The ecommerce subscriptions space has been going through significant growth in the past few years. According to MordorIntelligence, the global subscription e-commerce platform market is expected to increase from $72.91 billion in 2021 to $320.04 billion in 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 62.21%.
As more brands crop up in this space, it means competition for the subscribers’ dollar is only going to get fiercer. To stand out, you have to go the extra mile to sustain customer loyalty.
We cover how you can do this for your subscription business in 4 key actionable tactics. Landing pages are not required for implementing any of these improved flows, but they will certainly make your life easier—and your customer lifetime value higher—if you do.
A/B Test Different Offers For Your Subscription Business
Offering multiple subscription plans helps you better target a range of customer needs and budgets. More options means that your business can attract a wider range of subscribers and maximize their revenue potential. Plus, this also helps improve customer lifetime value by providing flexibility and encouraging subscribers to stay loyal.
Different subscription plans can include variations in billing cycles, such as monthly, quarterly, or annual subscriptions. Tiered membership plans with increasing levels of benefits are also a popular option; a basic plan might offer essential products or services, while a premium plan could include exclusive perks, discounts, or early access to new releases. This means customers have the flexibility to choose what best suits their needs and budget, while businesses get the chance to upsell their subscribers and increase average order value.
Subscription brands like Lilac Street, a popular beauty brand known for its DIY eyelash extensions, have benefitted greatly from being able to offer tier subscription plans. Over the course of 11 months, Lilac Street was able to increase subscription revenue by 72.2% through tiered volume discounts, where product pricing dropped as customers added more lash sets to their box order. This encouraged customers to increase their average order value per box, leading to revenue growth.
Beyond providing multiple subscription offers, it’s also important to A/B test your plans on different customer segments to identify the winning offer. For example, you could A/B test different billing cycles, such as monthly versus quarterly subscriptions, to see which option leads to higher conversion rates and lower churn. Or, you could have different pricing tiers and variations in the features offered per plan to determine the optimal balance of value and affordability for your target market.
Space Goods, a wellness brand, was able to test pricing models and landing page content and successfully supercharge their conversions. In one case, they tested subscription-only product pages with a cheaper-priced first month post-signup, which led to their subscription rate doubling in a single month. Prior to major holidays, the brand has also run extensive tests to identify the most attractive subscription plans for customers during holiday sales.
Experimenting with your offers across landing pages requires you to stay close to your customer data, including their preferences and motivations. Replo Analytics lets you track page performance per subscription offer page, while Replo Experiments makes it easy for you to A/B test pages, monitor results, and implement the winning offer across your pages.
The more you test, the more you’ll be able to make informed decisions on pricing, features, and overall subscription strategy, leading to increased revenue and customer satisfaction in the long run.
Create a Personalized Onboarding Experience For Your Subscription Business
A positive first impression is key to maintaining a long-lasting relationship with your customers and encouraging them to stay subscribed. This starts the moment they onboard with your subscription, from sign-up to first delivery.
Tips for building a standout onboarding experience include:
- Providing welcome discounts on the subscription landing page as an incentive to get first-time customers to sign up.
- Giving personalized product recommendations on the landing page for their first subscription order to make the purchase process as streamlined as possible.
- Using language and imagery that is tailored to suit your target audience across your pages. This makes them feel a sense of belonging and familiarity towards the brand. Tip: Let Content AI automatically write product copy that targets audiences according to your selected brand tone and product type.
- Sending welcome emails to keep new subscribers engaged and informed.
- Including a welcome gift or letter with their first delivery to add to the unboxing excitement.
Keeping your subscribers excited about the brand doesn’t just stop once your customers are fully onboarded. Instead, you should continue adding to their customer experience to make sure subscribers see value in your offer.
This can include offering dynamic product bundles and exclusive perks, which significantly enhance customer loyalty and decrease churn. Or you can include the ability for subscribers to customize their boxes by adding, removing, or swapping products, which gives them a sense of control over their orders. Providing exclusive discounts, early access to new seasonal products, or surprise gifts can also make subscribers feel appreciated.
