Tag: up selling

What’s the difference between cross selling and up selling?

| June 30, 2010

Both involve a customer buying more stuff from you than they’d originally intended. But cross selling and up selling are very different. 

  • cross selling involves selling related goods or services. If you’re in the process of selling someone a wedding outfit you could also offer them a matching hat, shoes and handbag
  • up selling involves selling a more expensive or exclusive version of the same thing. If you’re in the process of selling a £99 tent you could persuade your customer to buy the next model up for £120     

Increase impulse sales by…

| November 16, 2009

neurons… using highly visible response mechanisms

A simple tip that loads of businesses forget. When you’re marketing to customers and prospects, make it easy for them to respond. Anbd make it obvious what they can do next, up front.

We like to act on impulse. Particularly online. If we can’t, we go off the boil. We decide it’s not actually a good idea, or that we can’t afford it. Or we make plans to buy somewhere else.
Scarily, impulsive behaviour is much more time critical online than offline. We make decisions with alarming speed. Here’s an example.

You get an email offering you a lovely blue thing. You already have one, but you’d love a pink thing. 

Scenario 1: You scan through the message but you can’t spot a link to their website. You’re very busy and slightly exasperated, even though it has only taken a few seconds to look. You can’t be bothered to scroll down, so you forget the impulse and delete the email.

Scenario 2: The email says, right at the top, ’Email us or visit our website for details of orange, yellow and pink things’. You follow the site link and buy a few colourful things on impulse. While you’re at it, you email the company about those exclusive new purple things. They get back to you within the hour to say they can get hold of one for you. On impulse, you’ve collected the whole range.