Retail surgery: How can I cross-sell and up-sell on my website?

One strength of online retailing is the ability to adapt the content and promotions shown to each visitor according to their known preferences and behaviour. This can be a powerful tool in improving customer engagement and their lifetime values, and as Maxymiser chief executive Tim Brown explains, is particularly effective for increasing cross-sell and up-sell.

“The key to achieving effective cross-sell and up-sell is simply to display the most enticing offers to each customer at the important influence points on their journey through your site”, he says. By building a profile for each online visitor or customer based on items such as location, time of day, purchase history, browsing activity, CRM data, and so on, you can offer content that they are most likely to add to their shopping carts, he adds.

Product recommendations are one example of this, and have been used successfully by etail giants such as Amazon. But this is only one part of the solution required for true success in cross-selling and up-selling. Different techniques are required for targeting category-level offers or promotional campaigns.

The good news is that retailers no longer have to have endless IT resources or an Amazon-like budget to launch this. “The trick is to have access to an integrated optimisation platform and expert guidance that covers not just product recommendations, but all the techniques that Amazon use behind the scenes,” says Brown. Behavioural targeting offers complete transparency in how performance is reported.

Evidence of online customer behaviour will not only enable retailers to boost their revenue, but also provide a highly personalised experience for each shopper.