A Guide To Upselling & Cross-Selling Strategies

As a retailer, there’s one particular statistic centered around existing customer sales compared to new customer sales that should alarm you. As the resource featured alongside this post points out, retailers are 60% to 70% more likely to sell their products to existing customers. Now, compare this to the 5% to 20% chance they have of selling to new customers. Even the most experienced retailers will struggle in new customer acquisition but will continue to invest large amounts of their marketing budgets into developing strategies centered around attracting new customers.

What reason could these retailers have to continuously overlook their most loyal customers, those who are more likely to purchase from them again?

Namely because developing strategies to ensure new and dynamic revenue growth is a real challenge. Even devoting all attention to existing customer retention won’t necessarily be the quick fix retailers are looking for. Luckily the infographic coupled alongside this post provides a number of ideas regarding these strategies. Particularly a strategy that includes integrating both online and in-store sales techniques known as upselling and cross-selling.

Integrating these techniques is only possible with a well-founded omnichannel marketing strategy. It’s true that these strategies have taken over the retail industry, but, believe it or not, some retailers still fail to see how this type of strategy can benefit their business. Again, the featured infographic includes a number of real-world examples in which these strategies can improve the in-store retail experience.

Before these examples, it’s important to understand just how long a customer spends in physical retail locations. The average customer will spend anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour in any retail location. The strength of an omnichannel strategy is that customers never stop interacting with the retailer, despite leaving their physical locations so quickly. With social media profiles, a website that supports a web store and personalized text or e-mail notifications customers can remain connected with retailers long after they leave their stores. Some digital alerts are even effective at bringing more customers into these physical locations again.

The personalization provided by these alerts are just as important. Particularly because providing adequate personalization in-store can be so difficult. Whereas personalization online is much easier to achieve when online suggestions are predicated on things like a customer’s previous purchases, their favorite items on the web store and even what products they have in their cart.

Creating an immersive in-store experience is possible through digital techniques as well. This is seen through retailers that use digital signage or screens to display valuable information to customers regarding specific products. Things like price, customers reviews, unique features and qualities are all displayed on these screens to give customers a more accurate depiction of a given product when representatives aren’t avail to help. This drastically improves the in-store customer experience.

Retailers should look to omnichannel strategies if their intention is bringing in existing customers while simultaneously attracting new customers to their physical retail locations. For additional information regarding these omnichannel strategies and how to properly integrate them into your retail business, be sure to check out the infographic accompanying this post.  Courtesy of IDL Displays.