40:13Beyond Subscribe and Save with Bryan Starck
Bryan Starck explains six approaches to growing recurring revenue, from a stronger offer to better onboarding and renewal communication. Recorded at San Diego 2024.
Watch it. Put it to work.
Strengthen the reason to subscribe.
Bryan Starck explains six approaches to growing recurring revenue, from a stronger offer to better onboarding and renewal communication. Recorded at San Diego 2024.
For ecommerce founders, marketers, and operators working on subscriptions.
- Speaker
- Bryan Starck
Founder, 100 Celsius - Recorded at
- San Diego 2024 ↗
September 2024
Speaker roles and platform examples reflect the session’s original context. This is an archived conversation.
Ideas to put to work.
- 01
Strengthen the reason to subscribe
A compelling subscription needs more than a recurring charge.
Read this part · 08:31 ↓ - 02
Sell the longer-term product experience
The customer’s mindset influences whether the subscription feels useful.
Read this part · 14:53 ↓ - 03
Turn renewal into a useful interaction
A reminder can do more than announce the next bill.
Read this part · 19:58 ↓
Your session guide.
A quick editorial guide to the key ideas. Read the complete transcript below for the examples, details, and discussion in the recording.
Original recording on YouTube ↗Strengthen the reason to subscribe
A compelling subscription needs more than a recurring charge. Bryan discusses the offer and how it is presented to customers. He connects acquisition with explaining the ongoing value of the product, helping customers understand why a longer relationship makes sense.
Sell the longer-term product experience
The customer’s mindset influences whether the subscription feels useful. Bryan discusses presenting the product as part of an ongoing routine rather than a single order. This connects the promise made at acquisition with the experience the customer needs after subscribing.
Turn renewal into a useful interaction
A reminder can do more than announce the next bill. Bryan explores renewal communication and onboarding as opportunities to reinforce value. The session links these touchpoints with retention, giving teams a way to review the experience between recurring orders.
Read the full transcript.
From the recording’s auto-generated YouTube captions, with filler words removed and paragraph breaks added for readability. Names, numbers, and wording may contain caption errors; refer to the recording for exact phrasing. Chapter links jump to the text below.
Original recording on YouTube ↗The Power of Subscriptions
0:00I love subscriptions and one of the reasons I love subscriptions so much is because retention is literally baked into the DNA of your customers and your subscribers and just think about it it sounds so simple and very stupid but it's very profound if I come into your business as a one-time customer and then I just do nothing what happens I don't buy again I'm a one-time customer you spent a lot of money to acquire me and that's really sad but if I come into your business as a new subscriber and then I just do nothing what happens I buy again on a regular basis it's a difference in default Behavior right on one side of the coin I have to make an effort to go buy again and on the other I have to make an effort to go cancel and that is why for most brands that we look at their average subscriber is worth two three sometimes four times more over the course of a year than their average one-off customer right so
0:53it makes a lot of sense to prioritize subscribers in your new customer acquisition
Introduction and Audience Engagement
1:07good morning how's everybody doing great to see you thanks for being here guys again my name is Brian here to talk about subscriptions and before we get into it can I just see a quick show fans how many of you run or work for a brand that has some sort of subscriptions memberships recurring [Music] Revenue amazing amazing all right well you in the right place again guys my name is Brian Stark I run 100 Celsius and we are an e-commerce subscription growth agency and what that
Benefits of Subscription Models
1:37means is I get to work on helping Brands grow their recurring Revenue acquire more subscribers keep them longer increase their value every day it's something I love doing and I am really excited to be here talking about this because I think like so many of you I really think that subscriptions are amazing there's so many cool advantages to subscriptions both for your customers where they can get their favorite products on routine really I mean that's it's a great value prop for your customers but especially for I think maybe the I think it's all showing at the same time but anyways a lot of a lot of advantages for your business right subscription Brands typically are a lot more resilient and less risky so you know that if your ad performance kind of suddenly shuts down you're not immediately going to go to zero with your customers your a better ability to forecast right so guys I don't know if this deck it's kind of showing up a little bit
2:40funky just want to make sure that that's not check check check yeah I don't know anyways we'll kind of push through it yeah so you have better ability to forecast subscription businesses are a lot more profitable typically we know this right because they're over indexed on repeat purchases and when it comes time to sell you typically get better valuations and exit potential for subscription Brands but subscriptions
Challenges in Subscription Businesses
