The Cross-Sell Email Sequence: Why It's Essential + How To Set One Up
Feb 6, 2026
We’ve all heard of a few of the most common email sequences:
The welcome sequence, where you welcome new subscribers and introduce yourself
The cart abandonment sequence, where you try to recoup some of those lost purchases
The inactive re-engagement sequence (trying to reengage those lapsed subscribers that have become inactive)
And while those are important-
I want to say something that mIgHt ShOcK yOu....
One of the most underutilized (and underrated) sequences you can have is one that most businesses never seem to set up:
The email cross-sell sequence.
(A cross-sell email sequence: an automated sequence that sells your buyers something based on a purchase they have made in the past.)
And I can tell you from personal experience:
If you have a business and you don’t set this sequence up…
It’s costing you money.
Don’t be silly - get it set up.
Why Is A Cross-sell Email Sequence So Important?
Here’s the main thing to understand:
Cross-sell sequences only go out to buyers. And, as you probably already know as a business owner:
Customers are the most valuable subscribers you have.
Two things to keep in mind:
These people have already demonstrated that they will buy from you.
People that have bought at least once are something like ~9 times more likely to buy from you than somebody who has yet to make that first purchase
What this means in the context of generating more revenue?
You need to give your buyers more chances to buy.
It sounds simple. But so many businesses (perhaps yours included) neglect this.
"The same offer to everyone at all times."
In other words, not optimized for revenue at all.
And honestly, setting up a cross sell email sequence (or multiple) is often treated as “just another thing on the to-do list…
Which makes it less likely that it ever gets done.
This is leaving money on the table. Pure and simple.
A full email suite constantly firing at your business is the closest you will ever get to magical internet money…
And a cross-sell sequence is one of the most important ones to have set up.
Six Steps To Setting Up A Cross-sell Email Sequence
1) Map out your product stack.
What do you offer? What are the main products people buy? Which offers would be a nice complimentary cross-sell to them?
This “nice complimentary” part is important. A cross-sell shouldn’t be some random thing you throw their way. Instead, it should be a natural “next step” after what they just purchased.
Spend a few hours mapping these out. It will give you a high level view of exactly what you’re working with, and where exactly in your email system a cross-sell makes the most sense.
I literally recommend a big piece of paper and pen for this. It helps to draw this stuff out with your hands.
2) Get your tech set up.
Once you have the idea of the cross-sell, it’s time to move to the implementation.
There is usually some combination here of:
subscriber purchased a product
subscriber has had 10-14 days to use that product
subscribers gets an automated cross-sell email sequence selling them something else
Not that complicated-
But you need to test these things to make sure everything functions as it should.
3) Set up a discount.
Like I said before, the very idea of a cross-sell email sequence is to sell something to a past buyer.
Your buyers are your most valuable subscribers-
So it helps to have some kind of exclusive discount available only to them.
(This obviously incentivizes them to spend more on your pretty little biz.)
4) Write your emails.
Good copy is important here. Will you make sales even if your emails are crap? Sure. Some people just want to spend money.
But you’ll make a lot more money if your emails are decent. So here is the three-step process I recommend you follow in your emails (you can go through this process in one email, or spread it out over several):
Acknowledge what they’ve already bought in the past.
Shine the light on the “next problem” they have
Position your next cross-sell product at the bridge that allows them to overcome that problem.
Do this, and your cross-sell email sequence won’t feel like a sale, but rather a natural offering from a business that gives a shit.
And that’s when you make bank.
5) Make sure the logic works.
I don’t want to make this sound confusing. It’s really not. But you need to make sure that the logic your cross-sell sequence follows actually functions (and makes sense).
Example: you don’t want people on your “Evergreen” list when they are currently being sold to.
(Too many conflicting messages and diversion of attention.)
So, take a few minutes and really think through each step of your cross-sell automation. Might feel a bit confusing at first-
But it starts to make sense when you focus on the path people go down.
(This is the sort of thing that’s much better visualized, so in the next section I'll be going over in detail a cross-sell sequence I created myself.)
And obvious point: run yourself though it as a “test subscriber” before you set it live.
