Stay AI’s ExperienceEngine is the comprehensive promotions builder that enables you to offer free products or products at a discount to subscribers at key points in their journey. Whether you’re rewarding loyalty or preventing churn, this tool helps you personalize experiences that increase customer satisfaction and long-term value.
This guide covers:
What ExperienceEngine is
How to build a promotion
🔧 What are Promotions powered by ExperienceEngine?
With promotions you can:
Offer free products or discounted products as a promotion
Run A/B tests to measure what actually works
Use our Churn Risk Identification AI to target subscriptions at risk of churn
To get started, go to your Stay AI Merchant Portal, then click Optimization > Promotions
📦 Choosing Your Promotion Type
Stay AI offers five templates to help you launch quickly and effectively
Each will determine who you are offering Promotions to and how they will be offered. Before we get into the types of promotions, it's important to understand the Promotion incentives you can offer.
🎁 Incentives
When creating a promotion in ExperienceEngine, you can choose from the following incentive types:
Free Product
Offered at no cost and automatically added to the customer’s subscription when eligible. No customer action required.Fixed Discount
The product is sent to the customer as an optional offer at a fixed price (based on your store’s currency).The customer must accept the offer for it to be added to their subscription.
Percent Discount
The product is sent to the customer as an optional offer at a percentage off the regular price.As with fixed discounts, the customer must accept the offer before it is applied.
Types of Promotion
Don’t A/B Test
Simply offer a free product or a discounted product offer to eligible subscribers.
A/B Test Against Control Group
Test the impact of offering a free product or a product at a discount against offering no promotion at all.
The control group receives nothing.
The test group receives either a free product or a discounted product offer
A/B Test Against Another Product
Compare two different promotional offers to see which performs better.
You can test between:
Two free products
One product at two different discounts
Two different products at the same or different discounts
Whatever combination you'd like
Segment Test by Churn Risk
Target subscribers flagged by Stay AI’s proprietary churn risk identification AI. These customers can be offered a free product to increase retention.
Optionally A/B test this offer against a control group for customers at risk of churn (set Control Group = 0% to skip).
You can also target non-risk customers with discounted product offers to test other upsell opportunities.
Up to four different offers can be configured and split tested as you see fit.
Segment by Churn Risk + A/B Test Non-Risk Incentives
This template extends the previous one by enabling A/B testing for non-churn-risk subscribers as well.
Define a control group for non-risk customers.
The rest will receive one of the discounted product offers OR entered into the control group and not receive an product offer
Pro Tip!
If you would like to not offer an incentive to the non-churn risk group, select any product in your store for an Incentive AND set the Control Group to 100%.
Important:
The percentage for each Incentive is based on the percentage after the control group is calculated.
For Example:
You set:
Control Group: 50%
Incentive A: 50%
Incentive B: 50%
How it breaks down for the Churn Risk Is Not Identified Subscriptions:
50% receive no offer (Control Group)
25% get Incentive A (50% of the remaining 50%)
25% get Incentive B (50% of the remaining 50%)
Offer Promotion To
🎯 Offer Promotion To Who Gets the Offer?
All Orders – All subscriptions are eligible
Orders Including All Selected Products – Must include all selected products
Orders Including One of the Selected Products – Must include at least one selected product
Orders Excluding Specific Products – Must not include any of the selected products
🔁 Order Cycle: When the Promotion Applies
Order Number
The promotion is applied to a specific order in the customer journey (e.g., their 2nd order).For example: If the offer is set to “Order 2,” it will be added to the subscription after Order 1 processes, and appear on Order 2.
All Orders, One Per Subscription
The promotion applies to the next order that processes for one of the customer’s subscriptions. After that, it won’t be offered again.For example: If a customer has two subscriptions after the promotion is enabled, it will be offered to the first subscription that processes an order.
All Orders, Customers Can Be Entered More Than Once
The promotion applies to the next order for each of the customer’s subscriptions (this includes checkout orders). Once the customer accepts the offer, they won’t be eligible again—even across other subscriptions.For example: If a customer has two subscriptions after the promotion is enabled, it will be offered each subscription after they processes their next order.
⏱️ Promotion Duration: How Long It Runs
Choose how long your offer should be active:
Until Turned Off
Runs continuously starting on the launch date, until manually turned off.Limited Time
Runs from the start date you set and ends automatically on your chosen end date.Limited Amount of Customers
Runs from the start date until a specified number of customers have received (or accepted) the offer.
✅ Final Steps
🏷 Name Your Promotion
Choose a name that helps you remember what you’re offering, when it runs, and who it’s for.
Example: "Free Gift - Product - Variant – Order 2"
🚦Set to Active or Paused
Active – Ready to launch right away
Paused – Save it now, finish or activate it later
💾 Save Your Promotion
Click Save—and that’s it! Your promotion is ready to go.
⚠️ Editing Promotions
While Stay AI lets you edit promotions, we don’t recommend making changes after subscriptions have already been enrolled.
Why?
Changing a live promotion can disrupt the analytics
It can also make data exports harder to read and interpret
✅ What can I safely edit?
You can safely make these changes without affecting data:
Set the promotion to Active or Paused
Edit the Start or End Date
🚫 All other changes are NOT recommended
If you need to adjust anything else (like products, incentives, audience settings, etc.), it's best to:
🔁 Create a new promotion instead
What happens now?
Your promotion will become active on the date you set. Make sure you have configured your Stay Ai Promotion Offer Email. If you are not using Stay Ai’s email notifications, you will need to custom-configure these notifications using Stay Ai’s Klaviyo integration.
You can fully customize how promotional offers are displayed for customers from the merchant portal, like changing the messaging on the promotion announcement displayed in each subscriber’s portal, customizing modal icons, and switching up various design and color elements.
Now, your customers will be able to see that they got a discounted or free product if applicable to their subscription!
If you’re using the Promotion Offer Email, the subscriber will receive it as soon as their previous order is complete
After clicking the promotion offer email, customers will be directed to their portal where a pop-up modal will highlight key promotion information. In that modal, customers can either accept or decline the offer as well as see information about the offer – whether it’s expired or they’ve already accepted the promotion.
From here, you will be able to access the ExperienceEngine Analytics, where you can clearly delineate a promotion’s take rate, how the promotion impacted subscriber loyalty, and the impact of customer value post-promotion.
Note: If you are not using Klaviyo (and instead another ESP), we strongly recommend enabling Stay Ai’s email notifications in order to effectively run promotional information via email. Otherwise, customers will only be notified of their ExperienceEngine promotional offer in their customer portal.
What Next?
Want to know how to manage the promotions you've created?
Click here to read our Managing Promotions article.
Have more questions?
Click here to review our ExperiencEngine FAQ article.
Looking for inspiration for building promotions?
Check out these blog articles from the Stay Ai team: