Six Subscription Growth Strategies with Bryan Starck

Introduction to Subscription Growth

0:00The number one goal for new subscribers and really for new customers in general is this. Get them using your product quickly and consistently. And the reason is why do you think people would buy more from you if they don't start using your product? Right? If they're not using your stuff, if they're not in a routine, they're not really going to buy more or they're not going to stay subscribed. Maybe they're going to forget for one renewal, but they're not going to be a long-term subscriber. If

The Importance of Subscriber Retention

0:22you're just like skeptical about subscriptions in general, just look at, you know, your cohort retention in Shopify and your analytics and your repurchase rate. Like, are people coming back and buying? And some people are they coming back and buying on a repeat on kind of a regular cadence. That's usually a pretty good indicator that there's a subset of your customers that are ripe for subscription and already taking that behavior. And by offering subscribe and save, you're just making that behavior easier for them to stick to.

Speaker Introduction and Company Background

0:52Well guys, it's so good to be here with you today. like Nick said, my name is Brian Stark. I run a company called 100 Celsius and we're a e-commerce subscription growth consultancy. So, paid subscriptions, subscribe and save subscription boxes. This is literally all we work on. And I am super excited to be here to talk about this topic because I think that subscriptions are one of those areas for DTOC brands where we all kind of like know it's it's really important for so many of us. It's such a core part of our business, but there's not really been a whole lot of conversation or established playbooks about how do we actually systematically improve our growth rate for subscriptions. So, quick quick check before I before I get into it. Drop in the chat, how many of you work for or run a brand that has subscriptions as a core part of your business? Just want to get a sense for where people are at here. Give it like 10 seconds. All right. Well, I'm assuming that some of

1:54you are. Yeah, Jimmy. Yes. Yes. Yes. We'll all hop into it. Whether you run subscriptions for your brand or not, hopefully you're going to get some great

The Value of Paid Subscriptions

2:03takeaways from this. I'll just start by saying this. I think subscriptions, as many of you know, are awesome, right? There's so many great aspects to paid subscriptions, which is why so many merchants are leaning more and more into it. Paid subscriptions generally make your brand a lot more resilient and less risky. So, you are less dependent on paid ads, new customer acquisition. If the algorithm craps out on you, right, you're immediately not going to go to zero. You've got a lot more runway.

2:29There's obviously a lot of nuance here, but generally speaking, subscription brands are a lot more profitable and have higher repeat purchase rates than predominantly one-off brands. Subscriptions give you a better ability to forecast revenue, which is really, really great. And when it comes time to sell your brand, typically more MR focused businesses get better valuations and exit potential when it comes time to sell. But as you all probably know,

Challenges in Subscription Retention

2:55subscriptions are not a magic bullet, right? You can't just enable subscribe and save on your website, sign up for Recharge or Skio or one of his subscription apps and expect to build this huge MR base. I don't know if any of you find are are finding this in 2024 and 2025, but it's it's gotten a little bit harder. In our experience, most merchants are finding it it's getting harder to get people to subscribe and then stay subscribed for more than a couple of orders. People are being blanketed with ads from Rocket Money saying like, "Hey, you're spending way too much on subscriptions. why don't you cancel? Right? There's more resistance to this. A lot of you might have been in a situation where 2020, 2021, like COVID, you experienced a ton of growth.

3:36But in the last couple years, that growth has really stalled out or is maybe even on the decline. And then subscriptions are kind of an interesting subset of retention in that there's a lot of established playbooks for email, a lot of established for SMS, but not a whole lot of great best practices and institutional knowledge around how do we actually increase take rate on subscriptions improve retention. And then if we did do something, how do we know if it had an impact, right? How did that surprise and delight gift on the third order impact retention? How do we figure that out? Right? So, a lot of challenges. We know it's important, but it's challenging. So, my goal for today,

Strategies for Rapid Subscription Growth

4:13guys, is to give you six underrated strategies that are working really, really well for the merchants that we support at 100 Celsius to grow your brand's MR faster. These are going to be things that have a really high probability of helping and things that you can roll out in the next 1 to two weeks. Sound good? All right. So to kind of preframe this conversation, I really want you to be thinking about two main goals. This is the 100 Celsius recipe for rapid subscription growth. And I think we can distill it down into two primary areas. So one, how do we