3:08are not a Magic Bullet right it doesn't work like you can just turn on an app enable subscribe and save then just grow this big old recurring Revenue base there's a lot of unique challenges to subscription businesses and we talked to a lot of businesses and it probably feels like it may be harder than ever to bring in new customer on subscription right people are getting blanketed with thats from rocket money telling them how many subscriptions they're paying for and I think people are more skeptical these days a lot of you new subscribers cancel early right so you're spending all this money you're giving away margin on a subscription discount and people cancel before their first and second renewal how do we keep them longer it might feel like you're completely stalled out right so you were growing really quickly and efficiently for a long time but now things are kind of like really stabilizing so you're losing as many subscribers as you're gaining how do we get past that right what should we spend
4:05our limited time attention and bandwidth focusing on and when we do do something for subscriptions did it actually work right did that surprise gift that we enabled three months ago actually impact the retention curve it's kind of a tricky thing to figure out so my goal
Strategies for Subscriber Growth
4:20for today is I want to give you six really practical strategies that I think a lot of you running subscriptions can use an Implement over the next couple of weeks even to meaningfully improve your subscriber growth rate and the big takeaway all of these six strategies are kind of focused on two main things thing number one how do we increase the percentage of our new customers that we bring on subscription right from the start right that is one of our key elements to Rapid subscription growth and then element number two is how do we retain more of those subscription rers through their second and third renewals if we can do both of those two things I promise you you will grow your recurring Revenue a lot faster and you'll be a much happier camper so let's get into it I want to start with acquisition strategies for subscriptions AKA how do we get more subscribers fast and how we increase the percentage of new customers we bring in on subscription this is the big takeaway
5:26that I want you to take from this call or this stock and that's this if you want to grow your subscription base faster we need to get more first order subscribers and the reason for that is about 70 to 80% of people who subscribe overall time subscribe on their very first order with your brand right that's a really impactful statistic this is an actual brand that we work with really fast growing 8 figure supplement brand and look at that distribution of all of their subscribers 87% come in on their very first order with the business and only 133% come in on a repeat order that's really significant what it doesn't mean is that you shouldn't focus on converting one-time buyers into into subscribers and repeats but it's not the big lever the biggest lever the 8020 opportunity is how do we increase the acquisition of subscribers and increase that first order take rate and the reason for that is that the biggest predictor of a customer's future behavior is how they're acquired in the first place
6:30right shoe buyers buy shoes sock buyers like to buy socks oneoff buyers typically continue buying oneoff and subscribers stay subscribed it's a lot harder to change somebody's mind later on than it is to bring them in the right way from the start and I don't know if this is going to render properly but what I do want to show you is just imagine three supplement Brands identical Brands just to show the true impact of the first order subscription take rate imagine you're selling the same product each brand starts at 1,000 active subscribers they acquire 2,000 customers a month has a 10% churn rate and an aov of $6 the only difference in these three brands is the first order subscription take rate AK how much how many of their new customers do they bring in on subscription right from the start brand a has a 15% take rate brand B has a 40% take rate and then Brand C they bring in the majority of new customers on sub subscription at a 60% take rate look what happens over the
7:33course of a year so brand a the one with a pretty low take rate maybe they're feeling pretty good right they've gone from 1,000 subscribers to 2200 about $130,000 in recurring Revenue per month and they have about 2,200 active Subs but look what happens when you increase that take rate guys a brand that can bring in 40% of the new customers on subscription over the course of 12 months that compounds and now they're almost $200,000 ahead in terms of monthly recurring revenue and about 5,500 subs and if you can bring in the majority of your customers on subscription at this level look at the difference 60% take rate they've adex their subscriber base that's why this is so impactful I really want to make sure that you get this because this is probably the biggest biggest lever you can pull in increasing your subscriber growth rate so how do we do this well this is probably not going
Creating a Compelling Subscription Offer
