Upsells. Upsells. Upsells

A few weeks back, I shared the graph below, showing a tangible change to beehiiv’s MRR trajectory.

This culminated in our biggest month ever, adding >$1.5m in ARR just to the core subscription business (and we’re not slowing down).

So how did this happen? Well, we tackled everything: Conversion, Acquisition, Churn (newsletter coming soon on this).

However, the thing that had the biggest impact was doubling down on upsells and finally getting them to work.

So here’s what I’m going to cover:

In SaaS, there are two main ways to do product-based upsells:

Both work, but my preferred approach is #2.

Why? When you’re building a tool like beehiiv, if you fully gate a feature, then that can never become part of a user’s workflow. As a result, to generate an upsell via that feature you are reliant on push notifications (product & email) to drive the conversion.

Every notification has an opportunity cost (i.e. you cannot sell the benefits and push a user to two features at once) AND there is significant diminishing returns as you send more notifications as a business.

Where does fully-gating a feature work well?

The more specific and focused a tool/product, the easier (and effective) it is to fully gate a product.

Users are effectively moving on a linear path through your product, where every feature builds on the one before, and gating the next one is easy to explain and the value proposition is clear for the user.

When does fully-gating a product start to fail?

The more complex a product, the harder it is for a user to know why they need a specific feature. This is especially true of ‘all-in-one’ platforms like beehiiv.

For context we have three main products (Email, Website builder and Ads), we then also have some major features like Automations, Segments, Boosts, Analytics and several more major ones in the works (watch this space).

Each of these is both powerful and complex so there is a natural learning curve. By gating entire parts of the product, you:

…enter the partial gate → this is how we have started gating our features at beehiiv (keep reading for more details)

[Sponsored] Increasing your growth rate means optimizing every part of the business. Maintaining margin and minimising unnecessary discounts is a key part of that. KeepCart makes that easy.

Stop coupon extensions before they even touch your checkout. KeepCart blocks 125+ plugins like Honey, CapitalOne Shopping, and Karma from auto-applying random codes and draining your margins.

Brands like Quince and Newton use KeepCart to protect revenue and keep every sale clean.

After months of using KeepCart, Mando says “It’s paid for itself multiple times over.”

Get 2 months free and start blocking today.

Our approach is to make sure users are able to access every feature in some way so they can start to use it day-to-day as part of their workflow.

In time, the goal is that it becomes a core part of their workflow, and they want additional functionality for that specific workflow and then upgrade to unlock it.

Web analytics is the perfect example of this.

The initial goal is to see how much traffic your website is getting → so everyone has access to this by default.

beehiiv’s customer base is made up of entrepreneurs and media businesses - all of whom are incredibly hungry for data. (Not to mention that these graphs are super addictive)

You’ve hooked them with their top-line website stats, but this immediately triggers the subsequent questions of:

We provide the answers to all of these questions, but behind the paywall gate. (see below)

The key here, is that every user can always see that the answers to their questions are right there when they check the free version of analytics.

We provide four detailed breakdowns for users

A key detail here is how each of these upgrade cards are designed (see below):

Everything up to this step, is about focusing the decision onto one specific feature, to reduce the noise.

However, at this point you have not seen the price. So once you click the upsell CTA, we then introduce you to all the other benefits you are getting by upgrading to help nudge you over the line.

Sounds simple, but it’s incredibly effective and (importantly) evergreen. Plus, it requires no notifications once they are using the most basic version.

Don’t fall into the trap of getting too granular with this gating.
Eg. we debated gating small pieces of functionality such as specific filters, date ranges etc to differentiate two of our higher tiers.

Not only was it a nightmare to justify and communicate to users, but it fundamentally wasn’t worth upgrading for, so anyone that did was going to have a substandard experience. (Focus on gating something that is so-good its a no-brainer decision to upgrade.)

Once you have nailed your core upsell motion, you can start to layer others on top of each other.

One of the reasons that beehiiv has seen so much growth from upsells is because there was already an established underlying upsell motion as people exceed their subscriber limits.

Our feature-based upsells are then layered on-top, which then unlocks more growth for our users, which then drives more subscribers and pushes them through the next subscriber limit

This core motion isn’t something that is isolated to email tools either. It can be replicated in lots of business models:

PS - I have a favor to ask!

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: https://the-release-notes.beehiiv.com/p/upsells-upsells-upsells

Thanks

Jake -