How to build an Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience
Upcoming Order Cross-Sell experiences empower you to provide customers with a customized cross-sell journey with targeted products and specialized discounts.
This guide provides an overview of the Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience, configuration instructions, and common questions.
- Shopify Checkout Integration
- Migrated Shopify Checkout Integration
Before you start
- Recharge has created a new version of the Upcoming order experience. If you enabled Upcoming order cross-sell previously, you still have access to the version of Upcoming order cross-sell outlined in this guide.
- An upgrade to this functionality, Upcoming order email is coming soon. To join the waitlist for this feature, sign up for the waitlist.
Upcoming Order Cross-Sell overview
Use Upcoming Order Cross-Sells to offer discounted products, increasing your store's Average Order Value (AOV) and improving retention. Customers receive an email notification with the offer and can accept it via a link in their customer portal. These offers follow inventory rules configured in Recharge.
A/B test different offers to find the most effective incentives, and target specific products or collections to incentivize your customers.
The Upcoming Order Cross-Sell experience activates when a charge meets the trigger filters, adding the cross-sell incentive offer to the customer's account. A notification is sent to alert customers to proceed to the next step of the experience. The upsold product is added as a one-time product and can be managed like any regular one-time product.
Triggers
The Upcoming Order Cross-Sell experience starts with a trigger node set to activate after processing a recurring order, where you define the conditions to specify which order qualifies for the cross-sell incentive. You must add at least one trigger condition when configuring the Trigger node for your Subscription Experience.
Recharge suggests using either the order processed or order streak numbers as a condition to prevent customers from receiving the cross-sell offer with every order. See Understanding the Trigger node for additional information.
Upcoming Order Cross-Sell landing page
Customers with an active cross-sell offer have access to the cross-sell offer landing page when they first access their customer portal, either through a direct link in their email or upon logging in. Customers can choose to accept or decline the offer before proceeding to the portal.
Configure Upcoming Order Cross-Sell
To create a Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience:
Step 1 - Create your experience
- Click Cross-Sell & Upsell in your merchant portal and select Upcoming Order.
- Click Create New and select Get started.
- Click Manage Settings to add a name to your Upcoming Order Cross-Sell experience.
- Choose the Trigger and add conditions based on customer, order, and product data. The experience will start for customers when these conditions are met. You can also create custom customer segments and create a trigger for specific customers.
- You must use a single targeted order number for an experience, though you can create multiple experiences to target multiple order numbers.
Step 2 - Build your experience
Add the incentive to the experience:
- Click Configure under the Cross-Sell node to configure the offer.
- Click Add product to select a product and then click Apply.
- Select if you want customers to choose the product variant they will receive, or pick the specific variant available in the cross-sell offer.
- Configure the discount to be a percentage amount, or a dollar amount.
- Select Customize experience to navigate to the Site Builder and customize the cross-sell landing page.
- Customize the landing page contents and preview the landing page on a desktop or mobile device. Click Done once your changes are complete.
- Configure the notification node and click Apply. Use the standard Recharge notification, or add the Klaviyo node to create emails in Klaviyo. You can translate the notifications Recharge sends as part of the experience, or target customers by language in Klaviyo to send flows in multiple languages.
- See Using variables with the notification node for a list of available variables to personalize the customer experience.
- Review the experience to verify it is configured to your requirements before saving and activating the experience.
Step 3 - Save and activate the experience
- Click Save. Test the cross-sell experience to ensure it runs as expected.
- Click Activate when you are ready to go live with the experience.
- Select Save & activate.
You can deactivate an experience at any time, but you cannot edit an experience after activation.
Test the Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience
Test the Cross-Sell experience to confirm it functions as expected. When you perform a test you can force a customer through the experience allowing you to evaluate the customer journey before activating the experience.
There are two options available to test the Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience.
Option 1
- Click Upsell & Cross-Sell in the merchant portal and select Upcoming order.
- In the Your flows section, click the three vertical dot menu and select Test flow.
- Search for the target customer using the customer's email or customer ID. Select the customer and then select Run flow. The email notification configured in the template is sent at this time, assuming the customer has opted into marketing emails.
- Click View results to navigate to the customer details page to review the results of the test.
Option 2
- Click Cross-Sell & Upsell in your merchant portal and select Upcoming order.
