4 Effective Ways to Communicate Your Cross-Sells & Upsells to Subscribers (with Examples)

Once you’ve built a cross-sell or upsell promotion, you’re ready to share it with your subscribers. Using Stay AI’s robust feature set, you can communicate your promotion to your subscriber cohort through several quick and effective channels.

In this article, we’ll break down 4 unique strategies to effectively communicate your cross-sell and upsell offers to your subscribers – and boost your recurring revenue.

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1. Deliver a Promotional Offer Email Directly to Subscribers’ Inboxes

Email is one of modern marketers’ best friends, and has truly stood the test of time as one of the most reliable, revenue-generating channels. You can streamline the delivery of your cross-sell and upsell offers with a quick email announcement to ensure your customers not only see your offer, but can engage in just a few clicks.

Our friends at Momofuku utilized Stay’s Drag and Drop Email Builder to create beautifully branded subscription emails and promotion announcements that subscribers can easily apply to their next order by clicking the Quick Action call-to-action directly in the email.

The “Add Product” call-to-action at the bottom of their emails allows customers to quickly redirect to their Customer Portal to accept or decline their offer.

Want to do the same? Suppose your brand wants to run a similar discount promotion directly within a subscriber’s inbox. In that case, you can use Stay’s Email Builder and Quick Actions to successfully fire a promotion email after a subscriber meets the criteria of your offer. 

For example, if you’ve set up a cross-sell or upsell promotion for order 2, a customer could receive a Promotion Offer Email after checking out with their initial order, as they are receiving their promotion on their second order.

Note: If you are not using Klaviyo (and instead use another ESP), we strongly recommend enabling Stay AI’s email notifications to effectively send promotional information via email. Otherwise, customers will only be notified of their ExperienceEngine promotional offer in their customer portal.

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2. Include a Dynamic Upsell Module Directly Within Subscriber Email or SMS Communications

Transactional emails are some of the most important communications that your subscribers will receive from you – particularly the upcoming order email that lets them know their order is about to ship and that they have a few days to make any changes or add any products.

Lifeboost took their transactional emails to the next level with Stay AI’s Smart Blocks and added an upsell widget. All they had to do was pick a product they wanted to feature, add in a subscriber-specific discount, and drop the module into their “It’s almost that time!” upcoming order email.

Subscribers opened this email to see details and a discount on a product that interested them. From there, all they had to do was click “Add Product,” and it was added to their upcoming order. The inclusion of these modules in transactional emails helped Lifeboost push specific products while contributing to the 50% rise in MoM add-on revenue.

To read more about Lifeboost’s subscription strategy, read the full Case Study here.

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3. Leverage Klaviyo Quick Actions for Seamless One-click Upsells

Klaviyo Quick Actions are URLs that perform specific actions within the Customer Portal when a subscriber clicks on them. With Quick Actions, your brand can apply add-on item promotions like cross-sells and upsells directly within subscribers’ email communications. From there, subscribers can click the Quick Action call-to-action to be redirected to their portal to accept or decline your offer.

Using Stay AI’s Klaviyo integration, Aura Bora segments subscribers who tend to purchase new flavor releases or seasonal flavors and directly markets to those cohorts by sending emails with Quick Actions to announce and cross-sell new products.

Here, Aura Bora announced the launch of their new Honey Pumpkin flavor, and gave subscribers the option to add it to their upcoming order with a Quick Action call-to-action:

By implementing these cross-sell flows – in addition to using a variety of other revenue-driving features from Stay, the Aura Bora team has seen an incredible 128% growth in monthly subscription revenue.

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4. Implement an In-Portal Banner Ad to Announce Your New Offer

Adding a banner ad directly within the Customer Portal is another excellent way to alert subscribers of upcoming or new product announcements and offers. Here, you can alert customers of new one-time add-ons, such as a cross-sell or upsell, or any other number of discounts, deals, and surprises your team may have up their sleeves.

OLIPOP used their banner ad to promote the return of their limited-edition, seasonal Crisp Apple flavor. Subscribers could then add this limited-time cross-sell to their next subscription order in just a few clicks.

In less than a month, Olipop saw 30% of Crisp Apple sales attributed to add-ons directly within the Customer Portal – contributing to their overall subscription growth strategy.

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Delighting Your Subscribers with Timely Add-ons Has Never Been Easier

By communicating your ExperienceEngine cross-sell and upsell offers to subscribers directly via email, SMS, or banner ad messaging, you can streamline the delivery process to ensure your customers not only see your message and offer, but are at the ready to engage and convert in just a few clicks.

For specific cross-sell and upsell strategies that Shopify’s top brands use to unlock untapped revenue, check out our subscription-specific strategies here.

For more on leveraging email notifications to improve the subscriber experience, check out our breakdown with merchant examples here.

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