Increasing First Order Subscription Take Rate

4:48increase your first order subscription take rate? What this means is how do we increase the percentage of your new customers that come in on subscription versus as a one-time purchase. I'll explain why that's so important in just a second. And then two, how do we retain more of your new subscribers systematically through their first and your second renewal? If you can do both of those things, I can pretty much promise you that your MR is going to start tracking up really, really aggressively. All right, so without further ado, let's get into acquisition, which is the the sexy part. I know we're here at Retention Reimagined, but the thing I want you to keep in mind is that retention and acquisition are two sides of the same coin. acquisition is probably the biggest impact on retention. And when it comes to subscriptions, if you want to grow your MR base faster, the big thing that you should be focusing on in my opinion is getting more first order subscriptions.

5:44And the difference here is this is compared to trying to upsell people into subscription on the back end. Right? So you you heard hear Greg talking earlier. He's a very common way that people engage with subscriptions, right? They want to try the product first. They want to see if they like it and then they'll come back and subscribe. What I'm saying here is that actually you should try your very best to flip that on its head and get as many people in on subscription right from the start as you can if you want to maximize growth. And the reason is that typically, and this is different for every brand of course, but typically we see that about 70 to 80% of people who ultimately subscribe do so on their very first order. That's a pretty crazy statistic. but here's an example of how this type of distribution breaks out for one of the merchants that we work with. They're an eight figureure supplement brand. What you can see here is that 87% of people

6:39who subscribed overall time in the last year did so on their very first order and only 13% subscribed on a returning order. So, it's easy to think like, oh yeah, of course people are going to try the product and they're going to come back and subscribe. That's not really the way that people behave generally. Generally, the biggest predictor of a customer's future behavior is how they were acquired in the first place. I think it's just kind of common sense, right? If you come in as a one-time buyer, it's going to be difficult to change my behavior on the back end versus if I come in on subscription, the default next action is to buy again, right? And to stay subscribed. Now I'll just show you to dimensionalize how powerful this idea of the first order subscription take rate is just to show you how powerful this is. So imagine you have three supplement brands, right? Identical in every way.

7:31Each one is going to start at 1,000 active subscribers. You're acquiring 2,000 new customers every month. Each of these brands has a 10% total subscription churning rate per month and an AOV of $60. Right? So same stats, same brand. The only difference between these three merchants is their first order subscription take rate. So brand A in this example has a 15% take rate, meaning that 15% of their new customers come in on subscription from the start.

7:58Brand B has a 40% take rate and brand C has a 60% take rate. Look at the difference over 12 months. I think this is so crazy, guys. So brand A is down here. This is the one with 15% first order subscription take rate. After 12 months, they've doubled their subscriber base, which is really, really cool, right? They've gone from a,000 to 2,200. But look at brand B and C. So brand B with a 40% take rate is now at 5400 active subscriptions. And then brand C where they bring in 60% of their new customers on subscription versus on one time. They're at 8,000 active subscribers. Again, the only difference is take rate. Conversion rate hasn't changed. Traffic hasn't changed. Number of new customers hasn't changed. It's just the distribution of that subscriber to one-time purchase. All right. So hopefully you can all agree as it relates to growing your MR base, first order subscription take rate is super super important, right? So how do we actually get there? How do we generate those higher take rates? Well, the first

Creating a No-Brainer Subscription Offer

8:58strategy and the first principle for this is to develop a no-brainer subscription offer. This is very fundamental. It's all in the offer. And when it comes to getting people on subscription and creating an offer, you really have two two primary options that most e-commerce brands run with. So number one, you could restrict customers to only ordering on subscription, right? That's actually like a real option that a lot of folks do. Think about brands like AG1 at times or Heights or Everyday Dose or a lot of these other brands where they index really really heavily on subscriptions. The second option is to just position subscription as the clear value winner over buying oneoff.

