Crafting Winning Cross-sell & Upsell Offers for Your Subscribers: A Step-by-Step Guide
Too often, subscribers are overlooked when it comes to new promotions. If you’re not considering your subscriber cohort for cross-sells and upsells, then you’re missing out on a cost-effective, untapped opportunity to maximize AOV and recurring revenue.
In particular, cross-sells and upsells are an excellent opportunity to boost revenue without the added acquisition costs related to acquiring new customers.
A well-timed cross-sell or upsell can make your subscribers feel like they’re getting even more value from their subscription – building trust, loyalty, and LTV along the way.
In this article, we’ll review everything you need to know about cross-sells and upsells, and how your brand can implement winning add-on offers to boost recurring revenue.
What’s the difference between cross-selling and upselling?
Cross-selling encourages a customer to add a complementary product to their existing subscription order which also increases AOV and LTV. Upselling encourages customers to purchase a more expensive product, service, or feature which quickly increases their AOV.
In the context of your subscription program, cross-sells are more likely to increase AOV as you surprise and delight subscribers with limited-time products, exclusives, or seasonal surprises that enhance the overall subscriber experience. Similarly, upsells offer a chance to increase AOV by offering subscribers a premium or complementary product that will enhance their experience.
Crafting Winning Cross-sells with ExperienceEngine
Stay AI’s ExperienceEngine is our advanced promotions builder that enables you to test a wide range of discounts, add-ons, and gifts to your subscriber cohorts – including cross-sell and upsell offers.
You can either create these promotions within the Merchant Portal manually or leverage our proprietary AI to A/B test several cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Either way, you utilize it, ExperienceEngine is built to help you discover the highest-converting offer to share with your wider audience more easily.
If your brand has a large product catalog, you can use ExperienceEngine’s smart A/B testing capabilities to test multiple cross-sell or upsell offers to narrow down the offer that converts best with your subscribers. For 8 A/B testing strategies that leverage ExperienceEngine and enhance the subscriber experience, click here.
You can also present exclusive promotional offers to subscribers identified as high churn risk, incentivizing them to stick to a subscription before they even consider canceling it.
How does it work? When a subscriber becomes eligible for a promotion built in ExperienceEngine, this offer will become visible in their Customer Portal as a popup modal, which can be accepted or saved for later in the one-time products section. This offer can also be communicated to subscribers via email using Stay’s Email Builder.
A Step-by-Step Checklist for Creating Your Cross-sell or Upsell
Creating an enticing cross-sell or upsell for your subscribers can dramatically boost AOV and LTV without the costs associated with acquiring new customers or top-of-funnel campaigns. Instead, using the toolkit at your disposal in ExperienceEngine, you can create and deliver promotional offers to existing subscribers at no additional cost.
This next section will break down exactly how to create and execute a cross-sell or upsell promotion in Stay’s ExperienceEngine. For specific strategy recommendations to customize your existing cross-sell or upsell promotions, more on that here.
✅ 1. Navigate to ExperienceEngine & Choose Your Promotion Parameters
To create your cross-sell or upsell promotional offer, first navigate to your Merchant Portal and open your ExperienceEngine dashboard. From here, select Create a Promotion and either choose to Use AI or Do It Yourself.
You can let our subscription-trained AI engine run and test one-of-one personalized offers for your customers, or start your test manually to test specific cross-sell or upsell ideas that your team may already have.
Once you’ve selected Create a Promotion, you can easily choose which order parameters to apply this add-on promotion to, as well as whether or not to target your promotion to subscribers identified as high churn risk based on Stay’s predictive AI. If you’re interested in learning more about our AI functionality, you can read more here. Then, in the Apply to Orders section, select the parameters to include in your promotion. This includes order cycle, cohort segmentation, and more.
During the fall season, our friends at Olipop offer their limited-edition Crisp Apple flavor as a cross-sell opportunity for subscribers directly in their Customer Portal:
✅ 2. Choose a Product for your Cross-sell or Upsell
Next, choose a product (or two, or three) for your cross-sell or upsell offer. Using ExperienceEngine, you can test different products as upsells or the same product at varying discount amounts to see which offer is most successful – and then deliver this variation of the promotion to your larger customer cohort.
Our friends at Lifeboost A/B tested upselling subscribers on two different coffee variants – a pumpkin spice blend and an espresso blend. The promotion was a massive success, with Test B, the espresso option, receiving a 45% higher acceptance rate than Test A.
✅ 3. Select your Cross-sell or Upsell Discount Amount(s)
Your cross-sell or upsell offer will be viewed as an add-on product. Select whether to include this item as a percentage discount or a fixed ($) discount.
We recommend testing odd-numbered or unusual discount offers versus the standard 10% to 25% that customers are used to. For example, a 17% or 33% discount upsell may appear more unique and personalized, and, as a result, receive better results.
✅ 4. Select your Promotion Window
Before launching your new campaign, select the date window you’d like to use for your cross-sell or upsell promotion.
Try testing your cross-sell or upsell for at least one order cycle so that subscribers are more likely to see their limited-time offer when entering their Customer Portal.
✅ 5. Pro Tip: A/B Test your Cross-sell or Upsell Promotion(s)
If you’d like to A/B test several products in your cross-sell or upsell offer to see which one converts best, you can add up to 4 products within your promotion and select what percentage of the segment should receive each offer.
Once you’ve finished setting up your new cross-sell or upsell add-on promotion, you can serve this offer to your selected subscriber cohort. To make this offer even more timely, add an email communication or announcement to alert subscribers of this one-time offer waiting for them in their Customer Portal.
Using Stay’s Promotion Offer Email template in our Email Builder, you can quickly create these communications with ease.
Don’t Forget: Review Your Data!
To make the most of your subscription data, it’s crucial to comprehend various metrics related to the promotions you are testing. Without understanding and iterating on your tests’ results, you won’t be able to properly build and optimize your promotions.
ExperienceEngine automatically tracks over 25 KPIs relevant to your promotion so you can clearly understand how the promotion impacted your subscription program. These include actionable data insights around subscriber churn, including percentage and total subscriptions active/paused versus subscriptions canceled an experience, as well as insights like additional revenue and AOV from accepted and declined experiences.
By properly reviewing your data and iterating your campaign based on your results, you can effectively continue to grow and scale your subscriber AOV in no time.
PS – Did you know that Stay’s ExperienceEngine is the original subscription promotions builder, offering a far more actionable and detailed experience than our competitors’ tools? If you’d like to learn more about ExperienceEngine and its AI capabilities, check it out here.
Looking for more strategies and examples of cross-sells and upsells?
If you’re interested in specific cross-sell and upsell strategies from some of Shopify’s top brands using Stay AI, check out this article where we dive into subscription-specific cross-sell and upsell strategies, with examples from some of our favorite brands.
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