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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interested in learning more about communicating your cross-sell and upsell offers directly to your subscribers? Read more here.

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.

Between juggling the endless marketing messages, choosing their favorite deals, and dealing with high credit card bills, shoppers can be easily overwhelmed during Black Friday & Cyber Monday (BFCM). But for brands, it can be even more demanding.

After months of planning, the last thing you want to see is a high churn rate for those new first-time customers and subscribers you spent months working to acquire.

Unfortunately, churn is inevitable – but with an airtight aftercare strategy, you can reduce holiday-related churn to engage your new customers before they even consider churning.

By setting up your aftercare strategies before BFCM, you can maximize the value of your newest subscribers while preventing your team from playing catch-up after one of the year’s busiest shopping events.

Let’s unpack exactly how your brand can implement an effective aftercare strategy for BFCM: 

1) Optimize Your Cancellation Surveys

As the dust of BFCM begins to settle, you’ll start to see some of those new subscribers churn. The reality is that high-purchase intent occasions like BFCM will always attract some deal shoppers who are only here for deeply discounted deals – and sadly, may never become high LTV customers.

Nonetheless, by optimizing your cancellation survey reasons to address these shoppers, you can capture valuable insights on your BFCM shoppers – and even offer cancellation treatments to incentivize deal hunters to stick around.

For example, add cancellation survey options like: 

• “I just signed up for the discount”
• “I found better prices somewhere else”

Every option that you include around BFCM offers your brand an additional clue as to how you can get these shoppers to stick around next time.

Momofuku offers a cancellation reason for “I only subscribed to receive the discount.” This helps them segment and review the deal-shopping subscription shoppers versus those new customers with higher potential for long-term LTV.

2) Create Enticing Cancellation Rebuttal Offers

When subscribers decide to cancel, you can present them with tailored offers that could change their minds. For example, if they’re canceling because they only wanted a BFCM discount, make them an offer that is too good to refuse. 

When Momofuku’s customers select the “I only subscribed to receive the discount” cancellation reason, they’re presented with a rebuttal that offers them a further discount to stay on their subscription.

Pro Tip: Cancellation rebuttals tend to perform a ton better when they include a video as a personal touch!

3) Regularly Review Your Cancellation Data

It’s important to not only monitor your subscription program performance but also optimize it based on the insights you discover based on your cancellation response data.

Once you know why your subscribers are churning, you can tailor your retention strategies toward addressing their concerns. Proactively iterating your cancellation surveys based on the results can have a massive impact on churn rates over time.

This is especially important after big acquisition and retention events like BFCM when you need to answer questions like: 

• Did our BFCM discounts attract sticky subscribers or just deal-hunters?
• Are there any cancellation survey trends that we can/should address proactively?
• What kinds of rebuttals are most effective (including consideration of the cancel reason!) and how can we put more resources behind expanding that success?

Don’t just glance at your churn data. Decode it, act on it, and continue to optimize.

Unfortunately, we know a lot of subscription apps don’t make this particularly easy. If you aren’t giving yourself – or your team – the time to meaningfully improve things like your customer experience and retention marketing efforts, you are undoubtedly losing potential revenue. 

Using a tool like RetentionEngine, merchants can deliver dynamic cancellation surveys and better understand churn before it happens. RetentionEngine learns how different customer segments (based on location, acquisition channel, LTV, or product) behave over time to build dynamic cancel flows that capture insights on why customers are canceling, what rebuttals work best to retain them, and ultimately works to reactivate former customers.

Post BFCM, take a peek at the cohort of new subscribers you acquired, and who churned within their first month on subscription. Then look back at your acquisition streams to identify how you can better refine your strategy to get the right type of customer: a long-term subscriber.

In this article, we drill down on a few key performance metrics warning signs, and some actionable steps to consider if you find a certain metric trending in the wrong direction.

4) Reactivate & Win Back Former Subscribers Before BFCM

It’s well known that brands are 40% more likely to convert a former subscriber than they are to convert a brand-new one. That means as you prepare for BFCM, your brand should think about ways to reactivate former subscribers to boost holiday sales.

We’ve cracked the code to winning back churned subscribers – and it’s not as crazy as you might think. The secret? Personalization. Delivering an enticing reactivation campaign is ultimately about putting the right offer in front of the right person, at the right time.

4 Personalization Strategies to Winback Churned Subscribers:

• Segment your winback flow(s) by cancellation reason
• Offer Personalized Winback Campaigns Based on Purchase History
• A/B test exclusive BFCM “Early Access” Offers
• Trigger a winback flow to former subscribers that make a new OTP

For a detailed breakdown of each of these strategies with merchant examples, checkout our top 10 tips and tricks for subscriber winbacks here.

5) Leverage AI to Optimize Your BFCM Campaign

With the right machine-learning tools, you can optimize and scale your campaigns and subscription program far more effectively – saving your team time and resources during one of the busiest times of the year. 

Specifically, when it comes to BFCM, optimizing your cancellation surveys, winback campaigns, and dunning payment recovery settings with AI ensures that your campaigns are optimized for peak performance and holiday revenue.

Our friends at Lifeboost have built out an extensive cancellation treatment library with the help of RetentionEngine’s advanced AI, allowing them to split-test, optimize, and combine their best cancellation rebuttals to increase their subscriber save rate from 5% to over 27% – and rising.

6) Deliver Winning Reactivation Campaigns with AI

For any subscribers who churn in the weeks following BFCM, it’s worth sending this cohort a reactivation campaign (based on their cancellation reason) to attempt to win them back. Remember – even if a customer is deal shopping, if they were willing to purchase once, it’s possible to get them back. But when’s the right time to re-engage these subscribers? 

Optimizing the timing of your winback communication is crucial. If you reach out too early, customers may be reminded why they churned in the first place. Wait too long, and the harder it becomes to re-engage. Your timing needs to be juuuust right.

But no need to fear: our WinbackEngine feature utilizes proprietary machine learning models to take the guesswork out of winback timing by learning the most probable time to send tailored re-acquisition emails to churned subscribers.

What does this mean? No more manual work on your end, and no more A/B testing on your own. Now, you won’t have to guess at the perfect time to reach out to churned subscribers. You’ll be able to build winback flows with full confidence, knowing that our proprietary AI has determined the best time to re-engage your churned subscribers.

For more information on WinbackEngine, read more here.

7) Combat Passive Churn & Recover Failed Subscriptions with Advanced Payment Recoveries

Is your brand thinking about subscription recoveries from failed billing attempts this Black Friday? 

Nearly 25% of billing failures come from generic card declines. When Black Friday rolls around, we see even more card failures resulting from upticks in credit card swiping, unusual card behavior, and stolen cards. For your brand, this can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

To avoid these losses, you need to be proactively reviewing your data around dunning, top causes of failed billing, and subscription recoveries. When it comes to diving deep into billing failures, the objective is clear: you need to gain a comprehensive understanding of what is happening to take appropriate action.  

Looking for More BFCM Tips & Tricks?

Stay AI’s team of retention experts is constantly revealing the latest tips and tricks when it comes to retention and subscription. To stay up-to-date on our BFCM strategies, subscribe to our newsletter here.