17 effective examples of eCommerce cross-selling by beauty brands
If your goal is to raise average order values (AOV) or customer spend in the eCommerce space, cross-selling is arguably one of the most effective strategies to implement.
Maximizing every cart's potential through personalized marketing—recommending relevant additional products—you can boost revenue and profit while enhancing the online shopping experience for customers. It’s all about providing valuable offers and promotions that resonate with consumer behavior.
This discussion focuses on examples of beauty brands successfully adopting cross-selling techniques. But first, let’s clarify the difference between cross-selling and upselling.
The difference between cross-selling and upselling
With upselling, you're encouraging customers to purchase a premium, typically pricier version of the product they’re already considering. In the beauty sector, this might involve suggesting a larger size or a more luxurious version of the same item.
Conversely, cross-selling involves recommending complementary products that enhance what’s already in the cart. For instance, this could mean creating product sets, like suggesting shaving gel to someone buying a razor or recommending soaps to someone checking out with bath salts.
Why cross-selling works for beauty brands
As discussed in our previous piece on setting up a beauty product recommendation engine for retailers, cross-selling is an ideal strategy for several reasons:
Extensive product catalog
RevLifter collaborates with numerous beauty brands, offering thousands of items from various names. A broad product range opens up numerous opportunities for cross-selling, enhancing customer retention and conversions.
Complimentary products
A wide array of products often creates natural links among them, providing the basis for relevant recommendations that drive repeat purchases and business growth.
Guidance through personalization
Beauty customers frequently seek guidance when shopping online. With optimized product recommendations powered by machine learning, you can assist customers like an in-store expert, enhancing their experience and loyalty to your brand.
Beauty brands eCommerce cross-selling examples
Cross-selling is an incredibly effective strategy for beauty brands within retail eCommerce.
Now, let’s explore some industry-specific examples highlighting how these tactics can be effectively deployed on platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce to optimize sales through targeted testing and segmentation.
Example #1 Harrys Razors – The last chance saloon
Harry’s uses the checkout page as its last opportunity to grow the cart. It nailed the relevancy angle by recommending face wash to customers buying razors.
We tested this one by placing a few different products in the cart and got a slightly different recommendation each time. Kudos, Harry’s!
Example #2 Lush – Social proofing
Lush uses the space at the bottom of its product pages to recommend best sellers.
It’s all about the language here. Subtle touches like the use of ‘Lushies’ give a community feel. There’s some element of social proofing, too, as we’re cross-sold products we know people buy and love.
Example #3 Beautified You – The regimen
If you visit a store to get recommendations on skin treatment, you probably won’t be recommended just one product. You’ll likely receive a few different options to form a regimen.
That’s what Beautified You does with the example here. We’re also big fans of using reviews to show how many customers were happy with these recommendations.
Example #4 L’Occitane – Save with the set
Want to go one better? Try showing customers how much they save by investing in a product as part of a routine.
This requires a little more data work, but it’s one way of providing value to your customers. Here’s how the offer appears on the L’Occitane site.
Example #5 Winky Lux – Choose your swatch
You might think the more recommendations you provide, the better your chances of suggesting something worthwhile. Maybe you’re right, but it can result in a cluttered experience.
Winky Lux makes every pixel count by enabling shoppers to customize their recommendations. Here, I can pick my favorite lip balm and tinted moisturizer swatch.
Example #6 Barry M – Grab their attention
Native overlays are probably your best chance to cross-sell with impact.
On this occasion, I added nail paint to my cart at Barry M. I immediately received an overlay advertising a discount on a ‘nail paint vault’ containing multiple products, including the one I’ve got in my cart.
Example #7 Dollar Shave Club – Subscription extras
Dollar Shave Club works a little differently to some beauty businesses. By running a subscription model, where customers pay to receive razors and other grooming products every month, the brand locks in a good source of recurring revenue.
The challenge is to cross-sell customers who essentially buy the same thing month after month. Dollar Shave Club manages this by pushing ‘extras’ before shipping a box.
Here’s an example from an email campaign that would also work as an overlay within the membership area.
Example #8 Boots – Deals front and center
You don’t always need to recommend a product to cross-sell a customer; sometimes they’ll cross-sell themself.
After adding a Fenty lipstick to my cart at Boots, I see a deal encouraging me to spend £60 or more on Fenty products to save 10%. I click the deal, and it takes me right back to the brand’s range of products, where I can grab what I need to make a saving.
Example #9 Barry M – Everything must go
Here’s another tip: cross-selling should be about giving your customers what they need while driving your goals.
Pushing sale items as part of your cross-selling strategy is an ideal way of moving excess stock. Cosmetics retailer Barry M has this one down to a tee.
Example #10 Space NK – Customers also bought
‘Customers also bought’ has to be one of the most commonly observed phrases in the recommendation playbook. Here’s Space NK’s method of recommending items bought alongside my Coola sunscreen spray, but look out for the catch!
We don’t know if Space NK is actually recommending products that customers also buy with what’s in our cart or if these are simply items they want to push. Something about the recommendation of deodorant from a totally different brand just feels a little too irrelevant.
Other beauty brands are crunching the data to recommend ‘commonly bought with’ items. RevLifter offers this as a dedicated product recommendation type within technologies like Offers Wallet.
Example #11 FEELUNIQUE – Going big
FEELUNIQUE goes in very strongly with its cross-selling tactic. After adding a brow gel to the cart, 50% of my display is taken up by an overlay showing ‘frequently bought together items’ with a deal for each.
The placement of this overlay on the right side of the window almost makes it feel like a shopping cart. It makes the recommendation more native and seamless, which isn’t always easy with such a large display.
Example #12 Face the Future
Here’s a smaller version of the same play from Face the Future, which uses RevLifter’s technology to serve personalized deals and recommendations.
It’s a much tighter display, which means every suggestion has to be relevant.
If you want to learn more about how Face the Future grew AOV by +33% with the Offers Wallet, here’s our special recommendation: view the case study.
Example #13 MAC – Keep it simple
We love the simplicity of this cross-sell from MAC.
We’ve added lipstick to the cart, and we get three recommendations, two of which are definitely relevant to the order. There are no big displays—just a few useful suggestions.
Four we didn’t like
On our travels, we encountered many great examples of cross-selling, with some truly awful ones thrown in for good measure.
We won’t reference the brands, but we can list their strategies to prevent you from falling down the same traps:
Example #14 – Confusing customers with two types of recommendations
Note to this well-known department store: displaying two different reels of options for ‘You may like’ and ‘Recommended for you’ next to each other creates unnecessary confusion. Why not put all your attention into making one good reel?
Example #15 – Down-selling by recommending a smaller product
One of the world’s biggest luxury brands actually recommended a 50ml version of the 100ml fragrance we had in our cart. Way to decrease the value of your sale.
Example #16 – Bad recommendations
To this pharmaceutical giant, if I place a men’s fragrance in my cart, there must be tens of thousands of more suitable recommendations than… lip concealer.
Example #17 – Intrusive from the start
We appreciate that some customers need more guidance than others. But if you recommend very specific products with an overlay before we’ve even entered a category, there’s a big chance we won’t be interested.
(We’re talking to you, budget beauty reseller.)
Final thoughts
Cross-selling is a powerful tactic in any beauty brand’s arsenal. It’s about understanding your customers’ needs and recommending products that align with their interests while driving your goals.
Remember to keep it relevant, make it seamless for the customer, and avoid confusing them with too many recommendations or irrelevant suggestions. Following these tips can cross-sell and drive more conversions for your beauty business.
Keep experimenting and see what works best for your brand!