9:40And this is probably the camp that most of you guys are going to be in, which is that you offer one-time purchase, but you also have subscription. And you really want to make sure that when a customer is looking at their two options, subscriptions are the clear winner. All right. So, what goes into a great subscription offer? Two sides of the equation, right? On one hand, you need to make it more valuable than buying one off. So, there's a bunch of ways you can do that, right? Literally, the sky's is the limit. You can create a discount for subscription compared to buying one off. You can offer free shipping. You can do bonuses on the first order for subscriptions.

10:16You can offer free gifts on renewals, early access to products or other perks, right? There's so many options. You want to make it more valuable than buying one time. On the other side, you want to reduce risk. So, how do you do that? You can do it through money back guarantees. really clear return policies. Call out that it's super easy to cancel or skip or pause or swap. Maybe call out in your plan picker that you send renewal reminders. Guaranteed inventory and pricing. These are all ways where basically you want to make it more valuable and then reduce that friction where when somebody's considering they're like, "Ooh, I don't know if I want to be locked in on this subscription." You want to address that right there at the time of conversion and make sure people know that they're not locked in, that the ball is completely in their court and that they're in control. I'll show a couple examples of really good subscription offer pages and plan pickers. Right?

11:05Here's here's a brand that we really love. It's called Everyday Dose. They're a mushroom coffee and this is in my opinion a real masterass in terms of subscriber conversion. Right? This is their primary offer page. What are they doing here? They're calling out savings. They have this huge bonus stack at checkout. You're getting all of these different gifts at the time of your purchase on the first gift. You're getting more free gifts on renewals. And of course, they have that return and billing reminder policy, right? So, really, really cool conversion focused conversion focused page here. This is a subscription only funnel. Now, here's another brand, newer kind of AG1 competitor called IM8. And you can see a lot of those same elements just packaged in maybe a more traditional plan picker format. So, what are they doing here?

11:47They're they're calling out the discount for subscriptions. really prominently, lower price per serving, most popular, right? They're defaulting to subscriptions. They're including the risk reversal elements. They're including a free shipping and free welcome kit for subscriptions, right? They're clearly making this the better option. And so, if you think to yourself, hey, I'm probably going to like this product, it's kind of silly to not give it a shot on subscription, right? That's how you're going to generate a lot more of this, a lot more of the higher take rate. I think a really good litmus test for a good subscription offer is this. Would people choose to subscribe even without that percentage discount? Now, the discount helps, but this gets you thinking about what are all of the other things that I could offer to increase the value or reduce the risk of subscription so that even without a discount, some people would subscribe. Okay, so it all starts

Optimizing Subscription Plan Presentation

12:36from the offer. But that's not the end of the road because once we have a great offer, we now actually have to present that offer the right way. And that comes down to how we present that plan picker or the landing page. The truth is that even with a banger offer, if you don't package and position it well, your take rate is still going to be bad, right? You could have all of the elements, but if it's not optimized and it's not communicated to the customers, it's not going to do you a whole lot of good. I show this example. This is kind of like the default. You just install the subscription app you threw it on, and this is kind of what you're starting with. Unfortunately, a lot of merchants don't really move past this when it comes to their subs or their their PDP and their plan picker. You know, it's better than not having the option at all, but it's not really doing you a whole lot of favors in terms of

13:21increasing your take rate. I would estimate that a brand like this maybe gets 10% of their their new customers in on subscription. It could be so much better. What if we did something like this? This might be more similar to that IM8 example that we showed earlier, right? There's a lot of things going on that make this with not a whole lot of effort significantly better as it relates to subscriber acquisition. So, what are we doing here? Well, one, we're pre-selecting subscription. We're bumping it up to the top. We're making it the default option. That's going to be one of the easiest wins that so many of you can make. You know, today to increase take rate. We've increased the discount just a little bit. And what it's done is it's brought that price from the 30s into the 20s.

14:04Psychologically, that's going to help with conversion a lot. We're calling out the benefits in the plan picker. We're including a free bonus. In this case, a free sample pack with our first delivery. And we're calling out the risk reversal stuff. Pause out of deliveries or cancel anytime. Right? This type of plan picker, very little additional work. Could probably get 20 25 30% take rate. But don't stop there, right? There's so many other ways that we can experiment with our subscription offer, the presentation, the plan picker.

