Fulfillment : Your Data Holds the Key

Improve average order value with successful online upsells and cross-sells

April 2009 By Will Hakes, Ph.D.

multipage

It’s a pretty simple formula: Drive customers from high-cost channels like call centers into a low-cost channel like your Web site and save money. You likely will lower the cost to serve, give customers what they want and create a winning scenario for everyone. One problem—that’s generally how it works in a textbook but not in the real world.

In the real world, online and offline channels are not perfect substitutes. They are very different challenges, indeed. Perhaps it’s time to take a fresh look at how you are cross-selling/upselling in an online environment. It doesn’t really matter if you are a telco, an office supply company or sell pet supplies, your competition is trying to do it better than you are. So don’t just do it better—do it differently.

To put some structure around developing an approach, think about your online environment in the following steps.

1. What’s the Strategy?
This is the most challenging, and the most nuanced, to each business. Without diving into strategy formulation here, suffice it to say this is the first, biggest step. The online strategy must be integrated with the offline approach.

Your customers aren’t really going to care if they came to you online or offline. Therefore, your strategy for sales and support must use both channels to enhance the customer experience as well as provide the organization with essential data about customer interaction as a whole and, more specifically, individual customer data and behavior.

For example, a customer coming in through a call center may have called in with a particular promo code or to a unique toll-free number tied to a campaign. Likewise, an online customer may have responded to the same campaign. Both customers’ interactions should be tied to the campaign at the campaign-performance level as well as the individual-lead level, so you can learn how to improve your targeting at the macro and micro levels.

2. What Information Should Be Collected?
The most important piece—how will you identify a person who comes to your Web site? User login? IP address? Cookie? The more granular your level of recognition, the better you’ll perform when making the “best” offers.

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• ONLINE MARKETING
• PRINT PRODUCTION & FULFILLMENT