How to Push Subscriptions WITHOUT Hurting CVR

How to Push Subscriptions WITHOUT Hurting CVR Speaker 1: Hey guys, Gina here, your host for the Chew on This retention and subscription podcast powered by Stay AI. Today I am joined with Ash. Ash, say hello. Speaker 2: What's going on guys? Speaker 1: Who's been working with Stay the last few years now and we are about to get into all kinds of fun ways to optimize your subscription program. Everything from cutting down on churn, how to acquire more subscribers and everything in between. Passive churn. Do you even know what dunning is? Probably not. But you're going to learn about it today. Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. Yeah, we're both grateful for having each other here. Speaker 2: I'm very excited for this. I think like from my perspective, subscription has become such a main focus this year, just given how tough it's been just like on acquisition and like the volatility that we're seeing with meta and The world and this and that it's just been like super tough, right? So last year I think we did a really good job at maintaining first-order profitability, but I really wish we actually Did a lot more with subscription, right? I think we spent a ton last year I would say like a good amount of those people could have actually been Subscribers and we could have actually saw a lot more retention revenue kind of going into this period where things are a little shaky, right? so I think for me I have some questions for you because one it's like I I think a lot of brands out there, very similar to me, it's like, all right, well, you take what's working on meta, you have the product that you're kind of pushing and you're like, all right, well, how do I just turn it into a subscription, right? And I don't know if that's the right way of thinking about it, right? I think for brands out there with like a bigger catalog, you may actually have products that are kind of, that you didn't necessarily think could be more of a subscription style product. And so uncovering those, what we like to call gateway products is probably something that not a lot of people think about. So we'd love to get your take on, you know, what is the proper strategy to finding the right product to introduce to a potential subscriber? Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, I was just chatting with somebody about this, but like, there's a lot of push, like increasing the AOV on orders, getting these bigger and like try, but I think that sometimes we need to focus on like, what is the initial offer? Somebody coming to your website for the first time, they don't want to sign up and subscribe to something that costs. $400. That is scary. So depending on what your actual product retails for and then what the pack size of that is, you need to figure out what is the right way to get somebody into subscription. So is that just one pack every one month, knowing that you want to eventually get somebody to a three pack? Totally. But testing that out and figuring out, yeah, how do we get somebody in on that first order? And then once you have somebody as a subscriber, what does that journey look like? After the first order goes through, then do they get some incentive to add something in the next order to increase the pack size, all of that? Speaker 2: Before we dive in, a quick word about today's sponsor, Stay AI. Everyone wants that sweet recurring revenue, but building a subscription model that actually works is not easy. At Avi, we spent way too long battling churn, tweaking offers, and trying to duct tape a subscriber experience together. Switching to Stay AI was the turning point. It gave us the tools to automate churn reduction, personalize offers, and improve our email segmentation. Now we can build a subscription flow that customers want to stay in. Stay AI saved us a A ton of time lifted LTV and made subscriptions feel easy. If you're ready to level up your subscription program, go to Stay AI slash Chew on This and mention Chew on This. You'll get $200 off your monthly plan for life. Now let's get back to the episode. Speaker 1: I know that you guys have done a ton of testing. Sometimes it's easier just to get somebody on a high AOV one time versus subscription. How are you thinking about it over the course of the rest of the year? How do we prioritize subscription and what? What makes it worth it? Yes, the order might be a lower AOV, but what about subscription makes it worth it? Speaker 2: Yeah, so a couple of things that we've actually done this year, which is one, instead of selling multiple packs of a single product, can we educate the consumer on a 30 day supply bundle, right? So we have some top selling SKUs. We essentially took our top three and created a first offer for a bundle, okay? So now that AOV jumps up from your $39 price point to almost $100, okay? Now, can you sell a system that can help somebody achieve their goals? Maintain a 30-day supply so that, you know, obviously after 30 days they have to come back. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But then can you also achieve a high enough AOV where you could be first order profitable, okay? That was the first thing that we changed right off the bat. Now, because of that, we can actually offer a better deal on a subscription. So instead of selling, again, like I said, a one month supply, maybe a $40 price point, then offering 20% off to get on subscription, now you're left with that $32. It's very tough to be first order profitable, especially in the supplement game. Very tough. I'm able to take a higher AOV and then on top of that layer some of these tactics to get somebody to get into a subscription. Some of those things include obviously showcasing the difference and benefits of being on subscription versus a one-time purchase. You look at the Athletic Greens of the world, the Gruns, the Whoever, you know, the instant hydrations, right? Everybody who's running, you know, really solid subscription models, they're making the one-time purchase almost feel stupid for anybody buying that, right? So some of the things that you can do, and you tell me if there's other things that you've seen brands doing, but quite literally, you know, showcasing the discount, showcasing the savings, right? That's a guaranteed number one, okay? Number two is, can you offer free shipping on subscription orders? So instead of saying, hey, you have to cross a certain threshold, well, you don't actually need to if you subscribe. So discount, free shipping, cancel anytime, no hassle. I think with the backend on stay, it's very easy to adjust your subscription if you need to. The other things I think are free gifts as well, right? So if you enter a subscription, having a free gift that is valuable enough to say, you know what, let me, I'm already enticed by the subscription discount. I'm already saving on shipping, but hey, they're offering me, you know, maybe it's a cool water bottle or a tote bag or a pill case or whatever it is. Maybe it's an additional free product from your catalog, right? That you want to get into somebody's hands. I think the more you can incentivize to get somebody into your subscription model, your take rate can improve dramatically, right? And so I think some of those things that we implemented, we actually doubled our opt-in rate for subscription just from the PDP first, right? We're testing our things on the PDP and then we're going to take those learnings and then implement it more into our landing pages where we're actually driving a ton of traffic from the paid channels. Speaker 1: I think that what and how you just position the buy box and what sits on that PDP is really important. People are like, oh yeah, you just slap the radio button on it and it's fine. But if you have larger quantity sizes, deciding even if you want to default to subscription or not is a decision and it should be intentional. And if you are defaulting to subscription, you have to be like, and this is why you get this. This is the save, this is whatever. You need the cross out. It has to be super intentional and thought about to really measure what those take rates are. It's a question that we get when people are either established brands that are looking to start a subscription program. They're always like, so what will the take rate be? I'm like, well, a lot of that depends on- That has nothing to do with us. Speaker 2: That depends on you. Speaker 1: That depends on you. Any subscription platform that tells you that they have the best take rate on the PDP, they do not do anything with that. It's just kind of about the guidance maybe that they can give you. Looking at other buy boxes, but it's just how you set that up to incentivize people going into subscription. And then the question we get right after that is like, well, what happens if we incentivize and people just immediately cancel? It's like, okay, but like... Think about it like a funnel. Then the next step is what happens right after they made that purchase. What do those touch points look like? Are you building excitement? Are they immediately getting an email that they're getting a free gift on the next order? When they log in the portal, they go to cancel. Are they being hit with a pop-up and confetti about the free gift that's on the next order? When they go to hit the cancel button, does it say lose VIP status? Is there all these? Speaker 2: There's a lot. Speaker 1: There's a lot that you can do. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Focus on each step of it. Like think about everything as a funnel. Speaker 2: Right. I agree. So I think first step is making sure that your opt-in actually looks interesting enough to get somebody to say, you know what, I'm going to go for this. I can cancel if I want to. But I think, I think one thing that you mentioned in the, in the beginning is like, do we want to default to subscription? Right. Pro tip, honestly, go and A-B test this today. Just test having subscription enabled first. We actually saw zero drop in conversion rate. There was no dip in any performance, anything at all. If somebody wanted to switch to a one-time purchase, they did. But the benefit is your subscription take rate increases. So go test that today. I don't, in my opinion, we tested it multiple times. It doesn't drop conversion rate. So if you're scared to. Don't be. So that's the first thing, right? Now the second thing which is kind of like what you mentioned is the next step in the journey is now that somebody's entered this subscription phase, okay? You're gonna have different types of people. You're gonna have the people that just did it because they wanted the discount or they wanted the free gift, right? That's totally normal and that's why you did it in the first place. But can you convince them that, hey, give us a chance. Remain on the subscription, okay? Now, walk us through what some of the strategies are when you do have that person that comes in and says, you know what? I did it for 30 days. I don't know if I necessarily need to continue the subscription. I'll just buy whenever I need to. Say they go into their portal. They say, you know what? I'm going to cancel or pause or whatever. What are some things that brands can do at that moment that they should be thinking about? Speaker 1: So I think that you should be like, even taking a step back, you should think about the minute they land on the subscription portal. 