💡 TIP: Read our Academy module Subscription Foundations: Optimize Your Subscription Program with Unit Economics for a foundational understanding of subscription AOV.

Key Takeaways

• Orders with cross-sell items have, on average, a 50-60% higher AOV than those without cross-sell items.
• Subscriptions prime your business for cross-selling by leveraging existing relationships and convenience. 
• Use subscription cross-selling as a selling point for your program; and highlight that subscribers benefit from exclusive discounting for cross-sells.
• Use the subscriber lifecycle to cross-sell customers. Link to opportunities from the subscription manager, transactional notifications, and marketing emails. 1-click cross-sell is a powerful way to increase subscriber spend through normal transactional emails.

Why subscription cross-selling works

The proof is in the pudding: subscription orders with cross-sell items have an average of 50-60% higher AOV than orders without cross-sell items (and have seen results up to 600%, or 6x, increase).* But why, exactly, is this the case? And how can you realize similar growth for your business?

In today’s module, we’ll walk you through designing a seamless cross-sell experience for your subscribers and cover:

• Why subscription cross-selling works
• What you should cross-sell to subscribers
• How to design a good cross-sell offer
• How to promote subscription add-ons

83% of Consumers agree: convenience matters

Consumer convenience is playing a larger role in purchasing power than ever before. The National Retail Federation reports that 83% of consumers feel convenience is more important while shopping in current day. And when polling specifically online shoppers, our beloved DTC crowd, over half of this group say convenience is significantly more important now - compared with just 33% of average shoppers. And cross-selling subscription orders may be the most convenient way to shop yet.

Ordergroove’s cross-sell feature lets subscribers add any products to their upcoming subscription order as either a one-time or recurring subscription add-on. This process is streamlined to fewer than 3 clicks total, simplifying the checkout process and eliminating the need for additional payment input.

Ordergroove merchant Peet’s Coffee incentivizes subscribers to add additional items to their upcoming subscription orders with ease, increasing subscription AOV and total subscriber lifetime spend.

Subscription cross-sells offer customers more value

Customer experience led growth is a newer tactic to the market, but quickly emerging as the key to sustainable growth. Because subscribers consistently drive value for your business, rewarding their loyalty with financial and experiential incentives is more profitable than trying to acquire a net new customer. 

We designed our subscription cross-sell experience in line with this philosophy - rewarding subscribers for their repeat purchasing with you. Subscription cross-sells offer subscriber-exclusive discounts on recurring and one-time cross-sell add-ons, driving customer value and enhancing the overall subscriber experience.

What products should you include in subscription cross-sells?

We might be a little biased, but we can’t think of a product that shouldn’t be eligible for a subscription cross-sell. Continuity products should obviously be both subscription and cross-sell eligible; but even non repeatable products should be one-time cross-sell eligible for subscribers. Use your subscribable catalog to proactively understand and meet subscriber needs for add-ons like complementary tools.

For example:

A coffee merchant should make all consumables subscription eligible, but can set their hot beverage tumblers to be cross-sell eligible - offering subscribers an exclusive discount when they add a tumbler to their upcoming coffee order. This incentivizes subscribers to increase their order spend. 

💡 TIP: In Ordergroove, setting a non-subscription eligible product to cross-sell-eligible makes this product available for one-time cross-sell only. Their discount will default to your regular subscription discount - but talk to your Ordergroove CSM if you're interested in offering a different % off for one-time cross-sells.

How much % off you should offer for subscription cross-sells

Although convenience is one of the largest reasons to incorporate subscription cross-selling, a discount certainly doesn't hurt. Between 19 and 24% of all retail and consumer packaged good subscribers sign-on for the associated financial benefits, McKinsey found. So how do you determine what discount to offer?

We recommend matching your regular subscription offer so subscribers can enjoy the exclusive benefit of both one-time and recurring add-on discounting, and potential subscribers can see the value in signing up. Here's our quick, 30 minute exercise that'll help you to find the right subscription discount/incentive for your optimal business profit margins. 