- Select an existing experience or create a new experience to access the canvas.
- Click the vertical three dot icon and select Test flow.
- Search for the target customer using the customer's email or customer ID. Select the customer and then select Run flow. The email notification configured in the template is sent at this time, assuming the customer has opted into marketing emails.
- Click View results to navigate to the customer details page to review the results of the test.
You can also test the experience from the customer's perspective:
- Check your email to preview the email notification that is sent if you're using an email address that accepts promotional marketing
- View the customer's customer portal to confirm how the promoted product is displayed to customers
Operational analytics
Operational analytics allow you to review in-line metrics such as:
- The number of customers who entered the experience, filtered by trigger conditions,
- The number of emails sent
- The Average Order Value (AOV)
Complete results of the experience are not displayed until all customers who entered the experience have their next charge processed, or they cancelled their next charge. Metric results are delayed until the charge processes if a customer delays their charge.
For example, metric results are delayed until the next charge processes in a month if a customer is on a monthly subscription frequency.
Additionally, metrics are based on historical data and do not start from 0 when the flow is activated.
For example, if an Upcoming Order Cross-Sell is set to trigger on the 6th order (with a LTV of 150) and the customer in a segment already has 5 orders with an LTV of 150 before the cross-sell flow is activated, once they have their next order processed (order 6), the cross-sell will trigger.
Review the experience to access its metrics:
- Click Cross-Sell & Upsell in your merchant portal and select Upcoming order.
- Click on the specific Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience.
- Click the bar graph icon at the top of the flow canvas. This will populate metrics under each node in the flow canvas.
The following metrics appear on the Cross-Sell offer node:
- Claimed: The number of customers who claimed the offer.
- Declined: The number of customers who declined the offer.
- Pending: The number of customers who did not claim or decline the offer, and the offer is still active on their account.
- Expired: The number of customers who did not claim or decline the offer, and the offer is no longer active on their account. This happens if a customer enters another experience that overwrites their first offer with a new offer.
- Branch Metrics: The successfully processed charges containing the cross-sell product from the Subscription Experience. These metrics include AOV, order processed, total added revenue, and total revenue.
Considerations
Consider the following when using the Upcoming Order Cross-sell template:
- Custom customer portal themes are not compatible.
- The prepaid subscription order number is based on the actual prepaid charge, not the orders customers prepaid for. The cross-sell offer is added to the next prepaid charge.
- You can add preset bundles as the cross-sell offer, though you cannot use customizable bundles since customers cannot automatically make bundle selections.
- You cannot use dynamic bundles as a trigger filter when configuring the Subscription Experience.
- After accepting the cross-sell offer, customers cannot remove or manage the offer separately from the order. Only an admin can perform these actions.
- Cross-Sell offers do not appear in RechargeSMS.
- Stores that have migrated to Recharge from another platform will not consider legacy order counts. Migrated customer order counts will start from 0.
- Inactive flows will not have updated branch metrics. If you need to fresh your metrics, contact Recharge Support.
- Cross-Sell experiences that offer fixed-amount discounts do not run for multi-currency customers if the currency setting to convert fixed-price discounts to the customer's currency is disabled. If the setting is enabled, experiences that offer fixed discounts will run for all customers and addresses. Multi-currency customers will auto-convert the discount amount to the customer's currency.
- Recharge does not recommend having both the Cross-Sell template and a Workflow by Recharge triggering simultaneously on the same order, as it can lead to unexpected customer issues.
- Two experiences cannot be triggered at the same time. For example, if an Upcoming Order Cross-Sell and Cancellation Prevention Subscription Experience are triggered on order number 3, the most recently created experience triggers.
FAQs
Can you cross-sell a product immediately after checkout on the Thank you Page?
No. The Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience can only target on or after the first recurring order. Recharge is exploring a post-purchase cross-sell offer available after checkout through other methodologies that may be available in the future.
When is the notification sent from Recharge regarding the customer receiving a free gift or cross-sell offer?
A notification is sent immediately after the free product is added to the queued charge. These notifications are only sent to customers who have opted into marketing emails and Recharge emails, otherwise, they are skipped.
Can I use an Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience to cross-sell subscription products?
No, the Upcoming Order Cross-Sell Subscription Experience only works on one-time products at this time.