You can increase your turnover with up- and cross-selling, even when acquiring new customer projects. Combined with the right performance measurement, you can find out which campaigns are particularly worthwhile. We'll show you how both strategies work best.

This article is the third part of our series on customer acquisition. To learn the basics of how to acquire new customers, we recommend you read the first two parts: they deal with target groups & inbound leads and remarketing & affiliate marketing. You can also download the series of articles as a complete e-book.

Upselling and cross-selling

So you've sold something - see the last parts of our series - and won an important new customer project. Congratulations! For many agencies, companies and WordPress freelancers trying to grow their client base, that's good enough. They can sit back and relax. Because what have we been talking about all this time? Converting prospects into leads and then into sales - that's why we're here.

But actually, the moment you've just made a sale is exactly the wrong time to rest. If you want to take your customer acquisition to the next level, you now have additional opportunities. We're talking about up-selling and cross-selling here, i.e. selling additional services per customer.

Utilizing unused potential

The thing about selling is that you've already done the hard part: You've found someone who likes your product or services, so they're already convinced of the quality - assuming your support does a good job. And you've started to build a relationship with that person.

Do you know what it feels like when you buy a new smartphone or computer? And you can hardly wait to get home and start using it? It's very similar when we've just decided on a new service provider. Only we may not be quite as aware of it.

This is the moment of ultimate satisfaction for a customer: He or she has just bought into the dream, reality has not yet set in. What's more, this person has already opened their wallet. Now is not the time for you to say, "Have a nice day!" - and send the new customer on their way. Instead, it's time to ask: "Hey, what else can I do for you?"

Upselling is something we're all familiar with. When you order a pizza, they offer you an extra ingredient, a half-price dessert or a discount if you switch from a large to an extra-large pizza. These principles are easily transferable to digital businesses. For example, if your agency offers maintenance contracts and a customer places an order for one year, you could offer a discount if he or she upgrades to two years.

If an interested person buys a certain package from you, then offer them a higher-value model. By clearly highlighting what the benefits of the enhanced solution are. For example, a security package that allows your customers to do less themselves, minimize their business risk or simply sleep better.

However, these techniques require that you don't just settle for a "simple" sale - you must always be looking for more. And ideally do consultative selling. This means that you not only offer your services and products, but also ask lots of questions. In order to get to know your customers' needs down to the last detail.

Cross Selling

Another way to profit from customers who have already said "yes" to you is cross-selling. This is another well-known technique that you know from Amazon, for example: Customers order a product, and while you are processing the order, you offer very similar and related items that could complement the product they have already purchased.

This even works for services. If you sell your premium plugin in a kind of SaaS model, you could offer additional add-ons that supplement the plugin you have just purchased for other use cases. Or you could offer discounted follow-up services, premium support, interface customization, maintenance services, etc.

If you buy a smartphone, the algorithm might throw up a discount offer on a suitable case. If you make an online appointment for an oil change, the system might suggest that you also do a brake check. Think about how these examples can be adapted to your business model. Include the services and ideas that your customers keep asking you for.

Up-selling and cross-selling can really boost your sales. And remember: the more someone spends in a store, the more likely he or she is to come back. And that person is probably happy to get multiple services from a single source with one contact person instead of having to deal with a multitude of agencies and developers.

Another tip: browse the world of premium WordPress and WooCommerce plugins and themes. For example, on a marketplace like Themeforest or Envato. You can learn a lot about creative business models from the agencies and freelancers who generate the highest turnover there. As a rule, these can always be scaled via upselling and cross-selling approaches.

Use a newsletter

As soon as you have closed a sale: Your goal is now to nurture this new customer relationship. And to get your customers to keep coming back to your website. After all, this increases the likelihood that they will get in touch with you again, learn about new service modules or buy another WordPress plugin or theme.

Many companies are successful here by creating a newsletter that offers useful tutorials, information about new products or even special promotions. If this newsletter is well done, i.e. has very high-quality content, the conversion is sometimes surprisingly good.

The concept of a newsletter may sound old-fashioned. But in the digital age, email newsletters are an important part of the marketing mix for a variety of reasons. This is because you decide which posts are mentioned first and therefore receive the most attention - unlike social networks such as Facebook, where you are dependent on external algorithms.

