The BEST Tactics to Optimize Your Subscription Program

The BEST Tactics to Optimize Your Subscription Program Speaker 1: Hey guys and welcome back to a very serious episode of Chew on This retention and subscription podcast powered by Stay AI. I am your host Gina and I am joined here again by Audrey. Yay. Speaker 2: So happy to be back and very excited for this episode. Speaker 1: Yes. I put my glasses on because we are, we're getting serious today. And we are going to be talking about everything to optimize your subscription program. So in the last episode, we covered on everything to get your subscription program started, how to get more customers into subscription. Now, once you have customers, we're going to cover all the things that you should be doing to better optimize your program, better retention rates, all the good stuff. So, let's take it from the subscriber portal. From the top of the subscriber portal, number one thing, what are add-ons? Should people have add-ons for their subscribers? The amount of times that I ask this question to somebody and I'm like, oh, do you have add-ons set up in your customer portal? And people are like, oh, I don't know. What products are perfect for add-ons? What should people be thinking about in terms of add-ons to subscription? Speaker 2: Add-ons should just be like an extension of your website, but for your subscribers. The goal is to allow subscribers to come into your portal, add new things to their subscription, try things as one time, maybe add some fun merch or exclusive gifts like that. Really just like a shoppable catalog for your subscribers. You've talked about this so much but ultimately the goal is to make the customer portal a positive place and I think that starts by making sure add-ons are front and center. Make sure you have products enabled in the carousel so like the first thing customers see is that scrolling. On the screen, but yeah, one times add-ons, merch, new flavors, exclusive things for subscribers. The really cool thing is you can offer or make available products that aren't available on your site exclusively in the customer portal. Speaker 1: Yes, I love when brands have like a new product coming out or something like that and they launch it first to subscribers and it's so easy. You just like can make it hidden on the website and so you can add it to Shopify and then you just add it to the customer portal. Also, I love when people do like subscriber exclusives or they just have their regular products. But even if it's a one-time product, so sometimes... like even a supplement company where almost everything makes sense on subscription every now and then they're gonna have a product that doesn't make sense for subscription and maybe it's merged maybe it's a shaker but whatever but that they can just add as a one-time product and it but it's in a subscriber portal so it's part of the experience so yes I love that. Unknown Speaker: 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 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: What do you think that people should be doing to incentivize those add-ons? Do you see people giving a discount on them, an extra discount? How do they differ from what's available on the site? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that this discount you're offering for one times in the portal should match the subscription discount because if you think about it, a customer can't just go in and buy that product one time on a discount. It has to come with a subscription order. Don't think of it as a one-time product, just think of it as an increase in AOV for the total order. And going back to what you said about some products don't make sense on subscription, so you can offer them as one-time. Even the products that make sense on subscription should be available as one-times because Again, my favorite example, I'm a protein subscriber. I'm seeing all this trendy stuff about creatine. I don't want to commit to a subscription yet, but maybe I'll just add it and I have the benefit of doing so at a discount. Speaker 1: Yeah. Once I become a subscriber or something, I'm a loyal girl. I like to just go into the portal and then use that as my way to shop. So once I'm a subscriber, I don't want to go back to the main site. I just want to be able to do it. It's one of the most frustrating experiences. That I had, and shout out Billy, call us, we would love to manage your subscription program, was I am a subscriber to Billy. I think we've talked about this. Yeah, like I have the Razorheads. They're on subscription, they're coming to my house. I don't even know what every eight weeks, whatever. I definitely have too much, doesn't matter. I'm using them. I've gone in a couple times and added a new like, you know, like razor, I don't know what you call it, like the, yeah, yeah, the new handle. They launched like dermablading razors, dermaplaning razors, whatever they're called, like the little things like to shave the peach fuzz. They didn't have them as an add-on in the portal. If I wanted to start it, I just wanted the set and they're like, oh, we only have the refills. I was like, well, no, I need the hand. And I reached out to, I was like, I want to pay for it. I reached out like over email and they were like, yeah, we just. Don't have that as an add-on. You got to go to the site. Speaker 2: And I was like, so you had to buy that separately. Yes. Speaker 1: I had to like go to the website and buy it where I was like, guys, this would take like one second to add. Like, come on. And where I was like, oh man, that was crazy. Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. A brand like that too. Like I, when I know my order's upcoming and I'm like, oh, I ran out of lotion or body wash. Like they sell all of those as add-ons and like, I've never subscribed to them, but I, I know that that order is coming anyway. So like why pay for shipping on another website when I, No, I like this one product. I might as well just add it to my list. Speaker 1: Yes, and it, like, Billie, I will say they do do other things really well because the first time they got me was I ended up with a bar of soap. I ended up with a tinted lip gloss. I ended up with a tinted chapstick or whatever. Yes, like I some, like it happened to me once where then they, I built that behavior of like, oh, anytime I want to try anything in this category because I have a subscription, I'm just going to log in my portal and add it to my next order. That just feels simpler for me than like, And it's yeah, it's a brand that I like that I know where as opposed to just like going to Amazon and trying something else. But yeah, I was like so mad about the term. Yeah, I mean, I ended up going to the website and getting them anyway, but I would have ordered them faster. And again, I totally probably would have started a subscription to them, where instead I just bought them the one time. All right, outside of add-ons, so we've got the carousel that shows and stay. If somebody, they should absolutely have as many, I think we let 12 things in the carousel, and then after that you can add as many other things when somebody hits view more products. Add them in there. If you have it, add it in there. Again, that example where even if you think like there's not people, like they probably were like, oh, if somebody subscribed to Razors, why would they want this? Like I wanted it. So think about that. If you're like, oh, who would ever add this? Just add it. It really doesn't take away from anything. Outside of that place, where else in the customer portal are we pushing add-ons? Speaker 2: The banner ad is probably the number one thing that comes to mind. I think that people overlook the banner ad when they aren't doing some sort of add-on campaign. The banner ad is like prime real estate. It's like... Speaker 1: Banner should always be on. Speaker 2: Yeah, it should always be on. So obviously the most used example is like an add-on. A new product, seasonal launch, something like that. But I love when brands do some sort of like subscriber exclusive campaign or they highlight a product. Now that those Dermaplane razors aren't a new product anymore, you can still offer that to subscribers and highlight that in the portal as an add-on. The cool thing about The Stay portal is you can link it to a product. So when the customer clicks it, it adds and you can choose if it's a one time, a subscription option. So you have a lot of flexibility there too. Speaker 1: Yeah. I like, and even if you don't have other products, cause sometimes people have been like, Oh, I don't have anything else to sell here. Like what would I put? Additional content, subscriber exclusive content, link out. You can link out to other things, link out to a video, link out to like do something that makes a subscriber feel important. And just say, when you're scrolling through it, like it's, A place to win somebody over and build brand before they see a skip button or before they see the cancel or remove or even the price of what they're going to pay. So like use that real estate wisely. Speaker 2: Just show like an evergreen VIP subscriber benefits banner. First Day does a great job of that. They just like have this evergreen banner that like lists out the subscription discounts and it kind of ties into their cancel button, their VIP status of the subscription program. So yeah, it's prime real estate and it should always be on. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. If you are not using banners, like this is your sign. So tip number one, open up your laptop. See what you have for add-ons. Make sure that you at least have products in the carousel if you have add-ons to sell and don't just pick 12. If you have 20 products, 12 main ones in the carousel and then the rest make sure that they're available if somebody hits add product. Next thing, banner. If it's not on, again, pause this episode, open up Canva, call your designer, take a screenshot from your website, like put something in here on the banner that adds value and helps build brand right in the customer portal. My other thing is Is your subscription portal easy to navigate? So what drives me crazy, I have, I wish they were a client, Ursa Major, I've been subscribed to them I think since 2018. I am subscribed to two products, Vitamin C Serum and the Golden Hour Recovery Eye Cream. If you are over the age of 25, you should be using that eye cream. I promise. I've been using it. I wish I was using it on my entire face this whole time, but it's too late to go back. Anyway, I use them at different cadences. They're all on the same thing. Sometimes I need them at the same, sometimes I just need one, whatever. My subscription gets ripped apart and confused. I can't imagine my mom trying to use this portal. And I think that is really the test is like, yes, a lot of us and a lot of you that are watching this, you can probably figure out how to navigate anything. But think about the age of your customers and can your mom or your grandma or dad, grandpa, anyone that's older than you, a generation older, can they navigate the portal? Yeah. Speaker 2: My parents are the most loyal subscribers to AG1. And my mom asked me, she was like, I need to send this to a different address. We're traveling. Do I need to make a new subscription? And it blew my mind, like my mom's pretty tech savvy, and it blew my mind that like that wasn't super clear when you log into the portal. So I was able to show her how to how to do that and it is relatively intuitive but that just kind of like got me thinking. Speaker 1: Did they have a one-time update address or did you have to update it and then update it back? Speaker 2: I think we updated it and then updated it back. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't like a gift next order situation. Speaker 1: Well, if they were on stay. Yeah. They could have done a one-time address update. I think that's another like slept on thing, you know, like talking about the customer portal. Yeah, a one-time address update. We out of the box call it gift next order. But if you don't think that your product is super giftable like AG1 Their customer probably is moving a lot in the summer. They're moving around, they're traveling, they're jet-setting. Yes, they want to stay healthy, but the whole reason they're drinking green is because they need some piece of regular and they want that lifestyle, but they're likely moving around a bit. Yeah, like a one-time address change, if it makes more sense to call it that than it does to call it gift next order, change the copy. Speaker 2: It's so easy. You literally can open your laptop right now and do that. There's so many other small copy tweaks too that you can make like going back to add-ons like instead of just saying add product it should say add products for 15% off, 25% off. Instead of cancel it should say cancel and lose VIP status. Speaker 1: Yes, these small tweaks you said it in the last episode with the subscribe and save on the like if you have a subscribe and save page how it's to say subscribe and save 25% off. Those small tweaks go such a long way like I think that people just like you know they get started with their subscription program and it's fine like if you just need to get it up and you don't have to do it just to get things launched. But once you're rolling, that's what this whole episode is about, to go in and tweak it. Where can you make small copy tweaks like that, that would make somebody want to do it? Add product, add discounted products, add whatever that line is that makes sense for you and your brand. The cancel and lose VIP status on the cancel button, I love that one. Speaker 2: Agreed. Speaker 1: We'll show an example of it. It is such a good one and it's such a small tweak. We have a couple brands now that have tested it and it almost always performs and has like a very significant of people that just don't even hit the cancel survey. And I know we're going to talk about the cancel survey, but like. I'm going to scream it. Everyone listen to me. Fighting churn does not start once somebody has opened the cancellation survey. That is your last ditch effort. That's like the last 10% of effort. Yes, there's a ton you can do in the cancellation survey, but it's not the only thing. Yeah. Speaker 2: Huron changed their skip Next order button to say, skip this order, I have enough for now, which like directly correlates to the copy that they're showing in their cancellation survey. So again, I feel like it's just like a psychological thing that like triggers the customer to say, oh, I have too much product. There's literally a button that solved this problem for me. Speaker 1: Yes, instead of even hitting the cancel button. I love that. And that's why I'm like, do not... Yes, save rate 100%. Like once you've optimized everything else, 100% you should be focused on your save rate, but it is not the only place. And I think so much about the cancellation survey. I'd rather see the save rate go down. But overall retention go up because you've used the answers of the surveys and what people are doing in the surveys to treat churn before someone hits the cancel button. Speaker 2: Definitely. And I feel like people always default to optimizing the cancellation survey and the save rate because it's such an easy metric to track. When you make these small tweaks in the portal, There's not a specific metric, like you will probably just see churn go down overall, but obviously there's so many factors that go into that. But within Stay you can actually track the different customer portal actions and you can just categorize those as positive or negative and then just see over time if there's any change there. Speaker 1: Yes, let's talk about that for a minute because I think that that's something people are not tracking enough is positive versus negative actions. And even if you're not using Stay AI, one, you should be. But if you're not, you can still, I think, do this. Other platforms must be tracking this stuff by now. We're like looking every month at the actions. Unknown Speaker: What could it take? Speaker 1: 30 minutes max once a month to go in and pull this report of how many, I don't know, get it now. What would you say the positive ones are? Speaker 2: Reactivate. I think get it now is a positive action. Speaker 1: I think it's definitely positive. Speaker 2: Gift next order. Swap. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I think skip. is on the edge because like technically you're not losing the customer but I think that should be an indicator that maybe you need to address like the frequencies that you're offering. But yeah, overall I think it's good to add product. Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say basically anything that's not negative I would put in the positive category because what it means is that you've got somebody to go into the portal and take an action that wasn't negative, which to me is a win. That means that somebody's engaging with the brand, they understand how to use the portal, like they're a fan of the brand. So like really the negative ones would be, I don't know, skip. Sometimes change date, and it's tough because change date can go up, it can go back. I think I categorize it most of the time, if you wanted to move it up you'd be hitting get it now. That's what I've absolutely changed order date and just moved it up like a week from when it was going to hit because I knew I was running out. But yeah, for the most part, anyway, you should be looking at those things and then using that as a better indicator, especially if you're using the learnings from the cancellation survey to optimize the portal. So please start tracking that. Copy tweaks. We talked about ad product for 15% off, lose VIP status. Any other small copy tweaks that you've seen? I like the Huron one a