99% of the interactions when somebody goes into the subscription portal, it's to take a negative action. Like maybe 90%, maybe people who have really done it before might be going in to add something extra to their next order. Most of the time it's negative intent. And so things that we're starting to measure with brands is how do we turn negative intent to positive intent? Can we actually change the behavior? Somebody comes in with a negative intent, can we make it a positive action? So can we change it from somebody comes in to cancel or skip or pause, And then they actually just swap the product that they're on. Or they like, you know, maybe skip the product, but added something else. And so like, they're just going to snooze the one product, but they're getting a new product that time. How do they gift it to a friend? How do they get like, there's all these different things. And so like adding a free gift on the second order, which we know is a big one. What does that pop-up look like when they jump into the subscription portal? Is there confetti turned on, which is like my favorite feature that some people are like, oh, it's not our brand. I'm like, your brand doesn't involve confetti. Like, come on, it's a free gift. Put the confetti on. Are they greeted with that, which immediately changes intent because now it goes from, oh, we're going to do something negative, like, oh, well, what is it? What is the gift? And so then you see it on the order and it's marked down. It says free and there's a little gift icon on it. If that's not enough, do you have a punch card enabled? Are they able to see like, well, oh, but like if I did just get, you know, two more orders past this, then I get this thing. Like now I'm on this journey with this company. Then you go down to the cancel button and it's like, well, like did they lose VIP status when they cancel? What is VIP status? Like there's like tweaks like that that we've seen brands make of just like on the cancel button, like cancel and lose status that like you wouldn't believe like the difference it makes. Then once they've actually hit the cancel, like you see how like there's all these different things you should be focusing on before you even get to the cancellation survey. Then there's a million tips and tricks of how you should be setting up your cancel survey and like what are the different reasons that someone's canceling? What are the rebuttals? And then with Stay you can do all these different things. You can test. We have a live learning model behind it that we'll look at. It'll start as a 50-50 split test and then it'll start to see, Ash, on a second order to this product, this is the best treatment for him. So instead of just 50-50 testing it, maybe it'll be 70-30 testing. It'll kind of start to know what's the best treatment. And based on what your number one cancellation reason is, You should be using that to change other pieces of the flow. So just because you're seeing that like maybe somebody doesn't feel the effects or somebody thinks it's too expensive, get ahead of that with your messaging before you get to that like next order. So like in your post-purchase email. Whatever your number one cancellation reason should be, there should be some form of a rebuttal to that to address that thing. If you know that somebody thinks the product is too expensive, if you know that they don't feel the benefits, you should be telling people what they should expect and why this thing is important so that way you're going ahead of it before they even get to the port. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, you mentioned so many things which are just so great. So I want to recap so right before somebody actually even gets to that cancel button, it's. Quite literally showing them what all the benefits of having a subscription really are, right? So the continued discount, the continued, you know, free shipping, maybe even rebranding the subscription program as like a VIP program so that you have other perks, right? So, you know, maybe you're first to access new products or you have access to maybe a community or something like that, right? Second thing is, is that, and this is the feature I love the most about Stay is the punch card, right? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: I mean, you've seen this everywhere you go. You go to a coffee shop, you go to an ice cream shop, whatever it is, you keep going, right? Every fifth or 10th order is discounted or free. Quite literally having that in your face in the portal. It's like, well, you know what? If I make it to here, like I'm getting a free product or I'm getting a free gift. And so, you know what, I'll stick it out, right? That mindset of like, I'm just gonna stick it out for the benefits of like the free gifts and discounts and everything is good, but to your other point, taking these moments and instilling it into your actual retention strategy on the email and SMS front is very, very important, right? People shouldn't feel like, oh, like, I don't want to pay for this anymore. They should want to pay for it because there's a reason why they bought the product in the first place. Subscription shouldn't feel like, oh, I have an additional charge every month. It should feel like I am working closer to my goals because I have continued product that I'm going to continue taking. So I think the education piece of this, and a lot of people don't Realize this is that it comes through the communication on email, SMS, community, etc, etc, right? You can have all the tips and tricks in the world, but the product is not good. You're not educating and setting expectations, which is what you mentioned is, hey, after 30 days, this is what you're gonna feel. After 60 days, this is what you're gonna see. After 90 days, da da da, then you tie it in with some of these like free gifts, achievements, unlocks, and I think that is how Brand should be thinking about reducing churn rate, right? I want to get into maybe some of the additional churn tactics. I know we've tested, you know, potentially, you know, free gifts at different orders. You guys just launched the punch card. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: One thing that has been helpful is When people typically cancel or pause, maybe after like the two month or the three month mark, it's typically because they haven't necessarily finished through the product, right? So they have a ton, right? That becomes a big issue that we see a lot, right? So what are some of your thoughts there on protecting churn when certain cohorts just are like, you know what? I'm good on subscription. I'm gonna come back at some point. I just have too much product, right? So we'd love to dive into that. Speaker 1: So slept on. Like if you go into like go go in your state dashboard and look at how many customers are canceling per month and then look at how many are reactivating and if it's less than 10% like you're not doing enough. Especially if one of the number one cancellation reasons for you is I have too much product. That is such a win-backable customer. You should be winning every single one of those people back. And so at Stay, we've got a tool called WinBackEngine, which essentially looks at the cancellation reason, when they got their last product and all of that, and then picks when is the right day to send them a win-back email. You can get as creative as you want with win-back emails. I think they should be all drip campaigns. I don't think that one email is enough. I mean, I think about it just like with ads. Is one touch point enough? No. Like with SaaS sales, if I email a brand one time, are they going to move on the site? No. It's so many touch points and figuring out if somebody canceled, especially because they had too much product, hit them up, like keep going, like put them in a Driplet six emails long, like, you know, every 20 to 30 days, like have you run through the product? What it may be less than that, depending on like what You know, you think makes sense for your brand. But yeah, I just think there's a lot of those things that can be set up. Say we push all that into your email, your SMS platform, whatever, and then you can just build these drip sequences on these reactivations. There's another piece of churn that I don't think people are paying enough attention to, and that's passive churn. So do you have any idea what your first time like billing failure rate is? Speaker 2: No. No, I don't. Speaker 1: It is probably like 10%. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: So think about that. Just queued up orders that are ready to go out. The order, you know, you wake up in the morning and you see, Oh, like 200 orders are going to go out from stay today. Odds are 20 of those will fail. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: And it's, they might get recovered, but they'll fail insufficient funds. Like my credit card, just standard decline, like all these different things. And like, the number one reason usually in there is just a standard decline, which is like, you know, when you go to the gas station and you go to pay for something and your card declines for $15, it's like the most mortifying 10 minutes or I guess 10 seconds of your life. That is just, it's just a standard decline. Like, you know, like it just all of a sudden at two in the morning, This order went off and so the credit card company declines it and it'll get one back when we retry it. We look at that and we look at what was the reason that it got declined. When should it be retried? So some people would just set up standard dunning in their platform. Like retry the card every five days, you know, for a max of eight tries. And there are hard declines and soft declines. And so we'll look at it and be like, okay, like, was this a soft decline? Like, should we retry the card immediately? Should we retry it tomorrow? Like if it was insufficient funds and it's Thursday, like we should probably retry it on Friday. Like, and there's all these different, like, when did the card go through successfully for this person based on the cancellation reason? Because a lot of this is passive and it's like so frustrating to the consumer. Like when they did want to get the order, they got the upcoming order notification, they wanted it to go through. And they're like, oh God, like it just got declined for no reason. Now my order's gonna be delayed five days, where like most of the time it should just be retried the next day. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I didn't even realize that that was such a, it's probably a big chunk too, right? I mean, you're talking about, even if brands are like, you have a hundred, you know, orders a day and you know, 10 of those, I mean, it makes up a good amount. So I think even, I didn't even know that was even possible to even understand, okay, well, if there's, You know, soft reasons versus hard reasons. It's like, well, some of those reasons are, well, I just need to retry on payday, right? Or like a card was expired or maybe something like that, right? I think it would probably fall under maybe hard reasons. Speaker 1: Yes, like expired, it doesn't matter. Like we don't need to, we need to email that person to update their card eight times, but we don't need to retry the card eight times. Speaker 2: So again, there's different strategies here to get these people reactivated. And I agree. I think it's probably the most slept on because those are probably the warmest people that you can convert against. Speaker 1: And I think that people don't understand the volume of it. So we put out Smart Dunning this year and we have a case study that's about to come out. I guess it'll probably be out by the time this comes out. But this brand was using a third party app to help with dunning. We, I think it was like a 17 or 18% lift even. So they were paying another service to do it. Then we turned ours on for free. 17% lift in recovered cards. On top of that, this brand is doing the following. It's a difference of $20,000 a month, which is just kind of like revenue that was just literally flying away in the middle of the night that you just don't realize you're losing. It's people who didn't mean to cancel. It wasn't the intent, but just because something happened with their car, they got declined, they needed to update, whatever. We've all been to the Apple store and had our card decline. It just, it happens. So yeah, there's like different things like that also with Churn that like I'm trying to raise awareness on Dunning. It's like the most not sexy thing ever, but I'm like, fight for it. Like pay attention to it. Speaker 2: Here's the truth. Most subscription platforms are built for billing teams and not for growth marketers. We didn't get subscriptions right the first time. There was too much friction and too many drop-offs. Stay AI helped us clean it all up. Now we have the platform to manage subscriber upsells Gifting, offers and profit analysis. After we added Stay AI, churn went down, LTV went up and our team isn't stuck in support tickets every single day. If subscriptions are part of your roadmap, check out Stay AI slash Chew on This and mention Chew on This, you'll get $200 off your monthly plan for life. Now, let's get back to the episode. How should brands think about cross-selling within the portal itself, right? I'll give you like the initial thought in my head because one, and I remember this because you said this a long time ago, which is like, people shouldn't feel like they have to, what's the saying? They shouldn't have to like tiptoe around their subscribers because they feel like if they reach out to them, they're going to cancel, right? How should brands really be thinking about cross selling because naturally it's like well you're on a subscription I'm trying to put you on another product. Is that gonna get you into the portal and be like, you know what? I'm gonna pause right now. I'm gonna cancel whatever it is. It can be At least from what I've heard. It's like it can be a very solid strategy to increase LTV on subscribers. What is the best way to do that without kind of pissing people off? Speaker 1: Absolutely. And that's why I think like the portal design is so important. Having a punch card, having a banner, having these different things. That way when you go in there, like even if you have negative intent, we can kind of pull that back and be like, okay, but like you're going to like think about you walk into a store to return an item. But you end up walking out with two items like it's like because of the layout of the way the store is designed. It's because did a person help you did like we have to do that to the customer when they come into the portal every time. If we are guiding someone into the portal because we're saying, hey, you're subscribed to this, maybe we sent them an email that has a quick action link in it. And it's like, hey, get, you know, get this special thing on your next order, add it to your upcoming order and get 50% off instead of, you know, the standard 25 or something like that. That's good because they did come in with positive intent. But we don't want to go in and just be like, your subtotal right at the top, you know, is like this is adding an extra. $45 to your order. Are you sure you want a $100 charge? That we don't need to slap them with. So having a screen that just kind of sits at the top and then using a banner and a punch card, these other things that will sit in the portal, they just go in, they're like, oh cool, I got 50% off. Accept, click, and then they just see the top and the banner and all that and that's it. So the layout of the portal I think is very important, not to just have the subtotal up at the top. Yes, you don't want to hide it. This whole age of we're not going to send upcoming order notifications and we're not going to be like that, shady era of subscription is gone. But I do think that that's amazing for this progressive era of subscription and adding things because people are now like, that's gone away. We can't not email the people anymore. With all the new laws that are put in place, you gotta send an upcoming order notification or you're getting a class action. So being afraid to email them, yeah, there's definitely a limit. Don't email them every single day and remind them of their upcoming charge, but don't be afraid. Speaker 2: While we're on the topic of cross-selling, I've definitely seen a lot of brands out there that have seasonal releases for certain products, right? So you'll have brands like an Olipop, which will have these limited releases or seasonal releases, especially during the holidays or even the summertime, right? Being able to say, well, I'm a subscriber of Olipop. I get my cans every month, but being able to take advantage of some