Let me tell you a story about one of Vanessa's products.
Vanessa is offering a free digital colouring book with every purchase on her eCommerce site indo gingo, a kids' brand all about celebrating diversity.
You'd have to admit, we all like FREE! (even more than we like children haha).
Free is a powerful word!
But what is more powerful when delighting customers????
It's cross-selling !
Sure, throw in something free if you want, but go with cross-selling too because .... drum roll, please ....
When a company cross-sells (ie. suggests to the customer another product that compliments the product they're already purchasing), beautiful things happen.
The customer becomes more loyal!
Evidence shows that if a customer purchases more products than intended, the more likely they will be repeat customers. This is common sense right, but empirical evidence proves this fact.
When I saw Vanessa's free colouring book, it just made sense to me to suggest to her to 'cross-sell' this product for $2 in her online check-out to increase customer loyalty.
But what made even more sense is to promote a cross-sell product with something else. Something quite magical. This something else is this .... all proceeds from the sale of the cross-sell product are donated to a charity.
Now hop in the mind of your customer now -
She's in your shopping cart.
You have her full attention.
She's experiencing joy.
She's motivated to buy from you.
As the customer goes to hit the 'pay now' button she sees a product suggestion that compliments the product she's already committed to buy.
And it's low-priced.
Totally affordable.
And the funds go to a charity.
The customer has pleasant feelings because of two reasons: (1) she just scored for herself another product for a low price, and (2) she's helping the world at large at the same time. Nice hey!
Vanessa's colouring book is a digital product. I suggested to Vanessa to tell her customers to share the colouring book with their friends. People like to share! In marketing, this is referred to as co-creation.
But the plot thickens! When the customer buys the $2 colouring book from Vanessa, they become instant subscribers to the digital product. So when Vanessa designs another colouring book, she emails this digital product to her subscribers.
The result... Vanessa reminds her customer time and time again of her brand thus keeping indo gingo top-of-mind. But even more importantly ... the customer remembers the pleasant feelings she got on that day when she scored herself a good deal on the colouring book vis a vis donating to a charity.
Pleasant feelings > enhanced customer loyalty.