A successful launch doesn't guarantee a successful business. It's just the starting line, not the finish. Your product launch is the beginning of your marketing journey, not the end goal. Take a moment to celebrate with your team (if you have one) after a successful launch. Go home, enjoy the win. But then you need to keep working to maintain whatever success you achieved during the launch.
A solid product launch should hit the first three levels of the marketing funnel:
Reach - Getting your business message in front of your target audience.
Attract - Getting your target audience to visit your website, turning them into leads.
Convert - Turning those leads into customers who sign up for your site and receive news and updates.
Educate - Teaching customers everything they need to know about your product and business to make them love what you're selling even more.
Product launches drive massive traffic spikes to your website, which means you've nailed the "reach" and "attract" parts of the funnel. But for your launch to truly succeed, you also need a high conversion rate - people who get your message and visit your website actually sign up and buy something.
To maintain consistently high sales, you need to reach that fourth stage: continuously educating your existing customers about your product so they love it and won't shop anywhere else. You can do this by sending them product news, updates, and ongoing promotions through email. Make them feel valued by giving them discounts and freebies.
Analyze Post-Launch Feedback
A successful product launch means people buy your products. But what about those who don't? What's stopping them from making a purchase? To answer these questions, you need to analyze the feedback you get after the launch. You probably had expectations about your target audience and why they'd buy your product. These are just assumptions that only become clear once you get their unfiltered feedback. Listen to feedback from both people who buy your products and people who don't, then analyze the reasons behind their actions.
You need to examine both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data includes the number of people giving feedback, participating in your launch, providing positive or negative feedback, converted leads, and so on. Qualitative data involves the actual content of their feedback. Analyze the words and phrases they use. If "expensive" keeps coming up, it might mean they find your products too pricey, which prevents them from purchasing.
Improve the Product
Selling a better version of a product is called upselling. To keep satisfying existing customers and attract new ones, your products need to continuously evolve and improve. To do this right, you need to understand what you're selling. What makes customers buy your products? What are your product's key selling features? On the flip side, what are your product's weak spots? You can find answers to these questions by reading customer feedback. To make product improvements, you can either add new features or enhance existing ones.
If you decide to add a new feature, make sure it adds real value and customers will be happy about it. Adding new features often creates a big marketing splash because people get excited hearing about changes to something they already know. Outsiders will also hear about the new feature and become curious, potentially buying the product just to see what's different. Adding new features can be risky, but it's highly rewarding when done correctly.
Improving existing product features is safer, and you can do it three ways. First is deliberate improvement, where you enhance a feature so the product works much better. Second is frequency improvement, where you improve a feature so consumers use it more often. Third is adoption improvement, where the change increases the number of people using the product.
Making product changes is a great way to maintain sales, but don't add unnecessary features or make unnecessary changes. Remember "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This applies to product improvement too. This is especially true if you already have a large group of customers who've been using your product and are satisfied with it. What you can do instead is create new products, which brings us to the next point.
Create New Products
This is another great way to attract more customers and make existing customers buy more. By adding new products to your existing lineup, you're reaching a larger group of people while keeping your loyal customers. If you simply add or improve a feature, there's a bigger chance of losing existing customers who aren't happy about the change. If you create a new product and add it to your store, you'll only attract new customers and give more options to existing ones. For example, if you're selling unscented shampoo bars, you can create new products with different scents while continuing to sell your unscented ones because they already have a loyal following. There's no reason to stop selling something lots of people buy.
Add Complementary Products
Selling new products that complement your existing ones is called cross-selling. This doesn't mean offering anything you can think of. If you're selling coffee, selling teaspoons or saucers might work, but they're not perfect complements for coffee. Instead, you could sell creamer, French presses, mugs, and similar items. Maybe you can sell teaspoons and saucers, but only after you already have these other complementary products.
Again, put yourself in your customer's shoes. If you buy coffee, what's the next thing you need? Teaspoons? Of course not. Creamer or sugar, maybe? Definitely. By selling complementary products, you're increasing the checkout total customers pay even though they were only planning to buy coffee. One advantage of cross-selling is increasing sales because customers buy more products from you.
Selling complementary products also improves customer loyalty. Your customers feel satisfied when they shop with you because they can get everything they need in one place. It improves customer experience, which builds brand loyalty. Selling complementary products is also easier to manage because it's like selling bundles. It's more cost-effective and easier to manage when one person buys two complementary products than when two people each buy one same product. This is also a great way to introduce less popular products. If you really want to sell your teaspoons and saucers, you should first sell mugs and teacups. This way, people would want to buy the complete set. It would be weird if you were just selling teaspoons and saucers.
There are two terms you need to understand to grasp the main objective of cross-selling: skimming and consumer surplus. Skimming means trying to sell a product at the highest possible price initially. Later, the price drops so people who weren't willing to spend the initial price can also buy the product. Skimming is basically trying to get as much money from your customer as possible. Doesn't sound too ethical, but selling products and starting a business is all about earning profits, right? Not exactly.