8:32to be a surprise to most of you but we need to create a really no-brainer subscription offer right the offer is everything as an e-commerce brand I think you have two main options to acquire subscribers right number one you can actually just restrict customers to only buying on subscription that's a legitimate option and a lot of brands do it it works really well in my opinion when you have a hero product that you maybe attach a starter kit to or starter pack with additional bonuses where you can create a really unique experience around a hero product and then attach continuity to it but I think for most of you you're probably operating where you have subscription positioned as a clear value winner against buying one off emphasis on the clear right if subscription is a marginal improvement over oneoff your take rate is going to be really low it needs to be a total Nob brain for people to choose subscription at a high enough rate what goes into a great subscription offer there are hundreds of different
9:36things you could do right the sky the limit but really it comes down to two things one how do you increase the value of subscription and then B how do you decrease the risk associated with subscribing right both sides of these of this equation is equally as important now things you can do to make it more valuable right a discount compared to one off you can do free shipping you can do free bonuses at checkout you can do free gifts upon renewals right to incentivize retention Early Access to products treat your subscribers like members with exclusive perks things like that right on the flip side reducing risk is really important too so having a money back guarantee calling out easy cancellations skip pause swap options actually maybe let people know that you send renewal reminders right don't hide them let people know that you send them all of that reduces friction and makes people feel more comfortable chooseing [Music] subscription I like to show this example this is one of my favorite companies
10:36they're called everyday dose I've been a customer for a long time on the subscription offer and I think this does a really good job kind of putting all these pieces together right they actually restrict you to only buying on subscription through the starter pack but they're still positioning the discount and the offer against one off right to show you the savings then look what this they're doing here they have this huge bonus back at the start right you get a free froth a free spoon a free app a free wellness booklet they're doing the math for you then they promise you free gifts on renewals and then down here at the below at the bottom they do their kind of renewal billing reminder policy Etc what this shows you is like you got to go beyond subscribe and save 10% if you want to maximize your take rate this is you know maybe you don't have to do a big old starter pack but think about how you can flesh the off R with other components
11:28I think really good litness test for a great subscription offer is this would people choose to subscribe to my product even if there was no discount attached to it if the answer is no you could probably stand to increase your take rate by adding additional components to that offer and positioning it better than oneoff right so this is a really good Lim test all right so we have a great subscription offer it's a large part of the battle now we need to optimize our
Optimizing Subscription Offer Presentation
11:58offer presentation because here's the truth even if you have a great offer if you suck at communicating it your take rate is still going to be really bad we see a lot of brands that haven't put a lot of thought into the subscription offer presentation and it looks a lot like this on their PDP their have subscription but their take rate is not going to be that compelling right what are they doing wrong on this well we're not you know pre-selecting subscribe and save we're not really calling out the benefits we're not really calling out the discount this is kind of a you know it's kind of a blah PDP and it's going to have a take rate to reflect that on subscription we can do a whole lot better what are we doing here that makes this take rate a lot more that's going to make this convert a lot better and bring us more subscribers very simple things right this is not rocket science and it doesn't take a lot of energy or resources to do but this is
12:53going to have maybe a 30 to 40% take rate on subscriptions whereas the first one might have 10 to 15 we're calling out the subscription benefits right there in the plan selector we've bumped subscription up to the top and we've pre-selected it which is going to give us a huge bump and you know we're calling at the discount compared to one off a lot more compelling a lot of you might have something like this but you're also asking yourself I'm have a bit of a dilemma because I want to get continuity I want to bring people in on subscription but I also need to maximize aov right I want to go what should I choose right is is it better to maximize quantity and maximize aov on that first order or do I go for continuity how do I think about that well one thing I want to show you is that you can actually do both this is one of our favorite bybox structures and it's really really effective for any of you that have like
13:47a consumable brand whether it's supplements food and Bev anything that can you can attach a 3 Monon Supply to or six month supply to and look what we're doing here so we've attached a quarterly Auto up to the top your least price sensitive customers are probably going to choose that because it's a better deal so it's going to increase the aov of your of your store but the real magic is in the anchoring effect right so instead of people seeing subscribe and save and then switching off to one off a lot more people are going to choose to switch off quarterly but then split the difference and go to monthly Auto renew right and so this is one of the ways that you can actually increase aov on your store while also increasing your take rate this works really really well for a lot of Brands and if you have something that could be conducive to this would highly recommend giving it a shot all right y'all so strategy one amazing subscription offer it's got to
