Cross-Selling Marketing Strategies to Propel Your Brand

By using appropriate cross-selling marketing techniques, you can substantially improve the basic transactions between customers and your company. Cross-selling allows you to enhance the customers’ experience while at the same time boosting the amount and type of products purchased, which benefits your profitability and brand awareness.


Cross-selling involves offering other products that are similar to or that complement the purchase being made. When a customer buys a book by a particular author or specific subject, for example, a retailer can suggest other books by the same author or that cover the same subject.

In online purchasing, you can use this technique during the three main phases of the transaction.

  1. Before checkout: Before checkout, make suggestions for similar items that the customer may not know about. Techniques can be customized and modified to offer suggestions based on what has already been put in the customer’s shopping cart or what has been searched for on your site. This gives you the opportunity to make the customers’ experience a more personalized and helpful one. Customers are likely to appreciate the suggestions and being made aware of other items that mesh with their interests.
  2. During checkout: Cross-selling during the checkout process takes advantage of the customer’s mind-set. Since a purchase is already under way, the customer is in the mood to buy and may be influenced by additional suggestions and options while their credit card is out. An effective strategy is to offer a similar but larger-sized or higher-priced item than what’s already in the customer’s cart.
  3. After checkout: After checkout may be a better time to approach customers since it avoids interrupting their current purchase. Post-purchase techniques can include the standard offers of similar products, later follow-up with marketing emails or other sales messages, or contacting the customer to gauge satisfaction while at the same time making additional sales offers.

Are there ways you can make better use of cross-selling to improve your customers’ purchasing experience and increase awareness of your brand and the size of each sale?

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