Making an automation system like Infusionsoft or Office AutoPilot carry out mundane human tasks takes a bit of planning. I often map out the logical decisions and steps with a flowcharting program like Visio. Then I’ll to put the implementation steps in sequential order using Nozbe so I can check off each step as I set it up.
This week, I was asked to create a one-click Subscription upsell process with Infusionsoft.
Here’s the challenge:
Let’s say that the base-level sale is a $50.00 monthly subscription, and the first upsell is $150.00 a month. Since you already made the first sale, your customer has already paid $50.00 and is now in a subscription payment program. How do you smoothly upsell an online subscription program without having to make a bunch of hand-entered payment adjustments?
I went over 1-Click upsell basics in February. That post covered selling single products. Here are some advanced techniques needed to upsell subscription programs with Infusionsoft:
Since the customer already paid you $50.00, you’ll first need to create a special single product priced at $100 to make up the difference between $50.00 and $150.00. If your subscription levels are Silver and Gold, you might call this product “Gold Upgrade”.
Next, you’ll need to set up a generic “payment plan” in the Shopping Cart area that tells Infusionsoft to charge the purchase immediately in full. Give it a neutral name like “Subscription Upgrade”.
As we saw in the basic method, creating Infusionsoft 1-Click Upsells requires setting up what Infusionsoft calls a “bundle”. This is done via the Miscellaneous tab under Order settings. So, go ahead and make a “bundle” called “Gold Upgrade Bundle” that includes both the $100.00 “Gold Upgrade” product and the “Gold Subscription” at $150.00 a month.
In your webform for the one-click upsell you’ll create an Action that runs an order. You’ll select the “Gold Upgrade” bundle and the “Subscription Upgrade” payment plan. When you set up this Action, you’ll also have the opportunity to set a free trial period for the “Gold Subscription”, so set that to 30 days. Last, inside this Action, run another action that cancels the level-1 “Silver Subscription” so that future payments at this level won’t run.
Now, upon purchasing the one-click upsell your customer will have been charged a total of $150.00 for the first month ($50 + $100) and will be charged $150 monthly starting in 30 days.
It turns out my client this week wanted two upsells, not just one. I just had to apply this same process with some extra attention to the sales process logic:
What if the person didn’t buy upsell #2 but did buy upsell #3?
This was solved by creating a total of three special products and three bundles. One set was for the Silver upsell, and two sets were needed to handle the two possible upsell paths to Platinum. By using tags, the form Action on the third sales page checked to see if the customer had purchased the first upsell or not, ran the appropriate bundle, and deleted any prior existing subscription plans purchased in this sales process.
Of course everyone uses blogs these days, so we needed to run the required web form level PHP scripting from inside a WordPress page as I describe here.
