121: Adding An Upsell to Your Subscription Box Checkout

If you've got extra box product laying around from past months, listen up, because this episode is for you. Come join me. Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams. Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. So glad to be back here with you guys. All the listeners today. I want to talk to you a little bit about adding an upsell to your subscription box checkout. Now, last month I was talking in our Mastermind Voxer channel, and what that is is I have a mastermind full of HighLevel students. They get direct access to me through this app called Voxer. It's a really cool app. I use it with my team a lot, but we have conversations back and forth throughout the days. And last month, one of my mastermind members, Lo Hickson with Passion and Growth, she'd just come off her launch. She was giving us a launch debrief in our Voxer channel, and we were talking through some of the things that she did. And she was talking about this one-click upsell that she put into her launch process for the first time. It was right at checkout. And basically she just has a bunch of extra inventory right now. And frankly, I do too. I've got a lot of inventory sitting around. And so I was listening to what she had talked about. She was talking about how she set up, you know, a box that people could buy right away after they've checked out from her subscription. And she ended up having a 40% conversion. Listen, that is a huge conversion rate. So that means 40% of all the people that signed up for her subscription also checked out for one of these boxes, a leftover box. I was mind blown. I was mind blown for so many reasons. Number one, the first thing, it hugely increased her average order value for the launch because now instead of selling one monthly subscription, she sold us— she sold a subscription and a box. So increased her AOV very quickly. It reduced inventory that she had laying around And here's the kicker, and this is what I love the most: she sold them at full price. They were discounted— they weren't discounted at all. She sold them for full price, y'all. I got our team on board very, very quickly. I was getting ready to launch in a couple weeks, and I thought, oh, this is good, we have to do this. So we got busy and we set this up for both my subscription box and my t-shirt club because we were getting ready to launch both of those, and we sold 77 boxes, y'all. 77 boxes of extra stuff laying around our shelf was gone. I got cash back in the bank. My new subscribers were super happy to receive a box so quickly, and that's exactly what we did. We made these first priority. So as we're going through the launch, we're actually prepping for the next month's box as we're going through launch. So we're busy doing that, we're busy doing everyday orders. And I made it very clear to the team that these were first priority boxes. So when we saw someone purchase one of these, we had to stop what we were doing and go get it packed and shipped out, monogrammed, packed, and shipped immediately. I needed our new subscribers to get this quickly to keep them happy and excited and all of that. So there couldn't be a big delay on that. What's the fun of that? If that— if I'm going to have a big delay, like, what's the whole point of getting a box right now if you're actually not going to get it right now? So that was key number one, was to make sure you have some processes in place to get that box out quickly. Now I'm going to walk you through really quickly— it's like a 4-part setup of how we actually made this happen on the back end. And just know that depending on what platform you're on this is going to be a little different for you. There are different ways that you can do this. My subscription is on WooCommerce, so I'm using WooCommerce subscription. So I'm going to tell you exactly what I did, and then I can also kind of give you a couple suggestions. I think this would be very easy to do on both Shopify and Subly, you know, with their built-in stuff that they have. But I'm going to tell you how we set it up on WooCommerce so that you can kind of put all the pieces in place. For yourself. It was not hard at all. There were 4 pieces to this, okay? So the first piece was the product listing. I had to put the product listing up. What I was able to do was hide that product listing so really nobody could purchase a past box unless you went through and subscribed. So the first thing was to build the product listing. Now I use the word surprise box, and I got— that's a tip from Lo— because She wanted to be able to make this a little bit generic so that she could pick from whatever past box she had laying around and that she wouldn't have to go in and change it all the time. Okay, and so we set up the product listing as a surprise box, and we made it very clear in the description that, um, this was one of our past boxes. I needed to make that clear because if somebody had canceled and come back I needed them to understand that they might already have this box, and I didn't want to get into customer service issues. So I made it very clear that they would receive one of our past boxes, and no, they couldn't pick, and no, I wasn't going to tell them. So we used two of our past boxes that we had heavy inventory on, and I used two of them for, for a couple reasons. And let me kind of explain that to you. So we were launching in the end of April, So we were at the end of April at this point, and so I had a February box that I probably had 40 or 50 left over of, and I had a March box which I think I had 60 or 70 boxes left over. So I wanted to use these two boxes. Now, the reason I didn't just use all of the March box was there was a sweatshirt in the March box, and so my concern, someone that's signing up at the end of April, beginning of May, that lives in the South, there's probably a really low chance that they're going to be wearing a sweatshirt very much longer. And so I decided to take the two boxes, and I told my team, if they are from the northern states and they buy the surprise box, I want you to send them the March box. If they are from the southern states and they buy the surprise box, I want you to send them the February box, because the February