What is Cross Shopping?

Cross-marketing refers to the integration of resources such as time, money, ideas, events, or presentation space to provide a low-cost channel for any business, including home-based small businesses, large enterprises or franchise stores, to reach more potential customers A marketing method. Cross marketing has become an important part of corporate cooperation, and even the basis for mergers and acquisitions to occur. Cross-marketing is not only applicable to large enterprises. As long as certain conditions are met, companies of all sizes can carry out cross-marketing within a certain range to help companies stand out in the fierce market competition; maintain a balance of cash flows during the off-peak season; inspire People s motivation to shop more; to reach more potential customers more often with the same or reduced costs; to cultivate trust with customers and communities.

Cross marketing

Cross-marketing refers to the integration of resources such as time, money, ideas, events, or presentation space to provide a low-cost channel for any business, including home-based small businesses, large enterprises or franchise stores, to reach more potential customers A marketing method. Cross marketing has become an important part of corporate cooperation, and even the basis for mergers and acquisitions to occur. Cross-marketing is not only applicable to large enterprises. As long as certain conditions are met, companies of all sizes can carry out cross-marketing within a certain range to help companies stand out in the fierce market competition; maintain a balance of cash flows during the off-peak season; inspire People s motivation to shop more; to reach more potential customers more often with the same or reduced costs; to cultivate trust with customers and communities.

Chinese name

Cross marketing

Foreign name

Cross-Marketing

Definition

Marketing

The essence of cross marketing is a promotion method to own customers or partners' customers under the condition of having certain marketing resources. The biggest feature of this marketing method is to make full use of existing resources. Cross-marketing between enterprises can significantly increase the number of potential users without additional marketing costs. At the same time, based on cross-marketing, establish a good cooperative relationship for the development of two (or more) companies. It has more strategic significance.

A concept that is closely related to cross marketing is "cross selling",

In September 2001, Microsoft's portal website and Disney's sports website signed a cross-marketing agreement. The main content of the agreement is that MSN's free mail Hotmail, search engine, chat and shopping brands and links to various online services will appear. At the top of the ESPN homepage, MSN exclusively uses ESPN content in the sports channel and provides a priority position on its webpage to achieve mutual promotion purposes.

Also in September, IBM and eBay also reached a cooperation agreement: IBM plans to expand its sales through eBay, eBay will become another new channel for IBM to sell to users and small and medium enterprises, and online retailer eBay will Make a 88 × 31 pixel LOGO link for the IBM website on the homepage of your own website. In addition, eBay will also choose IBM's application platform to upgrade its technology. The basis of the cooperation is that eBay has 34 million registered users, provides more than 6 million products and services at any time, has a huge amount of online transactions, and 70% of users on eBay are new IBM users. In addition, in the news released by the merger and acquisition of Sina.com and Sunshine Culture, Fang also emphasized that Fang's future integration focuses on cross-marketing, cross-selling, cross-content use, and providing one-stop services for advertisers.

Companies are facing fierce challenges of customer loyalty and profit. How to survive in the gap, cross-marketing has two major functions:

Cross marketing can enhance customer loyalty. The data shows that the churn rate for customers who buy two products is 55%, while the churn rate for 4 or more products or services is almost zero.

Cross marketing can also increase profits. Practice has proven that the cost of marketing a product and service to an existing customer is much lower than the cost of absorbing a new customer. Data from credit card companies show that, on average, credit card customers do not begin to make a profit until the third year. This shows that the cost of absorbing new customers is very high, and cross-selling existing customers has naturally become a shortcut for many companies to increase return on investment.

So-called

Print information on joint promotions on receipts; if customers buy, provide price reductions, special services or convenience services; hang signs or posters of each other's products on the venues and products of both parties; mention cooperation in local events or media interview Partner's advantages; send customers both sides 'advertising leaflets; collect mailing lists and send customers common promotional postcards; accept local media interviews together; encourage employees to promote how partners' products can be used with your products; customers buy in large quantities At that time, provide them with partner products and ask partners to do the same; co-organize in-store or office events, such as product demonstrations and free lectures.

In network companies, there is usually a BD (Business Development) department, which also shows the importance that network companies attach to cooperation and promotion. However, due to the special nature of network companies, when the profit is indefinite and the financing is hopeless, the value of BD is often not properly played , And often try to sell their products / services to partners in the name of cooperation, and even look for opportunities to be acquired, so many online companies do not take full advantage of cooperation-based cross-network marketing.

