Up-selling y cross-selling applied to SMS marketing

The uses of SMS are varied. Campaigns can be used in different ways, one of the most common being selling products or services. Companies typically use this type of tool to try and improve their productivity and have a bigger reach with their clients.

It’s common to use text messages to send promotions, offers, or discounts but SMS can also be used to carry out more complex selling tactics. This is the case of up-selling and cross-selling.

What are up-selling and cross-selling all about?

With the boom of virtual stores, marketing via SMS became necessary for businesses and companies that sell products or services. By sending massive text messages to their clients, they can use advanced selling strategies. 

The first of them is known as up-selling, which consists in offering a product or service that is more expensive than the one the person is buying at the time. 

• In general, the better the product is, the more expensive it will be and the benefit for the company will be bigger.
• This technique is oriented towards habitual clients, as they have an extensive relationship with the business. For example, a yearly subscription to a website.
• When this is about to finish, the company can send them a reminder of the ending date, highlighting the best moments and offering the possibility of upgrading. What it’s important is that the client consumes better products of a superior value.

The other technique is called cross-selling. It focuses on clients that have just bought from the company.

• The objective is to offer complementary products to the ones people have paid for.
• For example, if a person has bought some football trainers in a sports shop, the company can offer them socks, T-shirts, pants, etc.
• The objective is for the user to buy more products or services, but in this case, it’s done with recent clients.

Up-selling and cross-selling applied to SMS marketing

Companies usually work with databases where they store information about their clients. They already did this with traditional sales, but now with a virtual store it’s much easier, as this personla information is asked before carrying out a sale.  

Having a database is necessary if you want to succeed. All that information can be used in the LabsMobile platform to carry out massive SMS marketing campaigns. In this case, to increase your sales with up-selling and cross-selling.

One of the main characteristics of campaigns is personalization and segmentation.

• Each of these messages is destined to a person in particular, which allows you to establish a deeper relationship between the company and the client.
• Instead of being generic, you can start each message with a greeting by their name.
• Segmentatio is also key, as it allows you to send messages to specific groups according to the features of each customer. In this way, results are maximized.

For example, trying to send an up-selling SMS with a user that has subscribed to basic English lessons when just one month has passed will be useless. Instead, offering trainers via cross-selling SMS to a person who bought a shirt and a tie will also be a failure. 

However, a good idea would be to send an SMS like the following to a person who bought a shirt and a tie “John, take advantage of our 50% OFF offer in formal trousers”. And the best part is that you can do all of this using the LabsMobile platform.