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How to Use Bundled Products as a Marketing Technique

How to Use Bundled Products as a Marketing Technique for Your WordPress Store

Marketing strategies for e-commerce are like fashion trends. After a time, you simply end up dyeing the fabric a different color and calling it revolutionary. Nevertheless, like the aforementioned analogy, your creativity is what makes the difference in the way you present your product. Amongst the stock of such reliable strategies that can be used for increasing sales, is using bundled products.

Product bundling has been used by digital and physical store owners for a long time now. At its heart, the concept leverages human tendency to opt for a bunch of products at a discounted price rather than purchasing each of these products separately. Given the total savings they make, as perceived by the customer, it can be used to manoeuvre them into making a larger purchase than the original.

Although bundled products are supposed to be an incentive for customers, these days they do not swear by it. Why? Two reasons.

  1. The moment a customer thinks that you are trying to induce them to buy something they do not perceive as required they see the purchase as an expense and back out altogether.
  2. The e-commerce market is nearing saturation. Given the sheer number of e-stores that cater to the same niche audience, customers are likely to navigate to another website to get what they need, if they see you being too pushy about the purchase.

Hold up though! This does not mean that bundled products are a dead-end strategy. On the contrary, there are some great applications where product bundles can be used as the principal marketing method, provided you go about it smartly.

Classic Strategies for Selling More Using Bundled Products

When you build an online store with WordPress you can market your shop, increase revenues and offer more value to customers with these bundled product methods.

Create Value for Customers with Chained Bundles

Chaining bundles refers to the method used when related products are offered to the customer, either free or at a highly discounted rate, as a thank-you for purchasing the principal bundled product on the e-store.

Chained bundles are found to work better than simple product bundles due to their dual advantage; they upsell the principal product bundle as it has these free products associated with it and they act as promotional triggers for similar or relevant products that customers can be induced to buy at a later stage.

However, perhaps the most important task they do is create value for customers. Buyers at the store perceive the additional products as a reward for their larger purchase which encourages them to return to your store more frequently, creating loyal customers.

Think of a grocery store that offers you a free product with bundle A and three free products with a higher value bundle B. Which would you go for?

Offer Customizable Product Kits

Who doesn’t love having choices? In fact, when it comes to shopping online, ‘the more, the better’ is definitely the mantra. Offering your customers the choice of creating their own product bundles is one of the most popular iterations of the bundled product strategy.

This ensures that people have complete freedom in selecting the products they are looking for and packaging them as required.

In case you are worried about the compilation problems this might cause across sellers, you can always offer a pre-specified pool of products for customers to choose from. This lets you effectively be in control of the product bundle but does not restrict customers to buying products included in a pre-packaged bundle.

Consider the case of an online store selling fashion and makeup accessories. Given the range of skin tones, brand choices, color palettes, and personal preferences, it is hardly feasible to create product bundles for every shopper. Instead, here you could create a customizable kit bag, where the shopper would be able to choose from the products offered, as per their requirement.

Offer Customizable Product Kits

The Composite Alternative

Composite product bundles are used whenever some major customization comes into the picture. This is a combination of the value creation and customized bundling methods. Here, your base product, or product bundle, shall remain constant but the peripherals can be customized as required. If you own an e-store that sells cameras and photography equipment, or furniture, or even customized DIY jewelry, this can be an excellent option for increasing the popularity of your product bundles.

Consider the example of a store selling cameras online. You have your DSLR+lens bundle, but offer an additional lens, kit bag, a memory card, and a tripod as an extra bundle that can be purchased with the base bundle. If there is a situation where a customer does not need, say the tripod, he has the freedom to customize this bundle as necessary.

This is a simple example of how composite bundles can be used. You can even encourage cross platform purchases, making more complex bundles.

Add Value & Offer Alternatives

Mix it Up

This is a classic case of bundled products and emulates the live shopping experience to the maximum. Customers can purchase products in bulk at discounted prices, with optional variations in the same bundle. Here, you set a fixed number of items that can be added to the bundle and people can add single/multiple items as per their choice.

Consider the case of an online confectionery store, where people select from a range of chocolates and pastries. You have product boxes of sizes 4, 6, 8, 12, etc. People can choose different varieties of chocolates or multiple units of the same product and checkout with their purchase.

Offer Optional Bundle Variations

Read about the experience of Patrick Poptasi, to know more about the various ways how you can use mixed product bundles in an online confectionery store.

Groups are Good

Selling grouped products is a key strategy for stores which sell essentials that people tend not to spend time browsing for. Citing the grocery store example again, we see how it can be beneficial if you have a ready-to-go package of products one would need for a week or month. This could include everything from oil to bread to veggies to instant food, for say 2 people.

You could even extend the idea and prepare grouped bundles by category; vegans, vegetarians, meat lovers, health and fitness, and many more, or for variable durations, week, fortnight, two months, etc.

The entire bundle can have a fixed price which is lesser than the total cost of each of the individual items and yet within your profit margin. All shoppers have to do is select their product bundle and check out! A couple of clicks and your monthly grocery shopping is done!

Endnote

Bundled products are a great way of encouraging bulk purchases and can be used for a variety of applications. It might be one of the oldest strategies in the book, but it works flawlessly nonetheless.

What is your opinion about using bundled products to increase conversion rates? Any other innovative way you would like to share? Drop a comment to let us know!

Disclaimer: WPExplorer may be an affiliate for one or more products listed in the article. If you click a link and complete a purchase we could make a commission.
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Article by WisdmLabs WPExplorer.com guest author
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