WooCommerce cross-sells can boost and enhance your revenue multiple times.
You get repeat sales from your high-valued customers without putting in extra effort, resulting in a profit ratio like never before.
In this article, we’re going to discuss how you can create and run converting cross-sell offers on your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin.
What are cross-sells or cross-selling?
First of all, let’s understand what cross-selling is.
Cross-selling means to encourage customers to buy related products along with their existing products. Do you want fries with a burger? That’s the most common and simple cross-selling example offline.
Let’s understand cross-selling online.
Have you ever seen such a section while buying a product on Amazon?
This section of Amazon showcases what other products you can buy with the one you’re already buying.
So, if you’re buying a virtual reality gaming headset, you need its USB charger. And, that’s how Amazon cross-sells relevant products in its store.
As per the popular notion, cross-selling can significantly boost the chances of conversions for your products or services. It also boosts the chances of selling other products in your store besides the one that is advertised.
Is upselling similar to cross-selling?
The answer is NO.
Upselling means you try to sell a more expensive version of the existing product the customer is interested in or has already purchased.
Let’s take another example from Amazon to compare cross-sells with upsells.
A customer views a product worth $49.99 excluding shipping charges.
Now, Amazon tries to upsell the same product at a higher cost under the following section:
You can try upselling when you don’t have related products to cross-sell. Hence, you need to identify where you would cross-sell and upsell on your WooCommerce store.
But, then the agenda behind cross-sell and upsell techniques is the same, to drive more sales and profits from existing customers.
But how would you set up WooCommerce cross sell offers?
Because default WooCommerce does not provide the provision to show customized cross-sell offers on different pages.
All your customers can see the same type of cross-sell offers only on the cart page. No targeting rules mean no customization of the cross-sell offers. No customization means fewer chances of conversions.
That’s the reason why a dedicated WooCommerce cross-sell plugin is required. It serves as a great resource to show targeted offers on your site.
How to set up cross-sell offers in WooCommerce?
Smart Offers is a very popular plugin that allows you to set up WooCommerce cross-sells, upsells, down-sells, BOGO and other offers in a highly customized way.
The default WooCommerce only allows you to cross-sell and upsell on the cart page. This is not enough to grow your sales. Smart Offers plugin comes with extensive targeting rules and actions, making it simple for you to drive revenues and build customer loyalty.
The smart Offers plugin allows you to set up and schedule personalized offers automatically based on:
- Users
- Products, product attributes & product categories
- Product quantity
- Cart/Order total
- Product, cart, checkout, order received and other pages
- Dates
Steps to create a cross-sell offer without coding
You can cross-sell all product types – simple, product variation, bundles, etc.
In this example, we’ll offer a Camera Kit as a cross-sell (bundle) on the purchase of a GoPro Action Camera.
We recommended the Chained Products plugin to create product bundles, available on the WooCommerce marketplace to create product bundles.
Download and install the Smart Offers plugin. Go to WordPress admin > Smart Offers > Add New > Offer. Then follow these steps:
Step 1: Choose product and price
Click on What to Offer. Add details of the product you want to cross-sell along with the price.
Step 2: Set targeting rules
The next tab displays the Offer rules. Here, you can decide the conditions as to when your customer should see the offer.
For instance, you want to show this offer only when the customer has added GoPro Hero Black to their cart and not the GoPro Action Camera Kit. Otherwise, it makes no sense.
Smart Offers also gives you options like cart total, the number of products, product category and others to target your offer.
Step 3: Select the page to show the offer
It can be a cart page, an order complete page, or any other page.
Step 4: Choose how to show the offer
The next step is to decide how to show the offer. You can choose to show the offer as an Inline message or as a Popup.
Step 5: Set the next set of actions on offer acceptance
Now we come to the crucial step as to what to do next when the customer accepts the offer. You can choose from a range of options as shown above.
Here, we choose to Add the offered product to the cart. Moreover, you can also select the Enable one-click checkout with Buy Now option for faster checkout.
Step 6: Set the next set of actions on offer rejection
However, if your customer declines the offer, you can choose the next action item from any of the above by clicking on the Skip Actions tab.
Congratulations! You’re done with creating a cross-sell offer on your WooCommerce store.
If the customer accepts the offer, this bundle will be added to the cart alongside the GoPro camera but the customer will be redirected to the checkout page directly.
If the customer rejects the offer, the offer will not be shown again to them. The customer would then have only the GoPro camera and would proceed to cart page and then the checkout page.
Other powerful Smart Offers’ features
Smart Offers assist its users with countless other features to make your sales a rewarding experience.
Check out what else it offers that sets it apart from the rest of the competition.
Cross-sell subscription products
Products created using the official WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin can be shown as a cross-sell offer.
Order bumps
You can implement order bumps on the checkout page. It also offers essential low-priced products as cross-sell options.
BOGO offers
Run buy one get one, buy more get one, buy more get more, buy one get more deals.
Giveaways, tripwires and backend offers
Offer a product for Free in giveaways. Show tailor-made offers on premium products or club membership after order completion.
Cart upsell / checkout upsell
Show upsell and other conditional offers on the cart page, checkout page, thank you page (upsell after checkout), and you can also send upsell offers via email.
Simple segmenting rules
Creating multiple offers with multiple rules is complex and challenging. The Smart Offers plugin allows you to create a single offer or multiple offers with various segmenting rules for better conversions.
Sequence offers
Based on your customers’ actions, you can set up a series of offers throughout the entire user journey. Even if a user accepts or rejects an offer, you’ve something to offer them. Upsell cross-sell, upsell downsell, bogo-order bumps and many such offer combinations.
