If you sell a product or service, you've probably heard of bundling. Essentially, this means offering several services or products at one price or in the same package.
Bundling frequently happens with utilities or viewing subscriptions from cable providers or streaming platforms. You're probably wondering if this way of packaging is beneficial for businesses. Here, we'll discuss how bundling services help businesses and how you can use this business model to your advantage.
Benefits of Bundling for Businesses
Bundling can be advantageous for your business for various reasons. These include cost-efficiency and marketing.
Bundling can be cost-efficient when it increases your sales and lowers your shipping costs. For example, let's say you are an online computer supplier, and you decide to sell a computer bundle. In the basic package, you could include a monitor, wireless keyboard, and Wi-Fi mouse for a lower price point than what your customer would pay if they purchased each item separately.
This is cost-efficient not only for the consumer but for your business as well. If you're getting the items shipped in bulk and want to rotate items faster, then bundling and speeding up the rate of transactions can work to your benefit. Just remember not to price any of the items or the bundle as a whole at a cost lower than your purchasing expenses. Otherwise, you'll break even or lose money.
Bundling is also a great marketing technique. You can add in high-value items to higher-priced bundles. Keeping with the computer example, you could add a secondary monitor and upgrade the package to a premium bundle sold at a higher cost.
The higher-value items will stand out for your shoppers and generate greater interest and possibly more sales, which is the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign. Just remember to highlight the higher-value items in your bundle plans, so your customers can see all the enticing opportunities you're offering.
Now let's address how to implement bundling into your business model.
Compare with Your Competitors
The first tip is to explore how your competitors are presenting bundling to their customers. If this is not common practice in your field just yet, you're ahead of the game!
One easy way to conduct competitor comparison is to check out online review guides. Resources like catv.org present shoppers with a comparison of the best-bundled TV and internet options. You can use these comparison guides as a reference for your business to see how different bundling options are packaged by other companies.
Look at all the competitors in your field. Pay close attention to what services are available for your target customer demographic - and what's not. You can capitalize on what's not being bundled by including them in a bundled package for your customers. In the marketing stage, you want to highlight the unique offers your business makes available to customers.
Consider the Pick and Choose Model
Just because you offer a huge selection of services, it does not mean you can offer every option to your customers and keep your costs down.
This is where you pick and choose how you bundle. This is best done if you keep track of how much you can save from packaging each deal. Once you have all the options laid out, start to switch different services in and out of the bundles to figure out what you may be able to drop.
Returning to the computer example, you might weigh the cost-benefits of offering different brands or models of a PC, keyboard, and mouse. Once you determine the bundle price that will appeal to your consumers, you can pick and choose between the brands that will allow you to offer that price without setting back your profit margins. Again, look at your competitors to see what price points they are offering for comparable packages.
It's also a great idea to offer the pick-and-choose model to your customers. The power of choice appeals to many people, and it can allow them to customize a package to their preferences.
For example, with the pick-and-choose model, you might allow customers to choose between a wired and Bluetooth mouse. This will allow you to address the desires of both customers who like the reliability of wired options and the ones who enjoy the cleaner space that wireless options provide.
Conclusion
Bundling is a great business model whether you're selling a product or a service. Check out if your competitors are already taking advantage of this technique, and if they're not, beat them to it!