14:44be the clear winner strategy two optimize the presentation of that offer and then three this is a little bit more meta but it's equally as important sell
Selling a Long-Term Mindset
14:53long-term mindset when you have a subscription based product or brand you need to frame that product for a long-term use and long-term results it's really important that we do so because think about the reason so many of your customers churn on subscription right maybe they were expecting quick benefits and they didn't see it right so they gave up too early a lot of subscription churn can be attributed to user error right people not knowing how to use it not having the right expectations and we can kind of that as Brands and marketers by pre-frame that purchase right we're bringing people in with the right frame of mind and I want to show you something one of our clients this brand called mindbody Green they do something that I really love on all of their pdps and LPS and they do a timeline of results and a timeline of benefits right they're getting people thinking about long-term use right from the start so hey use this product over time to maximize the results week one you're probably going
15:58to experience this week two week four week 8 week 14 and so on is a really cool thing to do and it goes a long way in helping you acquire the right types of customers and improving retention on the back end Okay so we've talked about acquisition big takeaway there how do we increase our first order take rate a lot of it comes down to the offer the presentation and the framing but now
Retention Strategies
16:27let's talk about retention I love subscriptions and one of the reasons I love subscriptions so much is because retention is literally baked into the DNA of your customers and your subscribers and just think about it it sounds so simple and very stupid but it's very profound if I come into your business as a one-time customer and then I just do nothing what happens I don't buy again I'm a one-time customer you spent a lot of money to acquire me and that's really sad but if I come into your business as a new subscriber and then I just do nothing what happens I buy again on a regular basis it's a difference in default Behavior right on one side of the coin I have to make an effort to go buy again and on the other I have to make an effort to go cancel and that is why for most brands that we look at their average subscriber is worth two three sometimes four times more over the course of a year than their average one-off customer right so
17:28it makes a lot of sense to prioritize subscribers in your new customer acquisition but it's not all roses and you guys know this if you prioritize subscriptions a lot of you are dealing with churn and that's really frustrating right all of your subscribers will at some point probably cancel but if they're going to cancel most people are most likely to cancel right before and right after their first renewal and then the rest are most likely to cancel right before and right after their second renewal meaning for a lot of your new subscribers you're never getting to rebuild them right and then after that maybe you get one rebuild and that's not how you build a thriving subscription base I'll show you this is a distribution graph that we've done for and that we do for a lot of brands that plot out the frequency of days until churn meaning on what specific days do your customers typically cancel and what we typically see is something that looks a lot like this so first renewal
18:30reminder in order processing you see a big spike and then you see another big spike right around that second renewal reminder in order processing what you also see though oh if I could go back maybe one slide but what you also see and I don't think it's going to show up here is look at the way that churn starts to stabilize right after that second renewal churn starts to decrease what that tells us is that any retention initiatives that we focus on should largely be centered right around that first renewal and second renewal right how do we get people past the first rebu then how do we get people past a second and if we can do that then it has an amazing flowthrough effect all the way down the life cycle for that subscriber so how do we do that one of our favorite things to do for Brands is to level up their billing reminders billing reminders are not sexy
The Problem with Traditional Billing Reminders
19:25but the truth is your bilding reminders are probably prompting a a lot of unnecessary churn most renewal reminders look a lot like this your order is about to be processed Brian in 2 days if you need to make any changes click that button go manage your subscription and I as a customer I see that I'm like I'm about to be charged again and then like I should probably just go cancel this now am I really using it and that's why you typically see such a high correlation between these reminders and churn but the cool
Transforming Renewal Reminders into Exciting Touchpoints