In 2023, Oats Overnight added dynamic product bundles and gave subscribers exclusive perks, such as discounts and year-round access to seasonal products, as part of a long-standing initiative to elevate their subscription experience. On top of that, the brand experimented with bumping the first-order discount for new subscribers up to a hefty 25% as an onboarding benefit. Testing the offer determined that the steep first-timer discount was the right move; it generated more lasting subscriptions than same-day cancellations. For Oats Overnight, these changes led to a 152% increase in recurring orders and a 13% growth in average order value in the same year.
In another case, LOLA, a reproductive health brand, added a calendar feature which made it easy for customers to modify their delivery schedules from their own subscription portals. This meant subscribers could now quickly pause, skip, or modify their upcoming deliveries themselves, instead of having to contact customer service. Counterintuitively, this change helped LOLA grow their customer lifetime value by 23%, as subscribers were now less likely to be frustrated with the brand and more willing to stay long term.
Optimize Offers And User Flows For Your Subscription Business
Once a customer is fully onboarded, you have to keep them engaged for subscribers to stay. The best way to do this is to collect data on their preferences and behaviors to create tailored subscription offers and content that resonates with them. When done right, this will translate into long term loyalty that boosts your overall revenue. To effectively personalize the subscription experience, you need to collect and analyze relevant customer data. This includes information like purchase history, activity on pages, page performance, demographics, and product preferences.
Tools like Google Analytics, Replo Analytics, feedback surveys, subscription management apps, and customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you build a better understanding of your customers and how to target them. For example, if a customer has previously shown interest in a particular product category, you can send them a personalized email with a discounted subscription box featuring those products. This email should include a CTA that drives to a landing page with the same subscription offer for shoppers to sign-up, creating a cohesive landing page funnel. Or, you can create personalized landing pages that dynamically display offers based on the visitor's browsing history to incentivize them with new subscription products.
The same approach is also especially useful for decreasing churn. You can do this by targeting subscribers that are about to churn with personalized messaging or setting up conditional cancellation landing page flows. In one case, BEAM Supplements, a supplements brand, decreased their cancellation rate by 30% in 3 weeks by adding a video of the co-founder talking directly to the customer about the importance of their brand mission on the cancellation page. In another example, health and wellness brand Heights was able to slash cancellations by 152% after introducing new “pause” and “delay” options in their cancellation flows.
Don’t just settle once you have a personalized flow that works. A/B test multiple subscription cancellation alternatives to figure out which option best resonates with your audience, which dog food brand Open Farm did, reducing year over year churn by 28.7%.
Use Paid Social and Email Flows To Drive To Your Subscription Business
Last but not least, quality marketing is key for sustaining customer engagement with your brand and spreading the word about your product to new audiences. This includes targeted social media advertising and email marketing flows for both potential and existing customers.
Both ads and emails should drive to your subscription landing pages or subscriber accounts to keep new and current customers interacting with your brand. To create a cohesive funnel, make sure to tailor the content on your pages so that it matches the content on your advertisements or emails. You can easily do this with Replo’s landing page editor.
Popular platforms include Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok for paid social for visually-driven products, and email marketing integrations such as Klaviyo for managing customer relationships through email marketing. Potential content ideas for boosting engagement include running contests and giveaways, offering exclusive discounts to followers and subscribers, offering behind-the-scenes content, and sharing customer testimonials from loyal subscribers.
For less established, up-and-coming brands like Space Goods, paid social and word-of-mouth can do wonders for boosting customer acquisition. Since launching, the wellness brand has been able to grow its subscriber base from 0 to 4,000 (which accounts for over half of the brand’s recurring revenue) by doubling down on Instagram ads and building a cult following on social media. Space Goods has also been especially active on socials and encourages user generated content, such as quality product reviews on their subscription pages.
For other brands such as toilet paper business Who Gives A Crap, optimizing email flows are also key to maintaining relationships with current subscribers from all around the world. To match their respective time zones, the brand adjusted their email delivery times to when their customers were live, leading to an impressive 75% open rate from notifications. Customers who accessed these notifications were then more likely to interact with their subscription accounts on a monthly basis, including to adjust their subscription deliveries. By personalizing communication, Who Gives A Crap was able to keep subscribers actively engaged with their orders.