of these limited releases is very important. I would imagine it's very important for the brand. Obviously, I want to try it because I'm a diehard fan. Walk us through what that strategy might look like. Are we just, again, adding these to the orders? People may get confused. They're like, well, am I switching my subscription? It just becomes this whole thing where it's like, I get confused. If I'm confused, am I going to panic, cancel and pause, right? That's the whole point is we want to reduce that. So what's the best way of kind of getting these out there? Speaker 1: I'm glad that you mentioned Ollipop because they're actually one of my favorites that does these upsells. So they have right now Orange Cream, I think is the new one. I don't remember if it's seasonal or if it's going to stick around. But right now in their portal, like the banner is tied to it to add it to your next order. They send out an email and what they'll do too is before the flavor is released to everyone else, the subscribers get it first. So like a week and a half before it's going to be on the site, like enough time that the subscriber will have it at their door in their house before it's released to somebody who's not a subscriber. So, they'll send a note out. Subscribers now know that they get early access to products. They'll send an email, a text out to everybody with a quick action link in it that'll say, like, add this to your upcoming order. You get, even though it's going to be even just a one-time add-on, because it's a limited product, so it doesn't make sense to put it on subscription. You'll get your subscription discount on it. So if you get 20% off, you know, the subscription products, this product is also going to be 20% off. Just add it to your upcoming order one time and then people get to like try that with their upcoming. And I think that that has just been really helpful because it's helped train positive behavior. Now you get people used to like, it's like the gateway of getting somebody in to be like, oh, I can add more things to my upcoming order. I can switch things around. You want customers to feel in control. So when I measure like positive and negative interactions, swap for me is a positive action because it means that somebody is going in and they've taken control of their subscription. They know that if I didn't like this one product or I have too much of this product, I can actually try something else in the product catalog. Even if it's a swap that time, it might be an ad the next time. So now they've tried two different things and maybe it's not, maybe they didn't swap off because they didn't like the first product. It might simply be because they had too much of it or they just weren't in the mood for it. But maybe next time it'll, Add both of those things and add another thing. And so you just want to get people very comfortable with adding things, swapping things, like taking actions like that. So I think that using new products and limited edition products that people don't usually associate with subscriptions, they're not to be around for more than a month. That's perfect for your subscribers to just add to their upcoming order. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think also those customers may not necessarily pay attention to what's going on with the brand as much because they're like, I already have it on subscription. I'm not checking their Instagram. I'm not checking their emails as much. But hey, like if I get early access to something, like for sure, because I'm a subscriber, because I'm that VIP, and again, it goes back to what we were saying of Of rebranding a subscription program to more of like a VIP status, right, with the brand. So I really like that. I want to talk a little bit more about acquisition and kind of actually some of the tips and tricks that I've actually been testing out with Avi because you actually helped me out with this, which was really interesting because I didn't know this existed. So for us at Anvi, we have a lot of our traffic going to landing pages, okay? Right now, the way that it works is I have a customized buy box that I've tested over the last three years and I know this is like our best performing buy box. It's not your typical PDP, right? So the way that we do is we'll have three buy boxes, right? Now the Buy Now button, the way that I have it set up is each buy box has its own offer, they have gifts, they have this and that. So what I do is I create a unique URL which pretty much puts the user into checkout with the discount code applied, any free gifts applied. And so when they get into checkout, they don't have to do anything. It's like, hey, my discount's there, my free shipping is there, my free gift is there. Boom, go check out, okay? The question I had for you was, is that, well, I want to do this, but I want it to be a subscription as well. And so for us, when we were trying to move over from just one-time purchases to subscription, the easiest thing that I could think of was having that URL present some ID or push through whatever so that in the checkout ends up becoming a subscription. Apparently this is possible. You can create a URL that will allow you to do all the above. So if you want to add in a discount, you can add a discount. You want to add a free gift, you can add the free gift. Then you can say, all right, well, this specific product will have a 30-day subscription or a 60-day subscription or a 90-day subscription. And so I'm maintaining my buy box. I'm maintaining the architecture of my landing page. The only thing that I'm changing now is the messaging that, hey, this is a subscription. So you could get a 30-day, a 60-day, or a 90-day supply with a subscription on top of that. And all I did was change the URL to kind of push through what I need to in the checkout. I'm testing this. I'm trying to understand. Okay, obviously. You may see a dip in conversion rate, but can you actually increase opt-ins for subscription, right? So now you gotta look at, okay, well, CAC to AOV, obviously you're looking at for sort of profitability. Now you can start thinking about CAC to LTV if you're increasing the amount of people. So that's how we've been using it. I'm very curious how other brands have been using it, because I think it's a pretty slept-on feature, in my opinion. Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, and I'm wondering sometimes if it's where we tucked it in. So when you go into the state portal and you hit down on optimizations, There's the URL Builder and I think people just think of quick actions and that's when you can just add something to your upcoming order, but there's two tabs on the top and when you flip over it's the URL Builder, actually the checkout URLs. And so that enables you to go in, just as you said, and pick whatever product you want. And we also can build URLs just for one time, so it doesn't have to be a subscription, so you can just use the Stay Builder if you're comfortable there. For any type of checkout URL that you would like, but getting these, you can build custom bundles. You can basically be like, hey, I want to put these three products together, all on subscription, all on give this big discount code and do these other things. And so we're seeing people even put them in emails to people who have checked out just one time, or people that have checked out multiple times but are not on subscription. I build a segment of what somebody has done, placed two orders, and has never started a subscription before. Then all of a sudden, you're able to say, okay, well, what product were they subscribed to? You're like, what kind of offer do we want to do? And then you can send them an email that just takes them direct to checkout. They don't need to go down. They don't need all this other fluff. You can put the benefits of subscription in the email so that way when they click that, they're just right in checkout and it's not the noise of anything else. Speaker 2: No, I love that. I think email, SMS, probably all makes the most sense, right? Direct to checkout. It reduces the friction, right? And I think that's probably the biggest thing that a lot of people think about. It's like, oh, I got to send them to the PDP. I got to, again, sell them on the product. I got to click whatever options, this and that. Just put them in the email. Be like, hey, like, boom, checkout. Be done with it. Call it a day, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think back to my time at Lunar Solar and just some of the brands we'd work with and the email designs would be so intricate and they'd put together these packages and they do and there's so much detail and it was like almost this mist because you would like have this really cool thing in the email and then you would link to a PVP and it just like the branding wasn't the same because they were like doing something special in this email and also you're like wait like what is this like. Speaker 2: It's just an added step that you don't need. Speaker 1: Yeah, if you gave all the information you needed. Is it a good idea to just go run ads without any detail to check out URLs? No, probably not. But like, especially if somebody has bought from the brand before, they're on your email list, they're familiar with you and you like are giving good detail, I'm 100% pro like pushing right to check out. Speaker 2: I love that. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So going on this continued, I guess, trend of how do we get more subscribers, right? Right now, and I would imagine for a lot of brands too, it's like right now we're pushing the one-time purchase. It's easier conversion. Nobody has to think about if it's a subscription or not. But when you actually get somebody to buy, they've already learned about the product, they're educated, they've pulled out their wallet, they paid for something. They've obviously understood the value that you've brought to them and now they're waiting for the product. One thing that I think we've been testing, and this is with our post-purchase upsell app, is turning that one-time purchase into an actual subscription. And now the benefit here is that Hey, we know you just placed the order. Would you like to save an extra 20% off and turn it into a subscription, right? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: And if the answer is yes, you don't have to add in your details again. You don't have to cancel the order or do the whole process over. It's like, yes, I want this offer. Boom, gives them 20% back and turns it into a subscription. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Okay. I found that that opt-in is way better than trying to offer or try to force like a cold audience to enter a subscription, right? Speaker 1: 100%. Speaker 2: So I'm very curious. I haven't heard a lot of people talk about this. I know we've been testing it and seeing how we can increase opt-in rates, but curious your thoughts there. Speaker 1: We actually, by the time this comes out, have just released something. In-market to address post-purchase. I think that anywhere that we can acquire subscribers, how can we turn one-time purchasers into subscribers? How can we get people to add extra things to their upcoming order? That's all super helpful without damaging the conversion rate. People, I think, are very nervous to test different add-ons and stuff like that before. So post-checkout with Stay, you'll actually be able to go in and say, oh, I want to take this from a one-time purchase to a subscription and I want the $5 refund or whatever it is. Or I want to add this additional product to my upcoming order. We just like anything that Stay can touch to increase like getting one getting subscribers in and then also getting the AOB up on the subscribers even on that first order is critical to us. So I'm very very excited for you to see this. You're able to do a ton of testing in it. There's some great analytics to it. So it should be very very helpful in the post purchase experience. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean like and you can apply this to like all of your products too, right? It's not even just like your main funnel if you have somebody that just comes in, right? Just from the beginning of this episode we talked about having that default beyond subscription, right? On your PDP, okay? They may pass up on it once, okay? They'll go and buy a one-time, you know, purchase. What we do actually is in our cart is that one more time it's like do you want to save an extra? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: We have a pop-up and if they don't they'll just say no thanks and we'll go to checkout, right? So that's the second time that they've seen it. Now they actually get through checkout. They've put in their credit card details, they've checked out and now they're their customer. I think that third touch point, which is what we've been talking about, is the constant touch points to actually get somebody into a subscription program. That third touch point where it's like, listen, you just spent $100. We're going to give you $20 back. Now there's a value in their mind that they've already spent this money. They're going to get some of it back. I'll give you $20 back. I'll get you a free gift. I will comp your shipping. Enter a subscription. At that point, it should feel like a no-brainer because the entire journey, it's like, I could save, but I don't want to be, I don't want to have the hassle of a subscription. Oh yeah. Speaker 1: I think the take rate on that is higher than people think it's going to be. Most people think it's an afterthought. Maybe we'll get 2-3% and it's actually can be much higher. Another thing that we just put out was right in the checkout. On that checkout page, when you have a one-time item, you can put a little bar underneath it and it's like one last chance to switch over to subscription as you're putting in like the payment details and all of that. So yeah, it's like you really have to just think about every single step. Where can we just maybe get another 10% of people to take advantage of this? It might not be everyone, but you just wanna give every single opportunity at every single phase. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I think brands should be thinking about how do I just increase the opt-in in general and then focus on the retention side, reducing churn. And listen, acquisition is gonna be tough. It's always gonna be tough, right? But can you make more from the people that you've already acquired? I think that is like part of the conversation that not enough people are having. Speaker 1: Yeah. We talked about it earlier in the episode, but like, again, the cancellation survey. When you are optimizing to reduce churn, it's not just what's in the cancellation survey. It is what does the cancellation survey tell you, and then how do you change the entire journey? How do you change the post-purchase, like just join subscription email? How do you change the upcoming order email? How do you change what happens when they get into the portal? Because all of those things compound, and then by the time they get to the cancellation survey, you've already addressed some of the concerns already, so then it's easier with the content you have in there, the discount or whatever, to get a higher save rate. We're again I think people just like think like oh I just need to optimize like this survey and they don't think about the bigger picture and that's really how the whole thing is like when somebody's on the website like all those different page like you just have to think about the entire experience. Speaker 2: Love that. I mean, this has been super, super tactful and I think a lot of brands out there that are thinking about subscription have a lot to obviously consider and implement. For those who weren't considering, here's your sign to start considering it. But Gina, I want you to just give one last takeaway, whether it's just like one of your favorites from the episode or just one piece of advice for these brands to kind of go back and implement into their subscription program. And then I'll give one as well. Speaker 1: Okay. Mine, and I feel like I said this two times in the episode already, but I'm going to say it again. Fighting churn does not start at the cancellation survey. Fighting churn starts the minute somebody checks out and buys a subscription. Speaker 2: Love that. I think for me my biggest takeaway is one, go to your PDP right now and just Default to subscription and just test it. If you don't trust me, just go and test it. A-B test it with whatever A-B testing tool you're using. Go and A-B test it. I promise you, you won't see a drop in conversion rate, but you will see an increase in opt-ins for a subscription. So just get started and then start focusing on churn. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Chew on that. 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