How to design your cross-sell offer

Turning cross-sell on for your subscribers is a simple process that’ll set you up with a default cross-sell offer. We recommend making certain stylistic customizations to your cross-sell offer to enhance and promote this cross-sell experience. 

Here’s a breakdown of our stylistic recommendations, with the average lift in enrollment rate of each feature when A/B tested in a closed study of 13 Ordergroove merchants.

🌟 Bold your offer copy + color differentiate → Avg 17% Boost

🌟 Subscription offer placed above one-time offer → Avg 11% Boost

🌟 Discount/Incentive Displayed → Avg 199% Boost

And here's an example of a live, best-in-class cross-sell offer before and after it's been added to the next subscription order:

Peet's Coffee

How to promote subscription add-ons

So it’s clear - subscription cross-sells are an extremely valuable tool for your business to drive higher customer spend and lifetime value. But an offer is only as good as its awareness. So here’s how to promote subscription add-ons to drive higher subscription AOV with your current subscriber base, and even acquire new subscribers to your program.

• Market subscription add-ons to your subscriber base
• Market exclusive subscriber add-on discounting to your wider customer base

Use the subscriber lifecycle to market cross-sells

Throughout the subscriber lifecycle, you’ll communicate with each customer for transactional and marketing purposes. Use these as opportunities to point toward a landing page for all cross-sell-eligible products. We recommend linking to this landing page in a few different ways.

Subscription Transactional Emails

Transactional notifications like the Order Reminder email provide opportune moments for cross-selling leading up to an upcoming subscription order. In the copy of every Order Reminder email, we recommend linking to your subscription cross-sell landing page. And in all transactional emails, we recommend implementing a visual carousel marketing all subscription benefits, including cross-sell.

Use your order reminder email to cross-sell customers before their upcoming subscription order.

💡 TIP: If you use our Klaviyo or Attentive integrations for ESP or SMS purposes, use 1-click actions to cross-sell subscriptions in your Order Reminder email flows. Here's our full module on setting up 1-click cross-sell for your Order Reminder email flows.

The Subscription Manager

Subscribers can manage all active and inactive subscriptions through their subscription manager. Because they’ll traffic this portal fairly often through their purchasing journey, we recommend linking your cross-sell landing page here for maximum visibility to the right audience.

La Colombe links a landing page with cross-sell eligible products in their Subscription Manager, allowing subscribers to browse add-on options from their management portal.

Use cross-sell benefits as a subscription selling point

Because cross-sell benefits subscribers with exclusive access to one-time discounts and combined order shipping savings, you should use these benefits to market subscriptions to your wider customer base to convert one-time buyers to subscribers. 

Program Marketing Emails

It’s a best practice to send Subscription Program Marketing emails to your wider marketing customer list generally (more on that here), but you should dedicate specific program marketing emails to cross-sell benefits.

Firebelly Tea markets subscription cross-sells as the “VIP treatment;” informing customers of one-time cross-sell discounts for active subscribers.

📝Try it now!

Subscription cross-sells drive a boost to your AOV, give your subscribers more exclusive value, and can be both a growth catalyst and acquisition tool for your subscription program. Here’s how to start leveraging subscription cross-sells today.

• Here’s how to configure and style your cross-sell experience, and here’s how to set products eligible for cross-sell.
• Here's how to calculate the most profitable subscription offer for your business's margins.
• For teams using non Ordergroove-hosted offers, here’s how to set up cross-sell via API.
• Here’s how to style and edit your transactional emails.
• Here’s how to set up 1-click cross-sell via our Klaviyo integration.

Suggested Modules

• Maximize Your Subscription Offer Profitability with Unit Economics
• Boost AOV with 1-Click cross-sells in Order Reminder Emails

*Closed analysis of FY 2023 Ordergroove customer subscription revenue