14:32Here's one that is really, really powerful that a lot of supplements, skincare, consumable brands use, and this typically gets a 40% plus take rate where we're including an additional subscription option. So, a one month supply, a 3-month supply, or a onetime purchase. And this is something called the decoy effect where instead of choosing between a binary of subscribe and saver one time, we introduce a second subscription option. So now a customer is looking at okay I've got two subscription options one-time purchase and the one-time purchase is the third worst option from a value standpoint and normally by introducing this you increase your take rate and you also get a higher AOV because some people will choose this and then I'll throw this example in you could really get crazy with it right you could depending on your brand there's so many different configurations you can do this is one that we're doing a lot of experimenting with right now which is the idea of selling subscriptions to the household.

15:35So, positioning different quantity packs, one pack, two pack, three-pack, 1 through six, depending on how many people in your house are going to be using it or how frequently you use it. What's cool about this is let's just say you and your wife are going to be using this particular product. Well, you could arguably get sell two packs every month instead of two packs every two months. So you increase your average revenue per subscriber and the velocity of the rebuilds. Is this going to work for your brand? Who knows, right? But it's worth a test. It's worth experimenting because it really might crush it. So quick checklist for optimizing your subscription plan picker for maximum take rate, right? Very easy things you can do. Pre-select subscribe and save as a default option. That's usually a real winner. Make sure that subscription is the clear value winner compared to buying one time. Discounts, free gifts, free shipping, etc. The subscription benefits should be called out in the plan picker. Make sure you have some of those risk mitigation call outs featured

16:29very clearly. And then some optional tests. Consider trying things like additional quantity or plan options like that 1 2 3 pack or a 3 month supply. With enough experimentation, most consumptionbased brands in this climate should be able to get above you know 30 35 40% take rate which has a huge impact on your growth trajectory. All right. And then third strategy and principle for subscriber acquisition. This one's a little bit more meta, but it's to

Merchandising Subscriptions Everywhere

16:55merchandise subscriptions everywhere you can. So, you guys have all probably heard about this consumer psychology framework, right? Have you ever noticed how when you walk into a grocery store, they put like fruit and flowers and all that stuff right at the very front? Well, the reason they do that is because it's called the priming effect. They know that if you see kind of the fruit and the flowers and it smells great, it's going to make you happy and you're likely to spend more in that shopping experience. They're priming you to spend more. Well, we want to do kind of the same thing as it relates to subscriptions. Most brands only feature subscription calls to action and benefits right there on the PDP. But if you want to maximize your take rate, you really want to promote subscriptions everywhere you can. some different places where we can do this, right? We can promote subscriptions in an incart upsell. This is like such an easy win for so many of you to add a widget

17:54in there that when somebody adds a one-time purchase to their cart, just a little plug, hey, do you want to subscribe and save and and save on this order, right? That's going to increase your take rate. Maybe have a dedicated subscribe and save page on your website where people can go on their own leisure and understand and start thinking about, yeah, you know what, subscribe and save doesn't sound that bad. Maybe your popup, you know, we've got a Leah in the house. Maybe instead of offering, you know, 15% off for your welcome discount, maybe just restate the subscription discount. Like use that as the offer.

18:25You can see this example. Get 35% off your first auto ship order. You actually don't need to offer something different. Here's an example of a promo that Create is running right now. Save up to 30% extra on subscriptions, right? You run subscription focused sitewide promotions or or deals. Maybe on your PDPs, you kind of pre-frame results over time, like what to expect in 1 week, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks. You're getting people thinking about long-term use. You run ads where the call to action is specifically focused on subscriber acquisition or features a subscriber deal. And then in your email call to action, what if you just have kind of regular emails encouraging people to subscribe or dynamic blocks encouraging one-time buyers to upgrade? So many opportunities here. All right, so that's

Transition to Retention Strategies

19:10acquisition, guys. Really all in the service in this at this point of how do we increase our take rate? So how do we get more of our new customers to buy in subscription versus on a one-time purchase? acquisition is going to drive, I would say, the line share of your growth, but retention is what we're all here to talk about, right? And subscriptions are kind of go hand in hand with retention. I love subscriptions because retention is literally baked into the DNA of your subscribers. Kind of a dumb framework that I use to think about this, but I think it might be helpful to a lot of you is something that I I kind of think about as the default action framework.