Which brings me to the most exciting part:
6) Set it live.
An email cross-sell sequence is one of those sequences that will usually start brining in cash immediately. (Again, because you are giving people who spend money another chance to spend money.)
The exact timeline will obviously differ depending on how many leads you have, how big your list is, and what you have to sell (and for how much).
But once you have it set up-
You’re basically done.
But one last tip: don’t “set it and forget it.”
Always be tweaking things and figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and what could be improved.
This is one of the big benefits of email marketing:
It’s relatively fast and easy (and agile) to test things out.
And usually:
The more you test things >
The more you figure out what works >
The more money you end up making.
A Real Example Of A Cross-sell Email Sequence
Here is a cross-sell sequence I currently have set up for one of my businesses, Cleo Lingo. We sell digital products that help people learn Egyptian Arabic.
I am going to walk you through each step of this email cross-sell sequence. Understand the basic principles at play, and it becomes much easier to apply them to your own cross-sell sequences at your business.
Two things to keep in mind:
The people in this cross-sell email sequence just completed The Egyptian Arabic Crash Course (a crash course that gives people a basic primer on Egyptian Arabic)
The main offer for these people is Egyptian Arabic Conversations (Beginner) (a much larger and in-depth course)
Let’s get started:
(You will probably have to zoom in on this picture or download it to your device to see it perfectly.)
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This entire automation starts when people are added to the group “Cross-sell: after The Egyptian Arabic Crash Course”
People automatically get added to this group after they complete the seven day post-enrollment sequence of my course Egyptian Arabic Crash Course.
The reasoning here:
They are a beginner that just went through the Crash Course, which is a very basic (and not super in-depth) course.
The main cross-sell offer is Egyptian Arabic Conversations (Beginner), a much larger and “legit” course.
(Keep in mind that I say “main” offer. Will explain in a second.)
Before we get to the sales emails, I put the person in the NOT READY FOR BROADCAST group (which I also remove them from at the very end before they exit the automation).
This is the same group that I EXCLUDE from all my broadcast emails.
This means anybody that is currently in some kind of email sequence (the NOT READY FOR BROADCAST group) doesn’t get my broadcast emails.
The reasoning: all their focus is on the main goal of that sequence (selling them something, or trying to get them to consume what they already bought).
The delays at the beginning (1 minute and then 5 minutes) are just to give my ESP MailerLite time to “catch up.”
Things can lag a bit if all steps happen simultaneously, and just a brief minutes-long delay helps with things.
After this, we come to the first conditional split:
If they ARE NOT in the group “Product: Egyptian Arabic Conversations (Beginner)”, that means they haven’t bought that course. They get sent down the “No” path, and get emails that market them that course. (Six emails over five days. The CTA link goes to a sales page with a countdown timer that triggers as soon as they enter this automation. Once the timer expires the sales page is locked and they exit the automation.)
If they ARE in the group “Product: Egyptian Arabic Conversations (Beginner)”, that means they HAVE bought that course. They get sent down the “Yes” path, and a similar conditional path for another course of mine: The Ultimate Egyptian Arabic Vocabulary System.
Same thing here:
If they don’t have that product, they get sent similar emails (obviously changes a bit to reflect the product).
If they do have that product, I simply exit them out of the automation.
That’s about it.
You will see at the end of every path there are two things that happen:
They are removed from the NOT READY FOR BROADCAST group (so they can continue receiving broadcast emails)
They exit the flow / automation
In this way, I am able to sell more things to my past buyers on autopilot.
And that, ladies and gents, is the power of the lowly cross-sell.
This sequence makes me me money every week on autopilot, in a super niche category (people learning Egyptian Arabic). Get one set up at your own business-
And that's when the cash starts to flow. :)
A Good Cross-sell Email Sequence = More Money On Autopilot
The entire purpose of this sequence can be expressed in just six words:
Give buyers more chances to buy.
Sounds obvious, but people that have bought in the past are the ones that are most likely to buy in the future.
That means when you utilize a cross-sell sequence to put more offers in front of them-
You make more money.
Your challenge for the next 30 days:
Get a cross-sell email sequence set up.
Future you will thank you. :)
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