19:59thing is that they don't have to be so clinical and bad right they can actually be really cool customer touch points here's some examples of recent renewal reminders that we've done and I know you can't really see those that well on the screen probably so let's break down exactly what goes into one of these reminders and some different things that you guys could Implement in your own sub subscription bilding reminders okay so let's think about the mechanics of this we're not just saying your order is about to be processed we're building excitement from the start right hey good news your next order is coming up soon we're really excited for you to get it dude this is so sick yeah because like so many of us on the subside it's just the reminder and it's text and I'm like well legally I have to do this but if I would to make it like a piece that they actually want to receive yeah this has to be just by just design as incredible right right
20:53right it's it's it's really really impactful what you can do here and I think these notifications get overlooked so much but but these are when you think about subscriptions and email right it's a lot about mitigating the churn that's caused and prompted by communicating with your subscribers in the way you have to do it right and this is one way to do it right so we're getting excited a lot of you use subscription apps that allow you to use surprise and Delight or rewards right upon different renewals your billing reminder is an amazing place to put that because now people are thinking oh great I'm getting a free gift in my next order and not oh I got to go cancel this it Taps into loss aversion and that's a really really impactful way of translating those surprise and light rules into real business value tell them what they're going to get of course it's transactional but why not do quick action buttons to help them delay one week delay two weeks delay
21:54four weeks maybe add one time upsell and add-on options right that they can add to the next order rather than cancel and then of course manage my subscription down below but anywhere where you are communicating with subscribers in sort of a transactional way with these notifications these are amazing opportunities to go the extra mile update them and I promise you if you do this it will decrease your Jour so next we've got the renewal reminders we've got those transactional notifications up to Snuff we got to think about how to
Creating an Effective Subscriber Onboarding Experience
22:24create a new subscriber onboarding experience that gets people using your product I really think that the number one goal of a business right for their new subscribers and really for just customers in general is how do we get these people using my product consistently and how do we get them results your postp purchas email flow for this is great right this is a sun Lane event a lot of you are email folks and you probably have a postp purchase email flow that's dripping out content and information that's great do it but emails are just a little blip in people's day and people pay less and less attention to them it's not enough right you really I think want to pull out all the stops maximum effort on onboarding and there are there are a number of different ways you can do this right there's so many things you can do to improve your new subscriber onboarding but just a couple of options you might want to consider so think about yes sending that new
23:27subscriber onboarding series email but don't stop at email go with a SMS flow as well right maybe you're doing a coaching and a check-in flow where it comes from somebody on your customer service team and they're saying things like hey I saw you just got your order awesome if you need any help just text back we're here for you right or here's a link to our product usage guide there's a brand called perfect keto that does something I think more brands should follow and they create a centralized product usage Hub on their website where customers can go and they can learn about everything that they need to know to get results with their product right how to use it the protocol recommended dosage all that stuff they would be a good one to check out if you want an example of what that looks like maybe try Proactive phone calls or voicemail drops from customer service improve that on unboxing experience maybe get some packageing so it's going and yeah Michael Epstein from
24:22post-pilot talked yesterday they are an amazing company to use for post purchase right they have the ability to automate handwritten cards and this is an amazing place to do that right somebody checks out on your site they're a new customer they get a handwritten card from the founder hey thanks so much for your business we appreciate you nothing else imagine what that's going to do to your retention rate so big postp purchase goals here pretty simple get people using and consuming your product as soon as possible and consistently and let them know that you care about them right the bar for customer experience is not very high these days especially in e-commerce it only takes like a 10 to 20% lift in terms of effort there to really stand out for your customers and it's well worth doing strategy number
Optimizing Subscription Apps to Reduce Churn
25:06six retention I've saved not necessarily the best for last but the one that I think many of you will be able to quickly make some changes to and recover additional recurring Revenue very very quickly like it today that's to optimize your subscription apps cancel flow this is the actual experience people go through when they're in their customer portal and they go to cancel and your cancel flow is not a root cause fix your churn right don't get it don't get it mistaken this is not going to fix your churn problem but it's a really great Band-Aid we typically look for a Target save rate on these cancel flows of about 8 to 10% meaning that for every 100 subscribers that goes through you want to be saving about 8 to 10 of them or more most brands are kind of in that 3 to 5% range that we see meaning that a lot of you will have an opportunity to double or even triple your save rate with just a little bit of work and a