Discover best offers
With Smart Offers you can track conversions, how many times the offer was shown, accepted, skipped and paid through. This will help optimize your offers for better results.
Customized offer templates
Use Smart Offers with WordPress page builder plugins to create customized, attractive offer templates to boost your conversions.
Direct checkout with Buy Now buttons
Smart Offers provides Buy Now links, using which you can instantly enable direct checkout (skip cart) or one-click checkout (direct order completion).
Multi-lingual support on offer templates
Smart Offers with WPML compatibility allows you to target offers in different languages that your target audience will resonate more.
Customized thank-you page
Create the most attractive offer using the Smart Offers plugin and add it to your custom thank you page for extra sales.
Which offer works best on different pages?
Here are the pages on your online store where you can showcase them:
Product page
When a user is on the product page, the user might be making a buying decision. It’s the time when you need to either showcase your upsell or cross-sell offers to influence them to decide in your favor.
Cart page
The cart page is the page where you can cross-sell and upsell. Here, you can play with Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) offers. Such offers generate higher chances of increasing the order value. Upsell can do wonders on this page.
Checkout page
The checkout page is the most crucial as users are about to pay. You cannot disturb users’ flow, and hence, you need to showcase only the most relevant products. Otherwise, you may lose the customer.
Cross-selling using order bumps is the best offer type in such cases.
Order received page
Caution! Your users are on this page means they’ve gone through the checkout process and just bought your products. They trust your brand and they won’t like to go through the entire process all over again.
Hence, one-click upsell works the best here.
How to automatically create and show cross-sell offers?
If you wish to create and show cross-sell offers, why not try the Offermative plugin? It automatically picks up products/categories to promote, discount pricing, targeting rules, offer designs and even writes headlines and all other copy text.
Show cross-sells, upsells, Amazon-like product recommendations, order bumps and BOGO offers automatically.
Types of cross-selling offer with examples
Here’s a complete list of types of cross-selling offers with real-life examples.
Related products
Benefits of showing related products:
- Cross-sell offers in the WooCommerce-related products section work as reminders for the audience who might be missing out on the relevant products that are on great offers if they buy the main product.
- You win customers’ trust as they experience personalization here.
- AOV increases to a great extent.
Complementary products
Benefits of showing complementary products:
- Users need such products, and hence, it strikes instant sales for the main product.
- Your inventory is sold out more quickly.
Product bundles
Benefits of showing product bundles:
- Product bundles increase profits on each sale as it is a value-driven product with multiple useful items.
- The initial return on the cost of customer acquisition also increases as you sell more products to a single customer.
Order bump
Benefits of showing order bump:
- Order bump increases the value of the order as the customer now intends to pay little more than the main product’s value.
- The customers feel valued as they exactly know what they might be looking for while buying a product in your store.
Frequently bought together
Benefits of showing frequently bought together:
- Frequently bought together helps you in moving your inventory faster.
- With the right strategy here, you can multiply your profits instantly.
One-click cross-sell
Benefits of showing one-click upsell/cross-sell:
- The customer has already purchased from you and trusts you more.
- One-click upsell or one-click cross-sell eases checkout as no payment or contact details are needed.
BOGO (Buy One Get One) offer
Benefits of BOGO offer:
- It helps you move out the products that are not bought frequently and are in a high volume in the inventory. Moving those products out becomes easy with Buy One Get One (BOGO) offers while cross-selling.
- BOGO helps you liquidate the inventory with heavy discounts rather than having it stored in the inventory for a prolonged period.
How to ensure a perfect cross-selling technique?
Knowing the basics of cross-selling is one thing. But implementing it the right way is what matters the most. Let’s learn a few points to consider to make a perfect WooCommerce cross-sell offer-
Selecting the right products that go with the main product
Show cross-sells on the product pages that are related to the product a customer is viewing. If you are selling a laptop and you showcase a t-shirt in the cross-sell offers, you’re wasting your efforts.
But, if you choose to display laptop screen cleaning, laptop bag and more, you’re more likely to get orders on the same as well.
Targeting offers based on user or cart total
Consider the cart total and come up with offers on what else they can add or for how much, they can upgrade.
Such offers seem to be personalized and hence, more chances of a user buying an upgraded version of the product.
No overwhelming the user with too many products
Don’t overdo your cross-selling/upselling. Either look up to your competitors or test and try how many offers you can showcase. But, make sure you don’t frustrate your audience.
Setting the right price of the offer
The price of your cross-sell is an essential aspect, and hence, you need to set it up carefully. But, say if you ask your user to pay double the amount, then your cross-sell offer is sure to fail.
Play with different pricing strategies to entice the user and ensure they pay you for the cross-sells you expect them to.
Offering value the cross-sell would deliver
Inform your users about the value your cross-sells would provide. If they feel the relevant product is of no or less importance, they won’t add them to their cart.
Consider psychological factors while deciding how valuable each cross-sell offer should be.
Make the most powerful WooCommerce cross-sell upsell offers
Now you know how you can utilize your WooCommerce cross-sells on your store and make it a revenue-generating machine.
So, create the most attractive set of offers and set them up to double your conversions and enhance customer trust with Smart Offers.
FAQ
How do you identify cross-selling opportunities?
- Know and understand customers’ needs, goals and challenges.
- Conduct a consistent account review.
- Product knowledge and expertise.
- Customer networking.
- Share customer success stories and testimonials.
How to calculate the cross-selling rate?
- Take the number of people who bought the suggested items.
- Divide it by the total offers given out.
- Multiply the figure by 100.
What is a cross-selling ratio?
A cross-sell ratio refers to the percentage of customers who purchase additional products or services in addition to their initial purchase. It offers insights into a business’s ability to upsell and expand its revenue streams.