What’s the most critical part of your site? Digital marketers give different answers, but many will agree that anything “above the fold” is vital.Sticky bars can help reinforce vital messaging as web visitors scroll down your web pages. Just like announcements bars, sticky bars are one of the first elements web visitors see when they land on your site for the first time. This makes them key for online marketing messages. Sticky bars push web visitors towards up-sell or cross-sell deals, discounts, and other special offers. And if you’re looking to convert more visitors into buyers, schedule your personalized strategy call with a conversion expert at Ampry now!
What’s the Optimal Place/Time to Place an Up-Sell/Cross-Sell Bar?
You have many options to entice your customers to spend more than they initially intended. However, each option ultimately offers many potential benefits when used correctly. Product pages are optimal locations for cross-sell bars, and many retailers place related items on these pages. To boost your conversions and sales, display additional items that are regularly bought together on your product pages. Further, highlight the combined price of the product bundle and make it easy for your customers to add all the products to their carts using a single click. The shopping cart, just like your product pages, also offers an ideal location to place up-sell and cross-sell bars. One of the primary benefits of cross-selling in a shopping cart is that you can analyze all products a customer has added to their cart and offer valuable recommendations. Here, you can place a cross-sell bar with products that you think might interest the customer, as well as best-selling items. You can also place your up-sell and cross-sell bars on your checkout page to encourage your customers to purchase related products. The checkout page is an ideal location to entice customers with deals and discounts. Customers are more apt to add products to their purchase when they believe the discount they receive at checkout won’t be available for long. Even if a transaction is complete, it doesn't mean that there’s no chance to make another one immediately. Successful post-checkout up-selling and cross-selling are common in the travel industry.For instance, United Airlines sometimes displays upgrade offers immediately after a flight booking. It’s also common for travel aggregators and airlines to display cross-sell bars immediately after purchase. For instance, a customer who has booked a flight may see car rentals and hotel offers in the city they will travel to post-checkout. Post checkout up-sell and cross-sell bars are ideal for large purchases where pre-checkout distractions may delay, create friction, or hold back the initial sale.
How Do I Know That an Up-Sell/Cross-Sell Is Needed/Will Work?
Today, customers have more ways to engage with businesses. Research shows that nearly 50% of consumers regularly use more than four touchpoints to get in touch with companies. [1] Consumers interact and share information over multiple channels, including email, online reviews, social media networks, in-person meetings, and phone calls.So, one of the best ways to know when an up-sell or cross-sell offer is needed is to learn about your customers by actively listening to them and paying close attention to their needs and preferences throughout every interaction with them. Often, your customers will give you the information you need to spot up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. The following techniques can help you get the most from customer interactions:
- Ask open-ended questions to encourage customers to discuss their thoughts in detail instead of asking “yes and no” questions.
- Pay close attention to their online engagement, such as social media interactions, online reviews, posts, shares, and page views. The “State of Connected Customer” report by Salesforce shows that 43% of consumers use social media platforms to voice their opinions about businesses and products. [2] That means there’s a vast pool of valuable and relevant information that can help you determine when up-sell and cross-sell offers are needed and if they’ll yield desired results.
- Analyze customers’ purchasing history. This is a definitive way to determine which products are in demand and which customers have bought up-sell and cross-sell products from you in the past. According to the book Marketing Metrics, the likelihood of selling to a new customer is 5%-20%, while the possibility of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. So, understanding your current customers' preferences and needs can help you gather valuable data to prioritize up-sell and cross-sell marketing campaigns.
How to Include Sticky Bars Without Irritating Visitors
That may sound like a good reason to avoid using sticky bars altogether, and for many websites, that could be a good choice. However, as we’ve seen, sticky bars come with many benefits despite their annoying tendencies. That’s because they can boost your conversions enough to make up for visitors’ frustration or increase in bounce rates they may cause.Instead, the best option is to include sticky bars on your site in a less intrusive manner that won’t annoy your website visitors. And these proven strategies can help you achieve that:
1. Keep Your Sticky Bars Small
It’s tempting to increase the size of your sticky bars to get your website visitor’s attention. Bigger bars may get their attention, but it’s also quite irritating, and irritating your potential customers is bad for business. That’s because this may cause the visitor to leave your site and never come back because they intended to view your product or read an article, not your sticky bar.Avoid annoying potential customers by keeping your sticky bars small, but not too small. Ensure your sticky bars are visible and not too intrusive or annoying. Use eye-catching colors and don’t use flashy colors to attract web visitors. Sticky bars aren't meant to decorate your website—they’re here to boost conversation rates and ultimately generate more sales.
2. Show Call to Action Button After Scrolling Down a Certain Amount
Do you use long sales pages to sell your products? If you apply the best conversion practices on your landing pages, then most likely, your calls to action are in the above-the-fold area. This means when a visitor scrolls down your web page after a certain amount of time, your calls to action will appear.Displaying calls to action above the fold isn’t always a good idea. And often, it can adversely affect your conversions. If you always want to display your call to action, you can use a sticky bar on your web page. To use sticky bars in a way that’s less irritating to your web visitors, you can set to display a sticky bar only after a web visitor has scrolled your landing page X amount of time. Also, ensure that your sticky bar displays once a user has scrolled below your primary call to action.
3. Personalize Your Sticky Bars
Personalization can positively affect your company by boosting conversions, no matter what industry you're in. Your visitors are unique people with different behaviors and interests. One of the best ways to increase engagement rates for your up-sell and cross-sell marketing campaigns is personalizing your sticky bars by addressing the behaviors and needs of your visitors. This will also ensure that your sticky bars are less annoying because they’ll be relevant and valuable to your potential customers' needs and goals.
4. Keep Your Sticky Bar’s Content and Design Simple and Clear
Making your sticky bars a block of unnecessary text isn’t the way to capture your web visitors’ attention. Unfortunately, this can also make your sticky bars annoying to web users. So, it’s good to use minimal texts to boost your conversion rates. Keep your copy short and simple. Clear and concise content improves conversions and ensures your up-sell and cross-sell marketing campaigns are successful.Also, ensure the overall design of your sticky bars is eye-catching and simple enough to keep your web visitors engaged.
5. Create Sticky Bars that Complement Your Customers’ Journey
Do you want to know the secret of creating high-converting sticky bars? It’s caring about your web visitors’ experience. So, when you create optimized sticky bars that improve your customers’ journey, you’ll increase your conversion rates significantly, driving more sales. You’ll also increase your customer’s lifetime value by delivering a customer’s journey that makes customers want to shop more with you.To learn more about creating tailored on-site experiences that can help you convert your web visitors into buying customers, click this link to schedule a free strategy call with one of Ampry’s skilled conversion experts today!