MaxBLOG

In previous entries we've covered the area of multivariate and split testing for website optimisation so I thought I would share a little about one of Maxymiser's more successful ways to increase revenue through a transactional site.

Our multivariate testing technology can be easily integrated with a product database or in order to identify and promote cross-selling opportunities. Wikipedia's definition explains cross-selling in a nice succinct way so we won't cover that here but basically on the web it's all about using your site to persuade people to buy extra items in order to increase revenues, something retailers are masters at offline at point of sale.

Amazon use very effective cross-selling optimisation and if you haven't visited their site in the last 12 months or so, it's well worth a look. However, you don't need to have a product range as vast as theirs in order to benefit from cross-selling. Banks, IT suppliers (esp. Dell) and grocery retailers are particularly adept at cross-selling.

Maxymiser optimises a cross-selling system by offering extra products or services to your customers at the opportune moment in the shopping process. Our self-learning technology monitors which products sell well, when and where together during the initial exploration phase and then exploits this by showing the combinations of product that are most likely to generate your a cross-sale and drive up your revenue.

The two main pitfalls to cross selling are easily avoided by conducing live testing because self-learning algorithms optimise your offering in real-time and will show preference to combinations that generate uplift over those that do not. Here are those pitfalls so that you can avoid them:

- Irrelevance can upset -> a friend of the company purchased a book online entitled "Bumblebees of the British Isles". Upon visiting the site again later that week, he was offered a range of books about homosexuality, presumably the CRM system had picked up the word 'bum'.

- Don't push what customers were going to take anyway -> if you have a visitor who buys bread and milk every day, cross-selling isn't effective if all it does is suggest that the visitor buys milk once they have added bread to their basket. When you implement cross-selling, ensure you are promoting something new and relevant not what the visitor was going to purchase anyway.