different government organizations:
- Department of Natural Resources. When a customer reserves a campsite, you could subsequently offer content promoting a fishing license.
- Department of Labor. When someone applies for an LLC, and may be new to the small business world, you can subsequently offer content about business insurance and applying for a certificate of good standing.
- U.S. Post Office. When a customer visits your site to buy postage to send a package before Father’s Day, you may offer up additional products like greeting cards, or a 100-pack of stamps –ergo upselling the customer.
Where Do You Cross-Sell and Upsell?
Marketing platforms like GovDelivery make it possible to automate your cross-selling and upselling experiences for customers. You can set up campaigns on various digital channels, from your social, email, and even mobile applications.
Don’t miss an opportunity that is already established with your customer. Stay tuned for more blog posts on the art of the conversion.