How bundling your products adds value for small businesses
When you decide to launch a white label partnership and offer digital tools to your small business customers, one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle is how you position them among your range of products and services. That doesn’t just mean how you market them or where they sit on your website – it’s also about how they sit alongside your existing core services.
Do you tie those white label tools in with your core offering, or keep the two as separate products? Often companies opt for the latter, even though bundling them together can help them add more value to their services as well as offer a more competitive small business package.
Join the dots between your small business services
When you start offering new white label digital products for your small business customers, bundling them together with your core services might not be your first thought. You might want to keep them distinct from the products your customers know you for, or you might want to make it easier to track the adoption and success of the products by observing separate sales.
If you already support small businesses with your core services, there’s likely an easy link to make between those and the white label digital products you’re looking to offer.
For example, if you’re a telco selling internet connectivity, why not bundle the ability to build a website to make full use of that connectivity? Or if you’re a bank helping small businesses set up their first business bank account, why not also offer them the tools to start growing that bank account with an e-commerce store builder?
If there’s a logical link between the two, it makes sense to bundle them together as part of the same package. Then instead of seeing them as two separate products, small business owners will see your core services and your white label digital tools as a start up business bundle with all the tools they need to launch a successful online business in one place.
Entice small business owners to try what’s on offer
When you’re thinking about how bundling products together can add value to your core service, it can help to think about the examples you see from consumer brands.
Take Amazon and its Amazon Prime subscription, for example. The headline for Prime is free, one-day shipping and access to Amazon’s streaming platform. But the service also includes access to music streaming, ebooks and audiobooks, cloud gaming, photo storage and discounts for services like Whole Foods and Grubhub+.
If you were looking for somewhere to back up your photos, you might not think to go to an e-commerce site like Amazon for that, even if you already knew they offered it. But when it’s bundled in with something like their free shipping service, a customer is more likely to give it a go because they have access to it.
When you bundle services together in this way, it also has a psychological effect that’s worth considering. If you asked Amazon Prime customers what they’re paying for, they probably wouldn’t say cloud photo storage or Whole Foods discounts – they pay for the free shipping and the rest of the services feel like free benefits added on.
The same applies to small business customers. With the amount of digital tools and products a business needs – especially in today’s SaaS-driven world – balancing operational costs can be one of the biggest challenges for small business owners. With that in mind, any bundle of tools and services that appears to add value rather than be just another cost sink will be highly attractive.
Adding value by saving people hassle
When you’re talking about adding value by bundling products, it’s easy to only focus on the price. But money isn’t the only thing that bundles can save a small business owner.
In 2022 we carried out a study of small businesses in the UK and found that 39% of them didn’t know who to trust when it came to finding digital tools like website and store builders. And while part of that uncertainty is the result of a digital education gap, it’s also a question of time.
Small business owners – whether they’re a sole trader or managing a small team – are often extremely pressed for time. They have to wear multiple hats throughout the day, and rarely have time to step away from the hectic activity of running their business to weigh up the pros and cons of different software providers.
For time-strapped small business owners, a small business bundle that includes those tools alongside their essential broadband or banking services would remove a considerable barrier from searching for the digital products they need to grow and evolve their business.