Consumer surplus is the difference between what a customer is able and willing to pay (based on demand) and what they actually spend (based on current market price). As demand for your product decreases - maybe it's no longer trendy or it's almost the end of selling season - your product price will drop. You can no longer use skimming because your product is no longer in demand.
Cross-selling helps minimize consumer surplus by offering complementary products. Let's say a customer is willing to spend $50 on shoes that were trendy months ago, but because of decreased demand, you're only selling them for $30, giving you a $20 consumer surplus. To make the customer spend that amount at your shop, you should offer complementary products like socks, insoles, shoelaces, running shorts and t-shirts, etc. This way, the customer still spends the entire $50 at your shop. You still make them spend all the money they're willing and able to spend with you.
This is why lots of businesses bundle things together. Look at fast food chains like McDonald's, which sells burgers with fries and drinks. Or gaming consoles like Nintendo, which includes a couple of games and a controller in their bundle. They also upsell by asking if you want to upsize your drinks and fries or by offering a higher version of the gaming console.
The key to successful cross-selling is anticipating your customers' needs. You shouldn't just offer complementary products for the sake of making an offer because that's just annoying. You need to know if the customer actually needs it.
Different Ways to Cross-Sell
Sending Follow-Up Emails
You can manually cross-sell by sending emails to customers. For example, if a customer recently bought a laptop from your shop, you can send a follow-up email after a few days offering accessories like laptop bags, mice, laptop sleeves, etc.
Using Customer Browsing History
There's also automatic cross-selling, which Amazon excels at. If a customer visits Amazon and searches for baking sheets, even without buying one, their browsing history gets saved. When they visit the website again, they'll see suggested products for baking like baking molds, pans, spatulas, rolling pins, etc.
Social Proofing
You'll also see what other people bought or searched for while looking at a particular item. When you see lots of people buying the same items, you feel more confident about buying the same thing. That's just how humans work. We're social beings who value peer approval. You feel that your decision to buy a certain product is validated. Plus, you become curious when you see certain products bought together by some people. You end up buying the bundle yourself because other people are doing it, so there must be a reason.
Using Customer Wish Lists
If customers have wish lists saved in their accounts, sites customize suggested products based on items in those wish lists. Buying history also plays an important role in how algorithms decide which products customers might be interested in.
Offering Minor Yet Essential Products
You can also sell essential but minor products to make your main product work. Batteries are a great example. If you're selling battery-operated toys, you can be sure people will also want to buy batteries for those toys. They'd rather buy batteries from the same store where they bought the toys than search for them elsewhere. It's not much, but it's still a sale.
Selling an Entire Look
Another great cross-selling example is selling complete outfits for clothing sellers. You can make suggestions based on what goes well with particular clothing items. It's like having a mannequin in your online store. The mannequin gives potential buyers ideas on how clothes can be styled and worn. You can do the same by creating outfits from your products.
Believe it or not, people who are clueless about putting together outfits always appreciate having a complete outfit they can buy without thinking too much about it. IKEA is also good at this. They showcase room designs using IKEA products and people go crazy over them. They give people ideas on how to decorate their spaces using mostly IKEA furniture and decor, of course. This creates desire among consumers to get the whole look because they can see how great it looks.
When Is the Best Time to Cross-Sell?
There isn't one perfect time to cross-sell because it depends on customer buying behaviors. However, you might want to look at different moments when customers are more willing to buy complementary products.
You can make offers while customers are still looking to buy the first product. This is where Amazon comes in. They customize what buyers see when they start browsing and shopping by suggesting products other people bought or products that complement what the customer is planning to buy.
You can also cross-sell in the shopping cart, just before customers complete transactions. This way, they can add extras before checking out, instantly boosting your sales for that day.
Some people don't want to be distracted during the buying process. In this case, it's best to offer complementary products after completing the transaction, on the thank you page. Some sellers think thank you pages aren't really useful aside from telling customers you appreciate their business, but they're actually great pages to offer more. Customers are in great moods because their transactions were successfully completed, and you have their trust and confidence. Plus, they still have their credit cards out, so take advantage of the thank you page.
You can also send emails a few days after purchases.
Retargeting, or indirect cross-selling through advertisements, is another great way to offer complementary products. You can use Facebook ads and other platform ads to make customers buy complementary products.
You don't have to choose only one method. Just choose which ones to use. For instance, if you notice customers are always abandoning their carts, you shouldn't cross-sell before they complete transactions to prevent distractions. You can also combine two or more methods and test different strategies at different times to see which ones work best for your business.
Explore Cross-Selling Opportunities
If you have no idea what to cross-sell, you might want to do some research to get ideas about what other products would complement what you're already selling.
First, check your competitors' listings and see what kind of complementary products they're offering. If you're selling shoes, check out other vendors selling shoes and see what they offer as add-ons.
You can also conduct surveys by sending them to your email list or posting them in your Facebook group. Ask what they'd like to see in your store or what kinds of products would go well with your main products.
Asking your manufacturer what complementary products they can make is also a great idea. Some people overlook this step because they think it's all about customers (it really is most of the time), but you should also look at what kinds of products your manufacturer makes. This is even more helpful if they're also making products for other Amazon sellers.
