In today’s Apps Marketplace Masterclass, we’re going to kick things off by taking a look at how cross-selling and up-selling partner apps can increase customer success and retention rates. Then, we’ll go through a couple of strategies for cross-selling and up-selling via your apps marketplace specifically.
Increase customer success: cross-sell and up-sell partner apps and products.
You already know that boosting customer success is one of the best ways to reduce churn. When your tech helps users achieve the business results they want, they’re highly unlikely to ditch your product and jump ship to your competitors. In addition, when your product works hand-in-hand with other vital apps in your customers’ tech stack, they’re even less likely to cancel. That’s because when customers are able to use your app in conjunction with other useful apps, they’re able to use your tech in a myriad more ways, to solve a wider range of problems. This allows your product to really shine as a useful, highly-effective tool.
With all of that in mind, it’s easy to see that increasing customer success via cross-selling and up-selling integrated partner apps should be a key part of your marketplace strategy. Industry researchers agree: studies from Vendasta show that the more solutions you cross-sell or up-sell a customer, the longer they stick around: “Selling an SMB 1 product has a retention rate of only 30% after 2 years. Selling that SMB just 1 more product showed an increased retention rate of nearly 20%, while selling an SMB 4 products shows a retention rate of 80%.”
Selling via an Apps Marketplace gives you the opportunity to implement highly effective cross-selling and up-selling strategies.
As this article from Clarity explains, increasing customer success by cross-selling and up-selling via a B2B ecommerce Apps Marketplace isn’t only highly effective, it can also greatly enhance the customer experience: “By showing related products or upselling, you can show your customers that you’re interested in giving them the best deal for their money. You can also show them that you understand their needs, perhaps letting them know that they might need a related product before they even think of it themselves!”
If you’re delivering a great customer experience, showing customers that you understand their needs, and taking the legwork out of the buying process by suggesting related apps and products, your customers are much more likely to renew high-value subscriptions.
Leverage clever Apps Marketplace design geared towards cross-selling and up-selling.
Of course, when it comes to marketplace user experience, good design is key. In our previous Apps Marketplace Masterclass post, we delved into how to help your customers find the tools and apps they need. In addition, making it as easy and intuitive as possible for users to find related apps and products that your tech integrates with – and suggesting these tools and apps as customers use your marketplace – is essential to effective cross-selling and up-selling via your marketplace.
Think carefully about how and where on your marketplace interface you want to show product relationships. Will you list app integrations inside product listings? Will you suggest related apps and tool just before checkout? Does a ‘other customers also bought’ section make sense alongside product listings or inside the cart? One big ‘don’t’: Clarity cautions against forcing customers to view and interact with intrusive and annoying pop-ups.
Create ‘top seller’ app bundles.
Creating app bundles is an incredibly frictionless way to cross-sell products. These bundles can be manually created by you and your partners, or created by an algorithm. Either way, presenting a bundle of integrated, related tools that collectively solve a business problem as one coherent super-tool takes the guesswork out of the equation for the buyer. ‘Top-seller’ bundles carry a level of trust and social proof that encourages buyers to move down the funnel. Lastly, purchasing a bundle of tools all in one go, for one inclusive price, is frictionless buying at its best.
Cross-sell and up-sell with special offers only available via your marketplace.
Drive marketplace revenue by offering customers a discount on a partner app or product if they buy via your marketplace. The great thing about cross-selling by way of special deals is that you can use this strategy to incentivize both customers and partners. For example, offering special deals and offers based on different partnership tiers can encourage partners to level up.
Here’s how this could look in your marketplace:
(Source: https://ecosystem.partnershipleaders.com/)
Want to launch your own Apps Marketplace and put your Masterclass learnings into action?
