How to Instantly Bump Your Income 25-50% With Cross-sells

Unfortunately, with VistaPrint, the cross-selling doesn’t stop once you’ve checked out. They email, mail, and call you daily for weeks after the sale trying to get you to buy complimentary products or to refill your order. It took me forever to get them to stop stalking me after I ordered some business cards.

The most aggressive cross-selling on godaddy, imho

Very true, it’s annoying to 100% of users, but if people are already buying things it’s very unlikely they will go to another site once they’re already done adding items to the cart, and thus unlikely that they lose many customers because of it. I mean… has anyone ever ordered computers online nowadays? Why would you need a usb racing wheel when you’re buying a workstation? Nobody knows, but people apparently buy at least a small percent of the mass amount of stuff they try to get you to buy.

Between this, upselling, and charging more, I think these have been some very good articles that bring light to things that we see but may not pay that much attention to.

This is really informative, some great stuffs discuss in here. Thanks

Alexander, your assuming customers will only purchase once from said site. What if it puts off return custom?

I hope you guys don’t listen too much to this advice, because this is not what clients want and will do more to annoy them than to drive sales. Our version of cross-selling is, in a way, referrals. I do believe that it’s a good idea to let my clients know what other services I can provide, but I think it’s best to make your client believe that you specialize in what you’re working on with them, and that anything else is peripheral. If I go out and hire a Rails developer, I don’t care that he also does print advertising. If I wanted a print advertiser, I’d have contacted one.

@Thomas

True in that sense, since your outsourcing. But imagine a customer contacts you about a web design. You start discussing how they’re ganna promote their new web-site, and you mention that broadcasting their web-site on a business card or flyer is a great idea! Then point out that if they want, (maybe even after you’ve made the web-site, mention this) you also can design a nice business card including their web-site on it.

Or another example. A customer has a new business idea, and wants you to set up their web-site. Great. You set up an interview, get an idea of what they want, they get an idea of what content to provide. Then you ask if they are able to provide a logo. Oh, they haven’t developed one yet. No problem! You say you do logo design as well, and can include that into the proposal.

I recently had my current client tell me it’s good to know what all I offer, because now that he trusts me, if he needs any of my services, he doesn’t have to find anyone else.

I’d just say don’t be like those annoying sales strategies that are a like “Well I’m glad you’re getting a web-site from me for $xxx.xx. Would you like for me to also offer you business cards? No? Ok, well how about a tri-fold brochure? No? Not a problem, I also can do e-mail advertisement for you, interested?” Don’t be pushy, just be informative.

You don’t actually have to cross-sell your own services. You probably have some friends that work as freelancers as well and bringing them in at the right moment can really make your clients happy. And then you can expect the favor back and get some jobs from your friend.

I’m a designer, specifically a product designer, and although I can manage when it comes to graphic design or web development, I never claim to be a guru in the in those. What I do best is product design. So what did I do when my client for whom I designed a liquor bottle needed a label for the bottle? I brought in my sister who is a graphic designer. The client now has the bottle and the label in one package, both done nicely. Works much better than me designing a label and losing focus on the bottle.

Vistaprint cross-sells the crap out of you to try to recoup for their cheap prices. They also have a very unmoderated affiliate program. I get at least half a dozen emails a day from affiliates trying to sell Vistaprint… they’re just as bad http://www.entertainment.com/ . If you try contacting them, you’ll end up talking to someone in support who knows nothing about their marketing or affiliate program, won’t forward you to anyone and will tell you just ‘unsubscribe’ to the annoying emails, not understanding that each one is coming from a different affiliate (or one using different emails/aliases) so unsubscribing is a losing battle.

Flickr lets you do all kinds of stuff with the photos you upload
http://flickr.com/do/more/ and they’re 100x less annoying.

Thanks for the article, excellent piece!

This article is titled “How to Instantly Bump Your Income 25-50% With Cross-sells”. A total of 2 sentences are dedicated to that title while the rest is dedicated to reviewing a checkout process of a website. How are you justifying the 25 to 50% increase? Throwing out numbers and reviewing a website doesn’t make for a very informative article.

@Geoff: I think that applying the cross-sell strategy that the post author remarks, eventually you could raise your income in those percentages.

In fact, imagine you quote for a logotype, and in your quote you tell the client that you also make websites (and the client didn´t know that). If he is interested your income could be increased much more than 25-50%.

I don´t include cross-sells in my quotes, but I apply them when talking to clients, and the above example has happened to me.

@Eliffo: I understand that, my point I was trying to get across is that you could take the title: “How to Instantly Bump Your Income 25-50% With Cross-sells” take out a few words so it reads “Instantly Bump Your Income With Cross-sells” and you would have just as much information as the entire article does. If you are going to write a “how to” article, it should have the “how to” part in it. I clicked to read this article because the title peeked my interest and it didn’t deliver.

so I am going to be pitching a creative artist site tomorrow and i think ill try to cross sell a merch site is the pitch goes well… seems like it will fit

@Vistaprint – For a good online print buying experience check out http://www.optimalprint.com -
no point in going through 4 levels of cross-sales before getting your businesscards.

I think cross-selling is great but when it’s to that excessive/aggressive level, it’s irritating. I don’t mind it as long as there is, as in GoDaddy’s case, a “skip to checkout” button so I can skip it and subsequent offers if I’m not interested. Plus, it has to be related… if you’re ordering a t-shirt, don’t try to sell phone service.

Seems like the cross-sales could be much less offensively done if those additional clicks (in the story I counted 3 after already agreeing to buy the base item) took you to just ONE intermediary page of related items … possibly scripted to show the graphic already on the item … and then to the checkout proper.

Vistaprint & some of the others mentioned here are an extreme right? I’ve found the best way to upsell is not to directly ‘upsell’, but offer a valuable add on service along with a DIY guide to achieve the same results. Once the client see’s the benefit plus the work required, bingo: )