19:49So, basically, what's the default do nothing next action for each type of customer? Well, if you're a one-time buyer, your default next action is nothing, right? If I buy from you and

Understanding Subscriber Behavior

20:00then I don't do anything, I'm not going to buy again. On the flip side, as a a new subscriber and then I do nothing, their default next action is actually to buy again. So, for a one-time buyer, they actually have to make an effort to go buy again. And then for a new subscriber, they have to make an effort to go cancel and not buy again. And it's like so stupid when you think about it, but I think it's really profound. And in my opinion, that's one of the main reasons that for most of the merchants that we work with, their average subscriber has a two to four time higher lifetime revenue over about 12 months than the average one-time customer. So subscribers, all other things considered, are generally more valuable customers to get inherently. But it's not all roses, right? As you probably

Challenges with Subscription Cancellations

20:50know, if you run this type of business, a lot of people cancel. And subscribers are most likely to cancel, unfortunately, right before and right after their first subscription renewal. Meaning that the people that cancel, most of them are not even going to process another rebuill, meaning that you lost margin on a subscription discount, and they don't even rebuild, right? And then after that, they're most likely to cancel before and after their second renewal. So this is a big challenge. Here's an example of the distribution of cancels that we see very often, right? Days until churn. How many days from the creation of a subscription until they canled? You see a big spike right here around day 30 for a lot of brands on a monthly subscription cadence. Right? Day 27 billing reminder.

21:35Day 30 renewal. Another one day 57 second renewal bill and reminder. Day 60 second renewal processes. And then what happens here? Well, once you make it past the first two renewals, churn actually decreases. And so that's why when we think about churn reduction initiatives for subscriptions, but really for all customers in general for e-commerce, getting people past the first two purchases or in this case the first three purchases is really where we should focus like 80% of our energy.

22:09Right? That's the 8020 opportunity here. If we can reduce these spikes, we make a lot of impact in total churn rate. So

Retention Strategy: Billing Reminders

22:16that brings us to our first retention strategy, which is to level up your billing reminders. If we go back to this chart, what's happening right on these spikes? Typically, they correspond with the emails that go out saying, "Hey, your subscription is about to rebuild. Click here to manage." The truth is that most of you, your billing reminders for subscriptions are probably prompting a lot of churn. And if I had to guess, many of you are sending emails that look a lot like this, right? Subject, your order is about to be processed. Hey, it's about to process on this date. If you need to make any changes to your subscription, you can do so here. When the customer gets this, they're like, oh no, I'm about to be charged again. And then I should probably just cancel this right now. Right? And that's why we see such a big spike. The lucky thing is that we actually don't have to have our billing reminders this. So, here's an example kind of broken out for just so I

23:17can fit it on one one thing. One of our clients, awesome brand called Ned, and they sell they sell supplements of various types. Here's an example of some of the components that we typically like to set up in the billing reminder. So, we rebrand it, pull it into your email service provider via the integration and we're we're following a very similar framework for most of these. We're starting with excitement, right? Hey, get excited. Your next order is coming soon. This is an awesome thing. often times we like to incorporate a surprise gift into the first renewal and then actually feature it in the renewal reminder email to tap into loss aversion, right? And guess what? Because you're a great subscriber, you're getting a gift in your next order. We want to feature options to delay or skip via quick links without actually going to the portal. Need a bit more time?

24:09Bump it back a couple weeks. Skip your next order. Building reminders can also be a great opportunity for expansion and upsell. All right, so feel like trying something new, add this to your next order again through the quick links and then of course link to manage your subscription. So these are all components of I think oh you can you can optimize these touch points to really mitigate the the negative impact while turning them into a really cool expansion opportunity. All right so

Retention Strategy: Onboarding Experience

24:36strategy principle five create an awesome new subscriber onboarding experience. Greg spent you know his last session talking about this and I think it's it's so important right this idea of the post-purchase experience. In my opinion, the number one goal for new subscribers and really for new customers in general is is this. Get them using your product quickly and consistently. And the reason is why do you think people would buy more from you if they don't start using your product? Right?