You can also use the key performance indicators of your newsletter (open rates, click rates, conversions, subscriptions and unsubscriptions, etc.) to test exactly which content is successful and which is less so. The advantage: WordPress makes it very easy to compile and send your newsletter at the click of a mouse, see our comparison of newsletter plugins for WordPress. The so-called engagement rate is important here. This is the value that shows the percentage of interaction per measure or channel.

Social media is great for some things. For example, for people to share their approval of your products with their friends. But when companies directly try to engage with people via Facebook or Instagram, it's not uncommon for the success rate to be much improved. For example, most brands see a 17 percent engagement rate on social media, reaching just two percent of their intended audience.

With a newsletter, you can reach only those existing customers or leads who have provided their email addresses with minimal effort. Your click-through rate will then be significantly higher. In addition, you are not competing for attention with cute kitten pictures or the latest meme, which is also helpful. Ideally, you should use both channels - newsletters and social networks. And promote these channels mutually. This way, you combine new prospects and target groups with existing contacts.

Affiliate marketing program for existing customers

A clever and potentially lucrative variation on the affiliate marketing program ideas we talked about in the last chapter is to launch a similar program that is only for existing customers.

These days, everyone has a blog, a website or at least spends a lot of time curating their Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Snapchat. You can reach out to happy customers and get them to promote your products or services. By writing their own short posts or stories about how they liked your performance and service, how the shopping experience was, what their experience was and what other products they saw on your site that they would like to try.

And unlike professional bloggers or other websites and platforms that you could recruit as affiliates, individuals often demand less compensation. You can sometimes recruit them with perks or token payments combined with coupons. In fact, they'll probably be happy to be considered an 'influencer', even if it's a micro-targeted group. The bottom line is: if you have customers, then you have a certain level of loyalty and likeability - don't be afraid to work with them.

If in doubt, simply talk openly with your contacts about what a fair referral model looks like for them. And how much work they have to put into these recommendations. Perhaps you can find a cooperation model that works with completely different benefits in return. Or where you can recommend each other, for example on a specially created partner page.

Measuring success

So now you've launched your customer acquisition strategy, with a diverse mix of tactics across multiple platforms. And with a variety of approaches. You can see that your customer numbers are increasing - that's all you need to know, right? Wait, not so fast!

While any increase in customer numbers is a welcome development, there are a few details you should be aware of. You need to have a robust system in place to not only measure the success of your customer acquisition, but also to analyze and understand the numbers in detail: Who, why, where and when are your new customers converting? If you don't do this, you have no idea whether you are creating added value for your company. Or whether your marketing measures are just burning money.

In this chapter, we explain what we mean by customer acquisition costs and how they can be measured. We also explain how these figures tell you in detail what it costs you to acquire new customers using different methods. You can then compare this with the revenue they generate.

Measure customer acquisition costs

In the "old" days, companies had to spend money on advertising campaigns and more or less trust that a simultaneous increase in sales was due to the campaign. Apart from focus groups and other inaccurate or unscientific methods, they had little way of knowing what exactly made consumers buy their product.

But with today's targeted campaigns, it's much easier to break down the journey from prospect to lead to sale to long-term customer relationship. Not to mention the opportunities we have through an entire ecosystem of tools and apps to quantify consumer behavior.

Let's start with what goes into calculating the customer acquisition cost (CAC):

• Advertising costs
• Costs of the marketing and/or creative team
• Costs for the sales team
• Costs for publication
• Costs for technology
• Maintenance of the inventory etc.

The idea is pretty simple: you add up the costs for all the points mentioned above and put this figure in relation to how many customers you have acquired since implementing your marketing strategy and divide it. So if your agency spends 1000 euros on marketing over the course of a year and acquires 100 customers, the CAC would be 10 euros.

Typically, you calculate the CAC regularly, for a fixed period of time - for example, for each month. Or per channel, especially when new measures are added. Only then will you know whether new measures are worthwhile or which channels you should allocate more budget to because the costs per new customer are lower there. Of course, such a calculation requires you to record how much time and budget is spent on which channel.