Grow Revenue With Subscription Landing Pages
It’s important to continue iterating on your subscription flows and marketing even as your subscriber base grows. This includes A/B testing your offers, optimizing your onboarding flows, personalizing your customer experiences, and using social and email marketing that drive to custom landing pages to grow brand engagement and awareness. Over time, these 4 tactics will pay off by encouraging your current subscribers to continue seeing value in the brand, while at the same time attracting new subscribers. You’ll be able to sustain a more established revenue stream by increasing customer lifetime value in the long run.
Check out our full list of subscription integrations to see which ones would work best for your brand, and start building a custom landing page flow for your subscription offer now.
Frequently Asked Questions About Subscription Businesses On Shopify
- What is a subscription business model?
A subscription business model centers around customers making recurring payments for access to a product or service. This means a predictable long-term revenue stream for the business and convenience for the customer. Popular physical subscription products include health drinks from brands such as Liquid I.V. and Olipop or beauty products from brands such as Allure Beauty Box; popular digital subscription services include streaming music such as Spotify or streaming films such as Netflix. - How to start a subscription business? How to start a subscription box business with Shopify
You’ll need to start by identifying a customer need or pain point that your subscription can address. For example, this can be curated boxes tailored to specific interests, replenishment services for essential items, or access to exclusive perks and content.
Once you have an idea nailed down, test it. Select high-quality products that align with your brand and create a prototype offering to test your offering and gather feedback.
Set up your online store using a platform like Shopify, which has a robust app ecosystem for subscription management. Integrate a dedicated subscription app to handle recurring billing, customer management, and loyalty programs. Use Replo to build custom subscription pages to drive conversions and track your customer interactions with Replo Analytics. Use Experiments to A/B test subscription offers for maximum revenue growth.
Last but not least, develop a marketing strategy to attract and retain subscribers. Use marketing, social media engagement, influencer collaborations, and email campaigns to reach your target audience.
Offer attractive incentives, such as discounts and free trials, to encourage sign-ups. Make sure to prioritize your customer experience by providing excellent customer service, an easy onboarding process, flexible product delivery, and personalized interactions.
Read our complete article to learn how you can increase recurring revenue with subscription businesses on Shopify. - What is a subscription box business?
A subscription box business delivers curated collections of items to customers regularly, typically on a monthly or quarterly basis. These boxes cater to specific interests, such as beauty products or pet supplies, and the subscription gives customers a new box of items each delivery cycle. This model plays on the convenience and the excitement of discovery for customers, while providing businesses with a predictable revenue stream and valuable customer data. Subscription boxes are a popular choice for established brands to expand their revenue streams and for newer businesses looking to tap into the rapidly growing subscription ecommerce market.
- How to start a subscription box business? How to start a subscription box business with Shopify?
Long story short, starting a subscription box business is highly similar to what you would do to start a subscription business. As mentioned above, it requires identifying a customer need or pain point, and identifying high-quality products that can solve that problem.
The key difference is that your product offering would be a collection of items rather than a single product. Like its namesake, the product of a subscription box business usually comes in a box, with all the offerings relevant to your brand. The items can be custom-selected or highly variable between deliveries, but they should all adhere to some core theme or value proposition of your brand. To test your product idea, you should create a prototype subscription box and gather feedback first.
The set up process of a subscription box online store is very similar to that of setting up a regular subscription business. Using Shopify in conjunction with a third party subscription management app such as Skio or Loop is typical, and Replo helps store owners maintain greater control over the design and performance of their store. Replo Analytics and Experiments enable users to monitor and A/B test their subscription pages to identify the winning product offer or landing page design.
Develop a marketing strategy to attract and retain subscribers. Use marketing, social media engagement, influencer collaborations, and email campaigns to reach your target audience and drive them toward your landing pages. Offer attractive incentives, such as discounts and free trials, to encourage sign-ups. Make sure to prioritize your customer experience by providing excellent customer service, an easy onboarding process, flexible product delivery, and personalized interactions.
Read our full article about subscription box businesses to learn how you can grow your business revenue with them. - Can Shopify support a subscription box business?
Yes, 100%! Check out the previous question above for a full run-down for how you get started with your own subscription box business on Shopify.