25:59little bit of thought so how do we do that now I don't have time to go through the entire Playbook but I will just kind of go through the the general steps here so step number zero is just go ahead and make sure that cancel flow is activated if it's not click the button even the default rocking with that for a while is totally fine it's going to be better than nothing step number one though is before you make any changes go export your data most people never look at this they never look at their cancellation flow data and that's really that's a real shame because there are some amazing gold nuggets in there if you export it and sit with it for an hour I promise you you will learn some things that you can use to reduce churn improve conversions on the front end maybe run it through chat GPT have it ask you you know ask it for some help but this will be a really really productive hour now once you really
26:47feel like you've got a good handle on why people are cancelling and why people are churning go back realign your cancel reasons with one the most common answers that two you have a direct rebuttal for I'm actually a believer that you probably don't want to list out every cancel reason in your cancellation flow you want to keep it really tight really focused and make sure that you have a rebuttal for everything if you don't push people into the other to get that open-ended feedback you want to be testing multiple different offers for each reason right does a one-time discount work better than a multi-order discount does a free gift work better to recover people all that's worth testing and let that stuff run right get enough sessions continue optimizing reanalyzing in it and after no sessions you'll be able to get that up to 8 to 10% plus all right so quick recap here lot to cover I guess the recap is not there but two two slot two two big focuses
27:43guys how do we increase the first St subscription take rate and how do we keep those subscribers more through the first second renewals more consistently well y'all it's been a real pleasure thank you for for dealing with any of the technical slide issues been a real honor to be here feel free to download these slides if they're helpful afterwards and I'll be around the event if you want to chat more about this Brian thanks guys any any questions for Brian on the
Q&A: Building a Killer Subscription Model
28:13subscription stuff I see one front left I'm coming your way I would talk I can talk about another brand but Margaritaville has 20 million visitors to their resorts to their retail stores we just did a co-branding deal with modern sh with tandem surf modern shelving is the other brand yeah with tandem surf in Margaritaville we don't do any subscriptions at this time but I am so subscription curious especially after driving you last night you sat next to me in my surf van I feel like we have a connection in front of all these people how do you recommend that tandem surf sets up the killer subscription model for this Margaritaville tandem surf collaboration so that next year I can be up on stage with you wow talking about what we did together yeah we want that that would be amazing that's a big question I you better sit the [ __ ] down yeah yeah I don't know I mean so you you have no subscriptions like what are you what are you thinking do do you have any ideas
29:20right now of what what would work well well what I'm thinking is people want to learn how to do things on the water our mission is to get people together on the water we have the benefit of of all these millions of parrot heads that have not been exposed to the experience of riding waves together with their family and friends or paddle boarding together on tandem surf sit and sub paddle boards so as they're going through that initial experience at a resort if we invite them to become a member of our Surf Club if you will an exclusive club for Margaritaville members they could get access to tutorials they could get one-on-one consultations and so forth I think there's a way that we can build a subscription model around this I'm so fired up after listening to your talk yeah I want I I must be in this business I can't just sell products I must sell more no recurring revenue is amazing I mean I would say like big question I would have for you right now is do you
30:16want a subscription or do you want a membership and that's actually a good distinction to make and and there's some I almost would maybe want to look at what a membership would look like for you guys over a subscribe and save model you know very very similar recurring Revenue but there's different ways to structure it I would talk to the guys over at inet it or whatever and I think they might have some really good ideas but happy to talk after all right let's do it I'll give you a ride to the after Department awesome any any other questions on the subscription side of things just time spent on the optimization of the cancellation clows like how often priority compared to everything else because it sound like you're going to sending order of importance yeah kind of it's important I would say it's one of those things like a abandoned checkout flow or something like that where a lot of the value comes and having the boxes checked the big issue that I think I see a lot