Of course, this is a very simplified description of how your customer acquisition costs work. There are a variety of other elements that go into an accurate assessment of CAC. For example, if you've launched a new SEO campaign, you shouldn't expect to see results after a short period of time.

It gets even more complicated when you compare this figure with your other costs and the profit you make with each sale. For example, if you spend 10,000 euros to acquire 10,000 new customers in a year, you have a CAC of one euro. If each customer purchase brings in an average of 10 euros in profit, that's 100,000 euros in profit for an outlay of 10,000 euros - not a bad deal at all.

If your target group is likely to make several purchases per year, even if that means less profit, then your marketing strategy still has an advantage. But if you make less profit with a CAC of one euro, then you need to ask yourself a few questions. Starting with where exactly that euro is going.

Understanding marketing channels

Knowing your total CAC is just a start. You can significantly optimize your customer acquisition success by figuring out what you're spending on each of your marketing channels. The basic idea is to break down your spend on each channel - for example, how much did you spend on Google Ads? How much on Facebook ads? What about blogging and SEO? Or with your newsletter? In each case including all additional costs that you have to spend, for example, to create high-quality images.

Separate all these marketing costs. The simple but very imprecise option: Take the total number of customers you've acquired and divide them across all your marketing channels. Assuming that each channel has done the same amount of work in acquiring new customers. In a much better case, you can use Google Analytics & Co. to find out which channel was used for the initial contact of new leads and assign the corresponding number of new customers to this channel. However, some also use the channel with the last point of contact before the purchase, depending on what suits your business and its valuation better.

Now you can find out which channels have the lowest CAC. And you can direct more of your marketing budget in this direction. Check the values regularly, because the CAC of a channel can go up or down quickly.

Who clicked what and when

The data analysis of your marketing spend is much more complex than we can describe here in brief. But even a simple "milkmaid's calculation" is a necessary first step for you to gain more clarity. After that, it's time to take a closer look.

Knowing which specific channels and which specific ads have directly led to sales will help you even further. Let's say you have an e-commerce business that sells physical products. In this case, the conversion tracking of the advertising platforms will tell you which pay-per-click ads have led to sales, so you can measure your CAC directly against sales.

But even beyond pay-per-click ads, there are plenty of customer analytics tools that allow you to track your paying customers back to their last touchpoint before purchase. For example, if a customer made a purchase after an organic search, you can be pretty sure that they bought because of SEO or because of your content marketing.

You can also go much deeper down the rabbit hole and analyze your CAC per marketing channel. Think about the importance of these numbers for an interplay between your different strategies. In this interconnected world, no single one of these strategies exists in a bubble. For example, if you have a very popular podcast that relates to your business and products, it's difficult to analyze whether an SEO search was influenced by the listener hearing about you there first. Or whether they searched for you via a search engine on their own initiative.

Nevertheless, a well-founded overview of your figures helps. Use the CAC analysis regularly to better calibrate and focus your marketing expenditure. This is the only way your team can concentrate on the really target-oriented tasks.

Keywords for WordPress development

An important note: If you use keywords for your pay-per-click campaigns that are related to WordPress development and services, your marketing expenditure will often increase considerably. This is because these words and phrases are often very expensive on Google Ads & Co. depending on the target market and target group. Keep a close eye on what you are paying for these clicks, because they may not be worth it. Not if they don't result in concrete leads or sales, for example.

In such a case, the only option is to experiment with other content topics and keywords that appeal to your target groups for your product. Take a close look at our WordPress magazine wp unboxed as an example: We write about numerous topics that have only a limited connection to WordPress hosting, and yet still lead to sales. In our case, from web design to online law and SEO. Here are all the other articles in our customer acquisition series:

• Target groups & inbound lead generation
• Remarketing & Affiliate Marketing
• Building customer relationships & customer relationship management
• The entire series of articles as an e-book B2B customer acquisition made easy

We look forward to hearing from you: How can we help you grow your WordPress business? What are your own experiences in customer acquisition with WordPress and WooCommerce? Get in touch with us at any time or book an appointment with our sales team. We will be happy to deepen our knowledge with you.