How Rental Add-on/Cross-selling Helps Boost Revenues For Rental Businesses

One of the clever ways top rental eCommerce businesses consolidate their revenue is through a strategy called cross-selling. It’s subtle in nature yet surprisingly effective. It works by introducing customers to a new line of related products, also known as rental-add-ons, that accentuate the overall value proposition. This leads the customers to complete a relatively larger transaction. However, revenue isn’t the only benefit to draw from cross-selling. Let’s take a look at how both businesses and customers benefit from this incredibly effective marketing technique.

1. Adds a Personal Touch

While quality and price are never out of the equation, customers do appreciate a personal touch in their shopping experience. They like to be recognized and understood; moreover, they expect businesses to predict their needs and suggest relevant products that they might be interested in. In its true sense, cross-sell accomplishes just that. It creates and continues to update user persona based on their preferences and purchases. All this makes it possible to offer a personalized experience to the customer.

2. Optimizes Sales Value

Selling/acquisition cost takes up a considerable share of a business’ expenditure. Its objective is to attract new customers and boost the rental revenue. While justified more often than not, this cost can be slashed with the proper application of cross-selling. Cross-selling aims to make existing customers purchase rental-add-ons. These customers are already familiar with the business and little effort or cost is needed to market new products to them. This way, businesses can optimize their acquisition cost incurred on searching and attracting new customers from the outside.

3. Builds Trust & Brand Loyalty

As mentioned earlier, cross-selling is a subtle art. It’s implications can at best be described as positively subliminal. By displaying a cross-sell ad, a business isn’t only introducing the customer to a new product and raising the likelihood of a large transaction, it’s also sending a message that it understands the customer’s needs and preferences. This experience adds trust among customers and overtime leads to strong brand loyalty.

4. Raises Referrals

In the long run, cross-selling creates a product ecosystem in which customers can find everything that they need in one place. As customers become increasingly inclined towards one brand/business, they are more likely to start promoting by referring it to their peers, friends, and relatives. This way, businesses can increase their referrals and audience reach through cross-selling.

Crucial Steps Involved In Cross-selling

Now that we’ve seen a range of benefits that cross-selling has to offer, let’s move on to examine the steps needed to implement it successfully. 

Step 1. Identify What’s Suitable for Cross-Selling 

Step 2. Identify Who is Ready for Cross-selling 

Step 3. Develop Cross-Selling Campaign & Customer Journey

Step 1

Not everything works in cross-selling. The rental-add-on combination or relevancy is the key to success. Start by asking the following questions: 

i. What do customers frequently rent as add-on when shopping? 

Ii. What rental-add-on combinations are ordered together? 

iii. What types of rental-add-ons have historically been successful in cross-selling? 

Your business may already have useful data on these queries. Anything from customers’ past order, browsing history, or their interaction with business via chat/call can be analyzed to understand their needs.

Step 2

Next, step is about identifying the customers who are actually ready to be cross-selled to. It’s true that not every customer will appreciate rental add ons and prefer to shop their way without any suggestions. That’s why it’s better to categorize customer data based on their interaction with the rental store to identify who’s best fit for a cross-selling campaign.

Step 3

With product combinations defined and potential customers identified, all you need to do is to create a pathway that gives your cross-selling campaign the best-chance for success. The most common cross-selling ads appear on the checkout page. Additionally, cross-selling email campaigns can be targeted towards customers who recently purchased your products.

Techniques Used To Cross-sell Successfully

Now that we know the steps involved in cross-selling, let’s switch our focus to some of the techniques that are used to further increase the likelihood of success.

1. Cross-sell Relevantly

It’s quite important to be relevant in cross-selling. Customers should only be presented with rental-add-on products that offer them an additional value. Otherwise, it’s no better than an annoying advertisement.

2. Offer Discount

Discounts on bundled items are a great way to incentivize purchase. As well as attracting customers, discounts create a sense that one’s getting more value for what they’re paying for.

3. Identify Customer TouchPoints

It’s vital to keep a track of customer’s touch points throughout their shopping journey. Based on how customer shops, online or physical brick and mortar stores, they can be approached and marketed additional product/services accordingly.

4. Club Cross-Sell With Inbound Marketing

You might also want to leverage your inbound marketing to promote rental-add-on products. For instance, if you have a content piece that targets big ticket equipment rental clients, you might want to place ads on it along with a product brief to cross-sell.

5. Explain The Benefits of Add-On

Customers won’t be interested in a product if they don’t know how to use it. So, it’s important to clearly explain the benefits of rental-add-on products. The more they learn about the product and how it brings value to them, the more likely they will be to purchase/rent it.

6. Manage Inventory Proactively

Inventory management is useful in any domain but in something like construction or heavy equipment rental, it gains even more significance. Having real-time access to the availability of different types of equipment can help your sales team proactively share updates with regular customers. This practice also improves the customer experiences.

7. Capitalize Contractual Data

Contract management is something that can benefit business and improve customer experience at the same time. It allows you to view prices, commission rates and other relevant information about individual customers and make informed decisions towards incentivizing future sales.

Final Thoughts

With the right approach and application, cross-selling can prove to be an incredibly effective tool to maximize the revenue. Before you get underway, make sure you have a proper list of products that can be cross-sold. Start by testing a few of them. The more you test, the more data you’ll have on your hands to guide you ahead. 

If reading this post has invigorated you to get the ball rolling, we’d like to interest you in checking out our online rental software – Yo!Rent. The software comes pre-integrated with the cross-selling/add on rental module. We have tailored designs for equipment, fashion and automobile rental niches. However, Yo!Rent is a highly versatile software and can be customized to meet diverse needs of various other domains in the rental industry. The following video demonstrates the rental add-on module in Yo!Rent.

The ease of use and simplicity of the software is quite evident. Feel free to contact our team for more information.