25:04If they're not using your stuff, if they're not in a routine, they're not really going to buy more or they're not going to stay subscribe. Maybe they're going to forget for one renewal, but they're not going to be a long-term subscriber. you really get got to get people using the product the way it's intended to make sure that they don't end up with too much product by their first really billing reminder, right? So, I I think it's really important to to think about this in in this like take a couple cues from SAS. Most software that you that you sign up for, right?

25:34Whether it's an app for your store or something for your personal, they're going to onboard you right away, right? They're going to guide you through a series of steps that you should take to get set up and to start getting results as fast as possible because what they know is that the faster they can get you using and incorporating their software to get value, the less likely that you're going to cancel. And it's the exact same thing with e-commerce, right?

25:59It's just the manifestation of that is a little bit different. Now, we talked a lot about the post-purchase email flow. And it's great, right? It's great to deliver all that information via email, but I guess my takeaway here is don't stop there, right? Because email is kind of delivered in a drip. Inboxes are saturated. And so, if there's really important information that you want to communicate, you really can't rely on email to deliver that. So, what are some other ways that you can drive subscriber activation and post-purchase onboarding?

26:31Well, let's let's let's go through a few of these. In your first package, include a how to how to use insert, right? Maybe you sell something where there's recipes and you can include a recipe booklet or a leaflet for like how to actually get results and get started using this product. This makes a huge difference because the package and unboxing has about 100% open rate, right? Compared to emails, maybe on your website, you want to incorporate a product usage hub. So on the website itself, have a little section. I don't know if you can see that here where it says something like how to use our products and you click and then every product has a page with like a dedicated here's how to use it, here's how to get results, etc. Maybe you can do something like a coaching or a check-in SMS flow, right? So, hey, this is Brian from brand. Just wanted to check in. It's been a couple of weeks.

27:20How's it going with your creatine routine? Right? Personalize that. Create some cool moments that can be automated. Maybe you want to do a habit building or a word of mouth style challenge. Here's a really cool one from a brand called Dog is Human. In their new packages, in their new customer packages, they include a 20-day challenge punch card where you can mark off, you know, give your dog a treat 20 days straight, send it in to this email, and you'll get a free gift on us. Maybe use something like Postpilot to automate a handwritten card or a postcard a couple weeks out. just create a really cool customer service experience. And then yes, people still use Facebook groups. You can invite people to join communities, Facebook groups where they can see other customers getting results from your product. It just drives that community engagement feel, right? So there's so many different ways to to drive subscriber activation. The goal here is to think beyond just email. Look at all of the opportunities at your disposal.

28:18So again, in the post-purchase customer journey, we want to get them using consuming your product quickly and consistently as soon as possible. And then of course, just make sure that they know that you care about them as a brand. The bar for customer experience and service is so low, guys. It really does not take very much to just blow people away. Little bit of intentionality, and that goes such a long way for goodwill, word of mouth, and retention. All right. And then last retention strategy. again, I'm focusing on things that I think are immediately actionable. So much to unpack here, of

Retention Strategy: Failed Payment Recovery

28:51course, but I think an area that so many merchants miss out on is their failed payment. So, there's two types of subscriber churn. Active churn and then passive churn. Active churn is where customers cancel intentionally, right? They go into your portal and they cancel. That's about typically 80 to 90% of your total churn. Passive churn is where subscribers that would have liked to stay subscribed unintentionally cancel because of failed payments, insufficient funds, expired cards, etc. And often times that's 10 to 20% of your total subscription churn.