31:09is that a lot of people just never optimize it never even change it so it's they're just rocking with the defaults I think there's a lot that you can do in the course of an hour or two getting this dialed in that's going to save you thousands so it's definitely something to prioritize but it's not going to take you a lot of time and then as far as how often to kind of review it and optimize it it's more about how many entries you that go through right so you just need to have enough statistical significance to like be able to pull out pull out actual results really so I don't know every every month or two Depend and if you have a really high volume you could do more frequent iterations but yeah yep all hands nice all right one question is have you worked with a brand that has Ash pulled up a little bit pulled up thank you all right we're going up close but have you worked with a brand that
32:02used their welcome offer like popup and created a funnel that went straight to subscription as the offer versus a normal you know discount that you see on e-commerce brand yeah can you repeat the question back huh you repeat the question back yeah so the the question was do you see it being successful to promote a welcome offer for like an email popup that would apply only to subscription rather than kind of globally and I think the answer is yes you definitely can and I and I really feel that a great option for a lot of Brands is to kind of like restrict people's options actually and to push them into subscription but also it could be a free gift right it could be it doesn't have to be in the form of a discount it could be you know use this use this code or buy on the starter kit and there's a lot of different ways to to promote that welcome popup in a way that's going to get you that conversion on theil
32:57email sign up but also is just going straight to that subscription offer so yeah I do I do think it's a it's a legitimate option something to explore okay cool and secondary question to that any success of having people funnel to a a specific PDP for subscription versus having the one PDP that shows the subscription and onetime offer yeah definely funnel definitely I mean I I I think a lot of Brands even a lot of Brands here will just have people go into a subscription specific LP or something like that and you know if you can get a similar conversion and and the aov is roughly similar like I'd rather bring people in on subscription than one off right so is that something that you've tested in the past or yeah yeah different brands have tesed it and it just it kind of depends on the brand and the product and the offer but definitely worth I would say giving it a shot got it thank you for answering all the questions hi so I work with a pet
33:57brand and they do sell some items subscription based some items not mostly the food is subscription based I was wondering because we give them most of the discounts based on how frequent the subscription is a two week you get 20% off a month you get 10% off but what we were seeing is just an increase of people just subscribing for the 20% off for the first two weeks and then canceling like a day before their renewal yeah right so we were more considering leaning towards making it a first time regular purchase just like taking out the subscription offer from the PDP and then with an email like retention tactic getting them back to subscribe what would you think about that if you do that you're going to grow slower in terms of your subscription base your overall churn might be lower but that's really just a question that you have to ask yourself is like what do I care about more I I would say that it could be an issue less of people
34:53gaining the discount and more an issue of the timing that you have on your selling plan like maybe a lot of those people that are coming in on every 2 weeks like I would not I would not couple the discount with the time frame in that way because I think what's happening is you're incentivizing a lot of people to maybe take a two we subscription that they wouldn't otherwise take and so if you decoupled those two you might actually see less of that gaming behavior and better retention and I think the two we subscriptions if it's not you said it's pet food Okay so it's like it's got to be in the freezer or in the fridge right so it's yeah some some of them that do have the twoe one are very small bags like 6 ounces so you would need to reup every two weeks but I would understand yeah cuz we couped like you get the discount based on how frequently you do it but if you're saying yeah it's it's just not a good
35:45way to like structure it and imagine like with your shipping time and fulfillment it's like they could literally get the product and then 4 days later 3 days later be getting a renewal reminder right so this is we run into this too too so we have a major first purchase drop off cuz we incentivized someone in basically 20% or 25% and I basically said I'm trying to grow my Subs as fast as possible I I do not want to deal with reminding them with email because open rates are absolutely terrible so I would say don't go two weeks we're going to about to play with getting rid of two week only off of only off of the month and we ALS we sell like sixpack 12 18 24 quantity is is better to attach different quantity braks to more of like a common sense subscription Cadence yeah and I I subscribe to dog food topper and if I got that before I'd be like [ __ ] I got to give my dog triple this and now she's
36:36even fatter so like I don't want to deal with that right hey Brian thank you very much BR for kicking us off well done thank you guys appreciate it thanks [Music]
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