5 Product Bundling Tips to Increase Sales and Customer Satisfaction
Bundling products together is a very simple and very old sales tactic. The core of the strategy is to sell two products together at a lower price than the customer would pay had they bought the two products separately. For example, your store could sell a coffee mug for $10, and bags of coffee for $10, but your product bundle would sell them together for $15 instead of $20.
Product bundles are a fantastic way to increase sales and your average order value, and they also help improve customer satisfaction. Customers will be impressed by the monetary savings they make with product bundles, and they tend to appreciate the convenience of getting multiple products in a single purchase. Let’s take a look at the top five product bundling tips.
1. Bundle Complementary Products
Do some market research before you mail your bundles, and make sure you know what products you’re going to bundle together. You should look into things like your target demographic, and your current sales figures for various individual items that you might bundle together. Nevertheless, always remember that even if you bundle two products, you should still continue to offer them separately.
There are two schools of thought when creating product bundles; one sales-focused and one customer-focused.
For the sales-focused strategy, pay attention to the highest selling and lowest selling products. Where a poorly-selling item falls into a similar category to a best-selling item, you might consider bundling the two. This will increase your profits on the best-seller while preventing an excess inventory of the item that does not sell as well.
The customer-focused philosophy involves more product research. You need to look into which products actually work well together, as opposed to just products that are similar or share a product category. An example might be a clothing store selling a matching outfit as a product bundle. This tactic requires more work, but it provides all the increased sales of product bundling along with a hefty improvement in customer satisfaction.
2. Guarantee Customer Savings
Product bundling doesn’t just mean selling items together. You also need to offer some kind of monetary savings with the bundle, otherwise, there’s no difference between selling the bundle and selling the items separately.
Offering a bundle as a promotional offer is a good way to ensure that the customer will save money with a bundle purchase. A good example of this is advertising the bundle as a sales offer – when the customer buys X product, they get Y product at half price. At physical stores, make sure employees make offers like this at the register to remind customers.
You can emphasize the saving by including a list of the items contained in the bundles, as well as their individual prices. However, it doesn’t need to be as official as a purchase order or an invoice. Instead, the list should be worded in a friendly and informative manner, and should clearly show the money that’s been saved by purchasing the bundle.
3. Bundles as a Subscription
A very popular form of product bundling is a subscription box. This is when you deliver a box of complementary products directly to a customer on a regular basis, usually once a month. If you have customers pay monthly for their subscription, this is great for ensuring a steady stream of revenue.
Some form of retail software might be necessary if you choose to go down this route, however. Sending out bundles on a monthly basis will require you to be highly aware of your product inventory, as you must have enough for both your current subscribers and anyone who places an order for the current month. Retail software can help with both tracking inventory and estimating monthly orders, so it’s a worthwhile investment.
4. Keep Bundles Small and Simple
Product bundling is most effective when the deal you’re offering is easily understood. This means that offering a huge bundle of many products can be unattractive to customers, even if the bundle offers a great saving.
This is because the saving a customer is making from purchasing a product bundle should be evident at a glance. When you display a price for a bundle of more than ten products, a customer will either not understand the saving you’re offering, or they’ll not want every product in the bundle. If they don’t like more than two or three bundled items (out of ten), it’s likely they’ll not buy the bundle, and your sales will suffer as a result.
5. Focus on Marketing
When you’re marketing product bundles online, don’t forget the classic tools for driving traffic to your website, like social media and SEO. First, create a page exclusively for your bundles. Then, do some keyword research in order to optimize the page and ensure it ranks highly on search engines. Finally, for good measure, share it across all of your social media channels.
Although, don’t just share the page once. Product bundles provide a fantastic excuse for all sorts of marketing – make bundles with seasonal products and advertise them heavily at the relevant times. Remember to emphasize the potential of the bundles as gifts, as this can massively increase your sales at Christmas and on Valentine’s Day.
Your marketing methods will differ considerably if you run a brick-and-mortar store instead of focusing on ecommerce. Although, this doesn’t mean that you have fewer options to make your products stand out.
Moving bundled products to the front of your store and having organized, attractive displays helps immensely. Remind customers of bundle offers at the checkout too, as we mentioned above. If it can save your customers money, it can improve customer satisfaction.
Is Product Bundling Right for Your Business?
Although we’ve discussed the many benefits of product bundling above, it doesn’t mean it’s a perfect fit for every business. If you’re in a service-based industry, or you offer a limited number of products, you might struggle to implement bundling.
That’s not to say it’s impossible. If you’re a business that sells a wide range of physical products, the tips we’ve provided above will be invaluable to you. With a smart application of product bundling, you can both increase sales and improve customer satisfaction, all at the same time.
Source: 5 Product Bundling Tips to Increase Sales and Customer Satisfaction | CustomerThink
Eelco Krikke