29:26The problem is most brands focus here 100%. And this is kind of like the wild west of churn. It's worth the effort though because if you can increase your passive failed payment recovery by a significant amount, you can really bring down total churn and those customers are likely to stay subscribed for quite some time. So the the other point here is that don't assume your current setup is working. A lot of you that have subscriptions are using a subscription app that has some form of failed payment recovery, but they're not normally set up or configured the right way. So often issues that we see are you know there's a single approach for all decline payments regarding of regardless of reason or error code right just like the same email firing every time regardless of why that payment is failing. A lot of brands really aggressive retry attempts. We're talking like a retry every day for 20 days. What people don't realize is this can not only increase your spam risk, but can get your payment

30:29your your payment processor flagged, right? So, not a good idea. a lot of brands don't have a quiet retry period and send like pretty alarmist messages like alert, you know, urgent, update your failed payment now, exclamation exclamation point, exclamation point, right? So, all of these things are like imagine being on the receiving end of that. it's it's not a great experience for your customer and it's not going to generate the best recovery rate. So, step one, I would go just check your settings, right? Make sure everything makes sense and is configured properly. You want to enable any kind of smart retry settings in your subscription app if they offer it, right? Where they kind of segment things based on error code, etc. Try to implement what's called a quiet recovery period. So have at least one to two attempts before customers get notified in the first place because a lot of recovery can just actually be solved by retrying again in a couple of days.

31:28Connect with your email service provider whether that's Omnisend or Clavio or whatever to control that communication better. And if you're up to it, try to do a little bit of basic segmentation by decline reason. For example, insufficient funds may have a different message type than your payment method is expired. And then just don't be a don't be a jerk when the messaging. Step number two, if you want to get even better recovery rates, I'd recommend taking a look at one of the third-party recovery tools that are out there. The benefit here is that these tools use AI to intelligently route and retry your failed payment recovery. So there's like 50 different error codes and they can kind of parse it out and make sure everybody's getting the right message at the right time on the right schedule.

32:14Normally they set it up so it's like extremely low lift and then it's usually priced based on incremental ROI over your baseline. So in many cases it's a real win and kind of a no-brainer for for most merchants. All right, so six

Final Thoughts and Q&A

32:28strategies, three for acquisition, three for retention. Quick recap here. If we want to grow our MR faster, I really believe for most e-commerce brands, the two places to focus are this one. Maximize your first order subscription take rate. And then two, retain more of your subscribers past the first second renewal systematically. Six strategies to do that. One, create a no-brainer subscription offer. Two, position that offer well for maximum take rate. Merchandise subscriptions everywhere you can. Fix your billing reminders. Put forward maximum effort to onboard and activate new customers and subscribers.

33:08And get your failed payment recovery strategy dialed in. All right, let go. So, you this is this is again you and I obviously work together. We talk pretty frequently and a lot of these questions were coming in. Unfortunately, we're not going to get to a lot of them. I'm I'm I have two core ones. So, Brian will stay in the chat for a little bit. Brian, where do we find you? Where are you most active right now? connect with me on LinkedIn X is a good place. Active on both of those probably. So, be before you say goodbye and get back to the the rest of your day and start healing.

33:38dropped LinkedIn, drop your Twitter in the channel and if you have any questions in there, I would love to do it. I appreciate you always being here. But I got I got one for you before you jump out and this was a question from Modern Co. It's what program did you do to this? So he he was asking specifically there was one where you could like delay the and push off the order. What platform were you able to do that without going into the actual platform itself? It was on one of your slides when you showed to not take them to email to pause or cancel subscription. Yeah. What were you using for that? Yeah. So I you can actually do that with most of the subscription apps nowadays. So I I would check with your subscription app whether you use like a a Skia or Recharge or Stay or Loop or whatever. Most of them have a some variation of something called a quick action link or a quick link. And what

34:28that essentially does is you can configure this link and then you can put it in a call to action in your email and then essentially it preloads whatever action you want somebody to take. So you'll click it, it'll pop up a landing page. Do you want to do this thing? And they'll just accept and then it'll be done. Perfect. Thank you. And I and and if you're in stay like there's a bunch of quick actions that you can do that and I know Sko and Recharge has it as well.

34:51Okay, my last one. This is from Katie. With subscription models being more challenging than ever, how can we analyze our current retention rate to determine if moving to a subscription model is actually a good idea, what are the baseline metrics should be in place before I make that informed decision? That's an awesome question. That is a great question. Well, I I think that at a high level, you would want to make sure that you have a fairly solid repurchase rate and you can get to a a fairly decent repurchase rate without subscriptions.