The prerequisite for cross-network marketing is to have certain marketing resources. Generally, these marketing resources can be expressed as a certain amount of website visits, registered user information, some professional and unique value content resources, etc. In addition, some free Services such as free emails, forums, and E-books can also be used as cross-network marketing resources. Many small websites often cannot rely on a large number of advertising promotions because they lack sufficient marketing budget, and they should make full use of cross-network marketing methods. However, what makes some small websites or new websites headache is that they do nt have too many ready-made resources to use, which makes cross-network marketing limited. They even think that this method is not suitable for themselves. In this case, you can use it first. Partner resources for promotion, such as making a valuable e-book for the partner's user characteristics and providing it to the partner for users to download or send through the mailing list, these special e-books should include their own website Promotional information, or ask partners to specifically promote it. Of course, choosing a partner requires some effort. First, the two websites must have similar or complementary user demand characteristics rather than direct competitors. At the same time, a certain understanding of the user resources of potential partners is also required.

1. Find products

How to effectively cross-market? Finding the right product is naturally the first step. There are currently two approaches: business inspiration and data mining. Sometimes business inspiration can tell companies which products need to be cross-sell. Business inspiration is indeed a quick way to identify cross-sell products. However, relying solely on business inspiration may lose many business opportunities, because in some cases, some good cross-selling products are not intuitively visible. Therefore, if you are looking for potential cross-selling business opportunities, there is a best tool-data mining. Link analysis is a method in data mining. It can find the correlation between products and products from historical data, so as to produce the most appropriate cross-selling products or services. However, the results of link analysis must rely on business knowledge to review its accuracy and value. Therefore, in practical applications, business inspiration and data mining are often combined to determine the appropriate cross-selling product.

2. Customer analysis

Once the product to be promoted is determined, customer positioning must be carried out, mainly to understand the purchasing relationship between different products at the same time or before and after, so as to provide valuable suggestions for cross-selling. Generally speaking, if you have customer product purchase information, you can apply the link analysis method to understand the degree of correlation between products and products, so as to determine the target of cross-selling. Link analysis originated in the retail industry, a typical example of which is the story of beer and diapers. The data mining staff analyzed the transaction data and found that the degree of correlation between the simultaneous purchase of beer and diapers is very high. Further investigation revealed that fathers with children often bought diapers for their newborn children when they bought beer for themselves. Based on the above information, the supermarket staff adjusted the placement structure of the items in a timely manner, thereby making it easier for customers to purchase. Similar data mining technologies have also been widely used in foreign companies to promote different products and services to existing customers. Apply a classification model to predict the likelihood that all customers will buy the specified product, and find out who is most likely to buy the product.

3. Screening predictions

The selected customers can be predicted, and all potential customers can be selected for cross-selling, or the classification method in data mining can be used for scoring in order to find customers with high purchasing potential, thereby further increasing the purchase rate. However, in some cases, we may not need to care about the degree of correlation between the product and the product, but only need to find the customers who are most likely to purchase a specific product from the existing customers, and do not limit what products these customers are client. In this case, we can just apply the classification model directly. For designated product A, we will collect background information of customers before purchasing A and transaction data of other products. For customers who buy A, they can be assigned a value of 1, and for customers who have not bought A, they can be assigned a value of 0. Apply scientific and effective market segmentation standards and market segmentation methods to systematically and deeply market segmentation for all customers. Based on a scientific evaluation of the growth potential, competition level, and resource requirements of each market segment, a clear target customer group is selected.

4. Identify partners

Companies always want to reach more potential customers more often with less effort and cost, provide rich information or offers to attract people to buy products or services, and have to find the best partner to help. When choosing a partner, consider the creditworthiness of the other party and the customer base they serve rather than the product or service they actually provide. Partners should have the following characteristics: serve the same customer base, but there is no competition; there are acquaintance managers in the partner company, which is conducive to working together; serving customers that the company wants to win; One party happens to be the peak season, and the customer base of one party is at least as large as the existing customer base of the other party, with different resources from the other party, including high-traffic websites, different market segments, etc .; both parties have products that can be bundled and sold to each other Or services; compatible values. When approaching potential partners, explain that you want to explore a new way to reach more customers with the same or less cost and time. Then try to describe a simple way you want to try, clearly articulating the benefits and responsibilities of cross marketing.

5. Effectiveness evaluation

In order to improve the quality of cross-marketing program design and the effect of cross-marketing activities in the future, after each combined marketing activity, the effectiveness of cross-marketing activities should be evaluated in a timely manner based on the standards and methods of cross-marketing effect evaluations formulated at the time of program design Lessons learned

Direct effect evaluation. Such as the number of users, marketing ROI, cross marketing revenue, cross marketing costs, etc.

Indirect effect evaluation. Such as the impact of cross-marketing activities between new and old users, the impact of cross-marketing activities on related businesses, the impact of cross-marketing activities on customer loyalty, the impact of cross-marketing activities on long-term benefits and corporate image, cross-marketing The impact of activities on alliance partnerships, the impact of cross-marketing activities on competitive relationships and the competitive landscape.

Summary of experience and lessons. Carefully analyze and summarize experiences or lessons in cross marketing purposes, market segmentation, target customer group characteristics analysis, partner selection, product selection, scheme design, implementation process control, etc.