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How to create personalized upsell content campaigns

Implement a campaign that uses personalized messaging to drive upsells and cross-sells while understanding buying behaviors to increase average order size.

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Creating personalized upsell content campaigns enable businesses to generate additional revenue by encouraging customers to purchase higher-value products or services. This boosts customer LTV and retention by offering relevant product recommendations. Personalized offers increase satisfaction and promote premium features, strengthening customer relationships by showing an understanding of their needs.

Step 1: Add the required Sources

In your workspace, add a new prod or dev source for your website and another for your order processing system. This should be your website where checkout events will be tracked and the system that captures completed orders. These sources will be responsible for collecting the required Track Events and sending them to Segment.

Sign Up or Log In to Segment

First, access the Segment platform by signing up or logging into your existing account.

Create a Source for Your Website

A source in Segment acts as the origin of data you collect, such as user interactions on your website.

In your Segment workspace, navigate to the Sources section.
Click the Add Source button.
From the catalog of sources, select JavaScript (for websites).
Provide a name for your source, e.g., "i.e. Company Website - Dev or Prod".
Optionally, add labels for organization.
Enter your website URL.
Click Create Source button.

Install the Segment Snippet

After creating your source, Segment will provide you with a JavaScript snippet.

Copy the JavaScript snippet provided by Segment.
Paste the snippet into the <head> tag of your site to install Segment.

If you need to connect your website, mobile app, or server as a source please refer to our documentation on these touchpoints.

Step 2: Track your events

In order to build the funnels needed to personalize campaigns, you'll need to track two key events: 'Product Added' from your website and 'Order Completed' from your server source.

Product Added: Manually add this event to your site (See V2 Ecommerce spec).
Order Completed: Manually add this event to your site (See V2 Ecommerce spec).

Event Descriptions and Properties for E-commerce Tracking — Diagram detailing e-commerce events, including 'Product Added' and 'Order Completed,' and their respective properties.

In this example, we're not only tracking the event 'Product Added', but also sending additional properties like 'product_id', 'product_name', 'product_brand', 'product_price', and 'product_category (not shown in image). These properties provide important context about the event and can be extremely valuable in your analysis. Learn more about properties.

It should be noted that 'Order Completed' should trigger an Identify call because this event allows you to tie a user to their actions and record traits about them i.e., first_name, last_name, email. This can further be used for personalized messaging in your re-engagement campaign.

Only Identify calls can add and update user traits to a profile. For connections-only customers, the Identify event can still be mapped to downstream destinations to create/update user profiles.

Step 3: Add Destinations

Now, you'll need to decide where you want to send this data—for this use case it could be email, SMS, push notifications, and/or connecting to a paid media destination like Facebook Ads or Google Ads. In your Segment workspace, add a new destination and select your tool of choice from the catalog. This destination will receive the data collected by your source and use it according to your needs. We recommend starting with an analytics tool to see the events flowing and build out the funnels you need to measure.

Step 4: Test your setup

Finally, test your setup to ensure data is being collected and sent correctly. You can do this by performing the actions you're tracking on your dev website and checking if the corresponding events appear in your Segment debugger and analytics tool.

The Source Debugger is a tool that helps you confirm that API calls made from your website, mobile app, or servers arrive to your Segment Source, so you can troubleshoot your Segment setup even quicker.

Your data may not show up instantaneously and there may be a delay, but once the data is flowing you are ready to move to the next step.

Step 5: Analyze and activate

Once your setup is looking accurate and data is flowing into your destinations, you can start analyzing it. For instance, you can analyze the data to understand user behavior throughout the ordering process. For example, you can identify users who have already added an item to their cart and may be interested in buying additional recommended products or upgrading their service before completing their order. Then, create personalized marketing campaigns to encourage these users to add additional items to their cart or upgrade their tier of service to increase the average order size.

Below is an example of an upsell campaign designed to increase average order size. Leveraging the events and properties you're tracking, you can use a similar approach to deliver personalized experiences for customers who may be interested in adding additional products to their order.

Socks and shoelaces with zigzag patterns and a button to view each product — Suggested products

Final Thoughts

When customers receive personalized product recommendations, they are more likely to feel understood by the business. Personalized upsell campaigns can boost average order size by encouraging the purchase of related products or higher-value services, generating additional revenue. By leveraging Twilio Segment's capabilities to track, analyze, and act on user data, businesses can deliver tailored communications that drive both upsell and cross-sell opportunities, increasing revenue while strengthening customer relationships.

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