35:27Now, I guess to clarify, I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily for most replenishmentbased brands, I I typically wouldn't waste the time trying to like validate should I do it or should I not like if you sell supplements, skincare, food and beverage, whatever. Like, subscriptions are proven and they're going to work. How well they work for your brand, you know, depends a little bit on the product and the offer. But, I would say it couldn't hurt to to launch it. If you're just like skeptical about subscriptions in general, just look at your, you know, your cohort retention in Shopify and your analytics and your repurchase rate. Like, are people coming back and buying? And some people, are they coming back and buying on a repeat on kind of a regular cadence? That's usually a pretty good indicator that there's a subset of your customers that are ripe for subscription and already taking that behavior. And by offering subscribe and save, you're just making that behavior easier for them to stick to. If that makes sense. It does make

36:25sense. And actually to to further ask this, I'm right now in the process and it's probably something Brian and I are going to work on determining repeat purchase rate non-subscriber and repeat purchase rate with subscriber which we have obviously from retention metrics and understanding do I does it make sense for me to push them into subscription? Does it make sense for me to do a household offer? Does it make sense for me to do a book order for them? Because there's just some people that are not going to subscribe. That's just not their behavior. They don't want to do it. They're like they're like they're like the Amazon buyers. I want it when I want it and I want it as fast as I can get it. And so that is another way that I'm trying to understand is how do I really think through when to push them into subscription or when to say no don't do subscription but push them for multiple purchases because it's two core retention metrics that you have to go

37:10back and forth on which is new to me. It is. And ultimately, right, subscriptions in and of themselves are not the right northstar, right? They're not the end- all beall. What you really want are active repeat customers. Like, you want just a customer that comes back and is buying on a regular basis. Whether that's recurring through subscriptions or reoccurring, meaning they just buy repeatedly. That's that's all good. Like, and and both of those are great. Subscriptions are just one way to increase the likelihood that more of your customers come back and buy more frequently, if that makes sense. It it did make sense. And I got the last one.

37:48This is from Lorenzo, and I have a thought on this, too. So, I'll lead you in with my thought. I'll get your coverage. The IM8 page breakdown was fantastic. Question though, even if it's the business's best offer, best margins, but it's not their winning offer, at what point do you continue pushing it versus it's better to show you're winning, maybe less margin product? So this this is something that we go through back because we don't have a large skew set. IM8 doesn't have a large skew set as well. They have a core they have their hero skew right now. They're probably going to build more like as we are. You have to get you have to kind of force the consumer to understand that this is the gateway to all your other core products especially if you as the brand owner believe it's an incredible quality product that leads to more retention or more optionality as you release secondary and third products. So even if it's isn't your best, especially on social because it's so expensive

38:37right now, you really are tied to I have to run the the product that either a gets them sticking with us the longest or b has the highest margin for me to be able to afford to spend into it. If not, you're kind of stuck and and I wouldn't force yourself to sell something that's not a best margin focus specifically or highest stick rate or longest retention rate. I don't know if you have a different viewpoint on that, Bri. No, I think you I think you nailed it. I I mean you you probably see the exact same thing, Nick, but like most of the brands that are really doing well on the front end right now are scaling on the back of like one to two hero products. Yes.

39:12Yeah. And and some it's it's normally like all the all the companies that are doing really well, it's like they crack something in like April or May of last year or whatever and a new product launched or they figured out a new angle and it's just scaling and sometimes, you know, the market decides what that is. But I think that's why it's important to to treat a new subscriber or a new customer not like, "Okay, I got this new subscriber. Now I got to hang on to them so hard, but like, hey, this is a great start to our relationship between you and our brand. Now, let's figure out how we can expand that relationship, cross-ell, upsell, other products, right? Deepen that." I think it's a good mindset shift. I appreciate that. Well, dude, I'm I'm I know I got tons for you more chat. Let's let's clap it up for Brian. Brian, even without the voice, you sounded great. I appreciate you with all the knowledge. I'll see you soon, man. Have a great rest of the

40:04day and have love. I'll be in the chat, too. Thanks, Nick. Appreciate you all. [Music]