Online cross-selling is more than just upping order size, says Jupiter
Cross-selling has become a key online merchandising tactic, and not just to increase the size of the average order, according to a new report from Jupiter Media Metrix. Online merchants also should be looking for cross-selling as a way to increase customer value over time. “Cross–selling is a significant objective for companies targeting consumers online. Customer acquisition costs are too high to ignore any opportunity to increase the size of a given transaction or overall wallet share,” says Jupiter analyst Fiona Swerdlow.
About 18% of consumers polled in a recent survey reported they’d purchased products suggested to them by e-retailers either during or after a transaction. Cross-selling is on track to become even more commonplace among online merchants as they invest and gain greater proficiency in it, according to Jupiter.
Many cross-selling initiatives on the part of retailers are still manually-driven and expensive to develop and maintain, notes Jupiter. E-mail marketing still is relatively underused for cross-selling, with only about 10% of companies reporting that they used e-mail for this purpose. Yet some companies that have used e-mail to follow up a purchase with a cross-sell opportunity have found that the e-mails generate several times the click through rates of other e-mails.
T0 make sure that cross-sell offers are relevant and more likely to get a response, merchants need to closely watch the performance of the product combinations offered. The metrics for cross-selling should include customer uptake on paired products, measuring both click-throughs and sale, and the revenue and margin for product parings that consumers respond to, Jupiter says. For cross-sell offers issued after an online purchase, metrics should measure the open and click-through rates on e-mail offers, shoppers’ uptake on bundled products and offers, and revenue and margin on the products that customers buy post-purchase.
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