How you can drive your sales without compromising integrity

All about cross-selling ethically

Hi there,

You’ve been offered a cross-selling or upselling opportunity before.

You might not even realise that you have, but I guarantee it.

For example, when a restaurant asks if you’d like to make your order a large for another £1, that’s upselling.

When the same restaurant asks if you’d like fries with that order, that’s cross-selling.

Naturally, the answer to both those questions is “YES, OF COURSE!”

Rather than love actually being all around us, it’s upselling and cross-selling. So it’s natural to consider bringing these practices into your own business. 

But, perhaps surprisingly, there are ethics involved in cross-selling. It isn’t as harmless as it might seem. 

So let’s explore how you can incorporate these into your business without sacrificing your morals in the process.

What are cross-selling and upselling?

In case my fries analogy only made you hungry, let’s cover what exactly I mean by these terms.

Both upselling and cross-selling are ways of increasing the value of a sale by offering complementary products to a customer. You’re suggesting something related to enhance their purchase, whether that’s an accessory, subscription or warranty.

More specifically, upselling is encouraging the customer to buy the bigger, better version, and cross-selling is getting them to purchase an additional product.

If you’re buying a pair of leather boots, upselling is suggesting you purchase the better quality pair that’s more expensive, and cross-selling is offering you the leather aftercare products to look after your new shoes.

For online businesses, this can be done through platforms such as Aftersell, which can be integrated with Shopify.

What are the ethical issues associated?

You’re just selling people extra stuff, what’s wrong with that? Well, it can be an ethically grey area.

There are four potential ethical issues with upselling and cross-selling:

1. You might be misleading, and even deceiving, customers about the features, benefits or costs of additional products. Do they really NEED it to use their existing purchase? Will it actually give them more benefits?

2. You might be pressuring them into buying something they don’t need or want. This gets you a purchase now, but might stop them from becoming a return customer. It also plays into our culture of consumerism.

3. You might be breaching their privacy and consent by using their data without explicit permission.

4. You might be exaggerating a bit too heavily in your marketing and promotion of products. There’s a fine line between advertising and lying, and it’s one we consistently walk.

Can you upsell or cross-sell in an ethical manner?

Definitely! There is a way to promote more products or better offers without crossing into that morally grey area. 

Firstly, focus not on our own objectives, but on enhancing your customer’s objectives. Aim to give them a better experience rather than to just sell anything to them. 

You want to enhance their value and their ROI – not your own!

Profit shouldn’t be your sole motivation here. Because trust me, customers can tell, and it will diminish their trust in you.

Secondly, ethical cross-selling involves active listening and researching your customers’s pain points, goals, challenges and preferences. 

You want to ensure whatever you’re recommending will actually add value to their original pain point.

For example, at Whole Supp (a meal replacement shake), we’re experimenting with cross-selling a shaker to customers who purchase a standalone bag of Whole Supp. This will allow them to make their shake on the go, which helps with the lack of time customers face. 

Recommendation

I’ve recently been testing one-click upsells and thank you page upsells using Aftersell for one of the brands I work with. But I’d also recommend taking a look at UpCart.

UpCart is a Shopify integration that allows for upselling and cross-selling through the use of sticky cart buttons, discount and promo bars, cart announcements and custom add-ons - this last feature would be perfect if you offer things like gift-wrapping with your product.

It’s super user friendly and integrates easily with Shopify.

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The more tailored your upsell, the better it will work for both you and the customer.

Look at common purchasing patterns, which products tend to get purchased hand in hand and which compliment each other. This ensures that you’re tailoring the upsell to the specific needs of your customers as much as possible.

Now, I am definitely hungry for those extra fries.

Talk soon,

Daphne

Thanks for reading Growth Waves by Daphne Tideman! If you were forwarded this email, subscribe for free above to receive my weekly content, as well as get access to my Ultimate D2C Growth Swipe File, an ever growing collection of all the best tools, content and tips to maximise your growth.