box was a backpack purse that we had with an AirTag. And so it wasn't like climate-specific like the March box was. The March box had a sweatshirt and fuzzy slippers and a coffee mug and stuff like that. So I wanted to make sure that these people had a good experience with their surprise box. It's going to help with my retention for them. So I didn't want to send a bunch of Southern people a sweatshirt at the end of April, beginning of May. Okay, so that's You just have to look at what you have. You also don't want to send them a Valentine's box or a Christmas box or something like that. You've got to think about what you have, because I did have some January boxes left that are more Valentine's geared, but I'm gonna wait and I'm gonna, I'm gonna liquidate those in a different way. But you need to make it a win for this brand new subscriber, not just a win for you. So that's really, really important. So number 1, build the product listing. Okay, and then number 2, you're going to build a landing page. So I built— I didn't build this, my team built this. We built a simple landing page that really acted as a thank you page. You know how when you check out for something and then the next thing that pops on your screen is thank you for your order? That's what we did here. We built a simple thank you page as a landing page. And it just said, thank you for becoming a subscriber. And then we made the offer for the surprise box with a button at checkout. Now it's important to note that this comes up after they sign up for the subscription box. We don't want them adding it to their cart with their subscription. We don't want to distract them. We want them to finish their subscription box checkout and then we're going to hit them with the upsell afterwards. So we added it as an upsell afterwards, more of like an— it's an add-on, but they've already checked out their subscription box cart, is already checked out. Okay, so this was actually a separate purchase, and so we built a landing page that acted as a thank you page. Okay, number 1, build the product listing. Number 2, build the landing page. Number 3, You want to connect the thank you page to trigger upon checkout. So that's just a simple connection. When they check out, this thank you page pops up. That's number 3. Number 4, we set up an email automation inside Klaviyo. So if they signed up for a subscription and they did not purchase the surprise box, they were triggered to get this email. and it was the same information that had on the landing page in that email. And it was just one more chance to get this offer, get this upsell back in front of them. Sometimes people are checking out on their phone and then they're distracted, or they click off the screen too quickly, and so— and they can't get back to it once they've clicked off it. Maybe they've thought about it and said, no, I just spent money on the subscription, I don't need to buy more things. But maybe they're still thinking about it and we want to hit it again. So we want to give them another opportunity to go ahead and grab one of our surprise boxes. And so basically it's 4 things that you need to set up and you already have this product. I don't want you to go buy a bunch of product for this. This is really meant to be to liquidate some things that you already have. Okay. And I love also that Lo talked about What if I, you know, if I run out of surprise boxes, I can put a surprise box together. I can curate a box of things together, and that's why she called it a surprise box. So let's go through the 4 steps. So just so that you're clear, because it really is easy, it's just connecting these 4 things together. Number 1, build the product listing for the surprise box. Number 2, build a landing page to act as your thank you page. Number 3, connect the thank you page to trigger upon checkout. And number 4, set up an email automation for anyone that doesn't purchase the surprise box to get hit with it in their inbox after checkout as well. It's so clear. It's so clear, and that's why it's successful. People are signing up now for your subscription box. That typically means they want something now in the moment. We have like an instant gratification. You know, mindset these days. And if they can afford it, they're going to buy it. Not everyone's going to buy it. It's okay. But most people want things now and it's an opportunity. They're already coming to sign up for your subscription, so they're already telling you that I really like your subscription. And if I can go ahead and get a Pass box, yeah, let me have one of those too. I'd do it all day long if I was going to sign up for a subscription box right now. It meant that I really was excited about it, and it also would mean that I would want the last box. 9 times out of 10, they see the last box, and that's why they're coming to sign up for your subscription. So if it means I get one of your past boxes, I'm in all the time. So this is really a no-brainer offer. It's a no-brainer offer to go ahead and connect, and it doesn't mean that you have to only do this during a launch. We set it up during my launch. But now, as we get ready to add some people in from the waitlist, as we've had cancellations, this trigger's already set up. So anybody that signs up from our waitlist is going to go through this, and maybe I'll sell some more boxes. All you have to do is turn it off when you don't have any more boxes to sell. But what a great way to do this. We did the same thing with my t-shirt club. So we offered a mystery— a surprise t-shirt, one of our past t-shirts. By checking out. And the great thing is we're not telling them. So if they're a size medium when they check out for my subscription, I'm going to go look and see what leftover shirts I have in a size medium. So simple. And ship one to them. We sold a lot of shirts this way too. A lot of shirts that were extras sitting on my shelf taking up my cash flow. It's really simple. I want you to take action on this. 4 things, get it connected, and let's sell some extra inventory and get some cash back in our bank account. If the idea of creating a subscription box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com, get on our waitlist, and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.