The goal when building a solid subscription program is to move your business from one-off, episodic transactions to ongoing, predictable relationships. Your subscription program should provide rewarding incentives and exciting ideas for your customers so that subscription feels like an exclusive opportunity built just for them.
Here are some key considerations when developing your subscription program:
- Create a Program Identity
- Offer Exclusive and Valuable Benefits
- Build a Compelling Subscription Enrollment Experience
- Create Marketing Assets for Program Visibility
Create a Program Identity
What identity do you want your program to have? The first step is to choose a memorable program name that will resonate with your customers. For our clients, that is typically subscribing or auto-replenishment. The second step is to create a visual identity for your program through branding and a logo.
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Offer Exclusive and Valuable Benefits
Subscribers should be considered your most valuable customers since they have raised their hands to make a commitment to your brand and be billed on a recurring basis. Subscribers should be offered exclusive and valuable incentives, incentives that feel like the most rewarding way to shop your website.
Be aware of your own promotional strategy when choosing your incentives structure - if you frequently do discounts of 10% off or more, you should do a percentage off discount for your program.
Be aware of what your competition is doing in terms of incentives, both site-wide and for their subscription programs.
Build both initial AND recurring order incentives so that your program can easily acquire and retain subscribers.
Subscription benefits should be easy to identify and clear to the customer. Additional marketing resources, such as a dedicated landing page, should be utilized to provide more detail about your subscription program.
If you have a loyalty program, you should add additional loyalty rewards for your subscribers.
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- Establishing the right incentive structure here
- Loyalty program and subscription best practices
- Subscription retention initiatives
Build a Compelling Subscription Enrollment Experience
Your potential subscribers will likely first encounter your subscription program through enrollment on your PDPs, so it is important to make the most of your subscription enrollment.
Subscription benefits should be easy to identify and clear to the customer. If the primary benefit is a discount and free shipping, make sure that is clear to the customer.
Place the enrollment above the Add to Bag button so that it is easy to discover for your customers, or include it in other areas of your ecommerce site.
Leverage amplified visuals (bold, colors) to call out the subscription program and its benefits.
Include the subscription frequency dropdown in your enrollment offer. It helps customers better understand the program and increase conversion to subscription by 20%!
Include a tooltip that can provide additional information about the program and its benefits. You can link out to your dedicated landing page from the PDP tooltip.
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Create Marketing Assets for Program Visibility
It is important to build awareness of your subscription program across all customer touchpoints.
Key marketing assets include email marketing, post-purchase trigger emails, homepage banners, flyout and dropdown placements, landing pages, social media, affiliate marketing, and more!
Marketing placements not only help acquire new subscribers but also help retain customers as they remind existing customers of the program benefits.
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