Architect Use Case: Cross-Selling

When a user purchases a particular product category or a specific product, you can send them a follow-up email or a web push notification promoting a cross-sell product through a cross-sell journey.

Let's say you would like to promote home accessories to those who buy home furniture and promote home appliances. Users who purchased home furniture enter the journey. After a week, you send a web push notification promoting home accessories. If they click the web push, it means they are interested in your offer. Then you can follow up with home appliances via email, web push, app push notification, or on-site and in-app. With this journey, you can create two extra purchases from one single purchase!

Another example is having a flight to a specific destination. You may promote “rent a car”, hotel around the destination before the user goes there. Moreover, you can detect the user persona and suggest some special offers accordingly. For example, you can offer the cheapest hotels for students whose age is under 22, also if the flight ticket is not a business type.

You can actualize this flow without bothering your users for any irrelevant content by easily setting your product content in a web push, app push notification, or email. You can also use the on-site channel to show a smart recommender campaign on your website with many different recommendation algorithms after the user makes a purchase. 

Goals

While nudging your users to come back to your website or app with Cross-Sell Journeys, you can also improve your average order value and revenue. Each targeted and converted user will help you:

• Multiply revenue,
• Drive purchase frequency,
• Increase average order value,
• Increase transactions,
• Boost conversion rate,
• Boost cross-sell.

Requirements

• Your website must have a cart structure where information about cart items is available.
• Cart items and purchase information must be collected. Once your website is mapped by Insider during your onboarding, Insider starts to collect this information by default. This does not require any additional integration.
• You should implement all objects under Insider Object Integration for the cart items and purchased items to be tracked.
• Before starting to use any channel in your journeys, integrations for the respective channels should be completed. Depending on the channels you want to use in your journeys, additional integrations might be required.
• In case you need to have some custom events, you need to create them and pass them to Insider.
• If you have a mobile app, you must have the SDK Integration implemented.

Creating a Cross-Selling Journey

You can create cross-selling journeys to drive your customers back to your website or app to purchase one more time along with many other custom use cases.

Consumer Electronics, Cosmetics, Fashion Retailer, Home & Furniture, Restaurant & Delivery

Imagine you have a clothing line. Sophia has bought a skirt in the past 14 days and now you would like to promote some complimentary products from a different category. First, you check if she makes any purchase from that category. If not, you check her reachability on the Web Push channel.

• If she is reachable on Web Push, you send a Web Push Notification that promotes the Red Collection.
• If she is not reachable on Web Push, you target her through Facebook Ads with the same content.

Airlines, OTA - Hotels & Accommodation

Let's say John has booked a round trip to Los Angeles, but he has not purchased any ancillaries. No better time to offer rental cars or hotel recommendations, right?

Using Architect's Dynamic Date feature, you can send John an Email 7 days before his flight to offer rental cars in LA and give out a voucher to drive him to rent a car. If he does not, you can send an SMS 3 days before his flight to recommend hotels in LA and offer a discount.

1. Select a starter

On Event

On Event starter tracks user events and takes them immediately on the journey when the users perform the specified event. You can select the purchase event to take users on a journey when they make a purchase. 

You can use the event parameters to filter the users based on the product or product category they purchased.

You can either use the purchase segment or find the same event in the Default & Custom Events.

On event starter considers every platform to take users (e.g. website, mobile app, offline data passed from CRM, etc.). You can have custom events for different scenarios such as booking, watching series, etc. 

If you have any extra conditions or segments to take users on the journey, you can add an optional segment filter to control if they meet your condition. For example, you can target the users who made a purchase and visited more than 10 product pages in the last 7 days.

On Dynamic Date

On Dynamic Date is a starter that triggers the journey based on the user’s date type attributes or date type event parameters. 

On Dynamic Date does not consider any attribute like which city, country, or destination the user booked a flight or hotel. You can add the Check Conditions element to the journey flow after the starter to check which category, destination, or city is related to the user’s purchase or booking event.

This starter triggers users once a day at 01.00 (GMT+0). You can consider this when adding your wait elements not to send messages at the white hours.

If you use the purchase event in the Dynamic Date starter, you can select the on the day of the event or after the date option.

User Website Action

This starter tracks user activities only on the website. You can use this starter if you want to target only the website users.

You can filter users based on the product categories they purchased from. 

User Website Action works only on the website. If you want to target users on your mobile app or want to use data passed from your end, you can use On Event, On Attribute Change, On Past Behavior or On Dynamic Date.

2. Add flow logic

Before creating content for any channel, you can add a Check Conditions element to filter users for different paths on the flow.

Before sending a message, you can also check if users are reachable on that channel. If not, you can try another channel on another path. Besides, you can use Next Best Channel to increase the possibility of engagement.

After sending a cross-selling message, you can check if the users complete your desired goal (e.g. purchasing again, renting a car, etc.). You can add a Wait element to give users some time and can add the Check Conditions element to check if they perform the specified action in the given duration. This logic helps you send more relevant and contextual messages by branching the journey flow into the different paths.

For example, you select the purchase segment to see whether a user has not made a purchase based on the waiting duration (2 days).

You can either use the Purchase event or find the same event under Events.

You can also use the standard segments to filter users.

The Wait element helps you have a break between two messages. The first message may be sent immediately. However, adding a wait element before the second message will avoid bothering users with a few messages in a short time.

3. Creating content

You can add different messages in all channels you have in the journey flow (e.g. email, SMS, app, or web push notification, on-site). You can customize your message content with the products that would be interesting to the users.

Email

You can customize the email template by adding cross-sell/complementary product images, links, names, etc.

On-Site

You can display recommended products on your website using the on-site channel. 

SMS

In-App

Facebook

You can send users who made a purchase from a particular category to the Facebook Custom Audience. You can have a remarketing campaign on Facebook to recommend complementary products.

Advanced Cross-Selling Journey

You can move your journey to an advanced level by checking user behavior and interactions. For example, you can check if the user’s discount affinity is high, and you can give out promo codes accordingly.

If you want to send different messages based on the category the user made a purchase from, you can have multiple paths in the Check Conditions. 

After setting the first tab, you can create more tabs, which will create different paths on the flow. You can differentiate the purchased product category on different tabs.

You can check if the users interact with the messages you sent from the journey and you can take actions accordingly. For example, if a user clicks a web push notification or clicks a URL inside an email, it means that the user responds to your campaign. So you can continue to interact via the same channel.

You can check multiple reachabilities on channels for users at the same time and you can lead them to the corresponding path.

You can have an A/B Split on the journey flow to compare different contents on the same or different channels. The autowinner leads users to the winner content/channels automatically.

You can set special goals beside purchase for the users who enter the cross-selling journey (e.g. ride booking, redeeming coupons, buying a particular product, etc.). You can have a custom event to set goals or you can use default events as well as their event parameters.

You can immediately exit the users from the journey when they meet the exit criteria. 

For example, the user made a purchase from the laptop category and entered the cross-selling journey. You will recommend complementary products (e.g. mouse, laptop cooler, etc.) using the messaging channels. But the user may buy these complementary products until you send a message with the recommended items. To not send already-bought product recommendations, you can exit users automatically from the journey regardless of where the user at in the journey flow.