lot. Speaker 2: I mean, you can literally change the button copy and Every single aspect of the portal. The ad products, I think, is the biggest one that I call out. Gift next order. Gift next order to a friend. You also said, like, change order date one time or order address one time. Speaker 1: Yeah, one-time address update or something like that. Yeah, it really just depends on your customer. Yeah, gift doesn't make sense. Cool. Speaker 2: Here's the truth. Unknown Speaker: 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. Speaker 1: Other things that you can do in the portal, so outside of just Stay functionality, what have you seen people do? Speaker 2: I've seen customers do, like, embed their loyalty programs, like Yotpo, for example. I think Botanictonics has this enabled in Stay, where if you're a subscriber, you're logged into Shopify, into your Stay portal, you can just redeem your points right there. With the click of a button. I've seen merchants do like the beam integration where you're showing like the impact of your orders and you can change the different organizations that you're contributing to. Speaker 1: Yeah, Olipop has that. I do love that. I think that's very, very on brand for them. Speaker 2: Agreed. And then the possibilities are kind of endless too. You can use I mean, every app has the ability to kind of customize the portal to your liking, but I've seen some brands start to add custom widgets where they're calculating the lifetime savings of the subscription, which is great. Because, I think you mentioned this in the last episode, you don't want a customer to log into the portal and say, we're charging you this much for your next order. But instead, you're kind of reframing that and saying, you've saved this much by being a subscriber. Speaker 1: Yes. Well, on the topic of loyalty, a little no points loyalty needed to stay, what are you seeing people do with punch cards? Speaker 2: People are getting super creative with punch cards. Ion Layer has the coolest punch card and they've done like a ton of customization. Speaker 1: Oh, I haven't seen this one. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's amazing. But they do a discount like every few orders or so. Alice Mushrooms has one of my favorite punch cards. Speaker 1: Yes, that one I like scream about. Speaker 2: Yeah, they do gifts every few orders and they also use a banner ad to kind of It designed that in a way. And then they use that creative throughout all of their emails. So it just kind of like ties everything together. But I would say like, honestly, if you want to test out digital punch cards, like keep it simple. If you know your LTV or your LTO is around five orders or something like that, do a discount or a gift after that. And really try and get customers to stay through that order, through one more order. And then you can start introducing New incentives. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying to think of some other good punch cards that are like Beekeepers Natural. I also, I can't believe that more brands don't do this. They do it, but updating the little icons, how you can make them the cute little punches and they do little bees on theirs. That is fantastic. I'm also a subscriber of Clean Skin Club and theirs is like so good and basic. It's just every 10 orders you get $25 off. And it's just like for something like that where they're like, hey, we don't want to give away a ton, but we want something that's effective, like we like this. I love it. I log in every time. I'm like, oh man, I'm X amount away because that's something I've just been, that's another one. I think I've been subscribed to them since like 2018. So I love, love that one. All right. So now we, we talked about it a bit. The cancel flow, obviously like one of the hottest topics in subscription, I feel like The cancel flow is important. So like, let me be clear. The cancel flow is absolutely important, but it is not the end all be all of subscription and retention. Like you need to use the cancel survey to influence a lot of other things in your subscription experience. So that's everything we've been talking about today. That said, there's still a lot you can do to fight churn in the cancellation survey. We do see brands that crush it really like get 20, 30% save rates. If you're not seeing that, again, it's fine because you might be saving people before they get there. So I don't necessarily think if you have a 15% save rate, that's bad. Because overall, if you have good retention, you might be doing things where people are just not coming in to cancel. And the people that are coming in to cancel, you've hit them with all the treatments already before they entered that. Like if they didn't believe it, we're like, yeah, if it's just not a fit for them anymore, it's not a fit and there's nothing you were going to do in that cancellation survey anyway. If somebody is starting from scratch on the cancellation survey, what, how many reasons do you think they need? And what are the important, maybe like top three that you're like, you absolutely need to have these reasons listed? Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd say anywhere between like five and seven reasons. Again, it depends on the brand and what you know about why your customers cancel. But if you're just starting out collecting cancellation data, I think you should have other because that will probably illuminate a lot of reasons that you haven't even thought about yet. But the top ones are I have too much product, it's too expensive, and probably the third one that I see the most is I didn't feel the effects or the product didn't address my concern. But like you said before, I have too much product and I didn't feel the effects are ones where like if you are addressing those reasons correctly, you probably won't see your save rate go up. You'll just see less customers coming into the cancellation survey. Yeah, it's too expensive is like the easiest one to address with a discount. Speaker 1: A hundred percent. I would say that's where when you see really high save rates, it's probably because the reason is it's too expensive. And then if you're able to treat that with a discount, it's like the most immediate quick win. Speaker 2: Definitely. But I'm also a fan of like adding a discount in some capacity for all of the other cancellation reasons too, because I don't know, sometimes customers aren't honest and they just click the first one that pops up, which in today's cancellation survey, it's randomized. So like, it's not always going to, It won't skew the results, but yeah, even if customers cancel because they have too much product, tell them the options that they have, give them a swap option or something, but also throw them a discount because maybe they're not actually being truthful. Speaker 1: Yeah, totally fair. If you're going to lose the subscriber anyway, you might as well try a discount. Okay, and then in terms of treatments outside of discounts, what else are you seeing working? Speaker 2: I've seen founder videos included in the treatments working super, super well. Just like any sort of personalization, whether that's including the customer's name, the number of orders they've had, or speaking specifically to the reason that they're canceling, either in the copy or the video itself, I think is pretty powerful. And then one cool thing that I've seen brands start to do recently is use our new quick actions to kind of like build treatments that aren't Accessible right now, so like you can do a delay order for example, like right now you can do skip, which is easy, but if you wanted to just give customers the ability to delay their order for like a week and also layer on a discount, you can just use a quick option right in the treatment. Speaker 1: Okay, perfect. Love that. So then, when somebody asks you, like, how to know if my save rate is high, like, how does someone know? So again, we said, like, I think that used to be, like, you know, and things evolve over time, but it used to be, like, okay, yeah, like, whatever your save rate is, like, that really is the measure of how good your retention is. How do you, when you start working with a brand, decide if they have a good cancellation survey? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think the first thing is to look at the top cancellation reasons, because like we said before, like, depending on the reason, The save rate might not be high if the top reason for cancellation is like, I didn't like this product. That's hard to treat in the cancellation survey. But if it's a matter of like realigning expectations, that's something that, as we talked about in the previous episode, happens from the very first subscriber touchpoint. So if the cancellation reasons are along those lines and the save rate is sitting at like 12%, I don't think a 12% save rate is bad in that situation, but there's a lot that we can do before the customer even gets there, which you might not see reflected in the save rate percentage. Speaker 1: 100%. And I think a good example of that is if somebody is like, I just don't like the product. I think we worked years ago, or maybe this was even a story that Retention Engine had told me, that they worked with a company that was not on Shopify or something. But anyway, coffee company, they had two different SKUs, light roast, dark roast. And the light roast people just, it had the highest cancellation. People just did not love it. So what they started, and they learned that through the cancellation survey. And so they would try to save people in the cancellation survey and say, Hey, like, you know, like, do you want to swap to this other product? Do you want this? But it was too late. They now have like 30 servings of this coffee. They didn't like the taste of their mouth. Oh my God. Great pun was already spoiled from this brand. So what they started doing was they were just like, screw it, everyone who buys the light roast, we're just going to give them a sample pack of dark roast. Speaker 2: So smart. Speaker 1: And so they learned something from the cancellation survey that they treated earlier in the experience. And I think that's the most direct example where they saw Retention absolutely rise and they saw swaps rise and they were able to push swaps out and so then they started sending emails out, you know, 15 days after you've been in the subscription, 10 days after you've been in the subscription, you'd get an email with a quick action that's like, do you want to swap? And that is like a great example of, yeah, by the time somebody got to the cancellation survey, it was too late, but the only reason they knew that that was happening was because of the cancellation survey data. Speaker 2: The other place that I don't think people are leveraging the cancellation survey data enough is in your reactivation flows. I know you're a big fan of this one too, but in the same way that you can address those reasons up front, you can also speak to those after the customer is cancelled. Like, I have too much product, there's no reason that you shouldn't be winning those customers back. There was nothing wrong, they didn't have a bad experience, they just didn't use it enough. And you can follow up and message them differently than customers that may have cancelled because it was too expensive. For another reason. Speaker 1: Yeah, if you are not reactivating at least like 10% of your customers, you're doing something wrong. Like you're leaving money on the table. That to me is crazy. Unless people truly are canceling for other reasons besides I have too much product, but that is usually a big component. You should really be looking at those customers and aiming to win a ton of them back. You can have reactivation flows set up by cancel reason. I mean, I'm pretty sure we've even set up recipes where you can just clone those things into people's Klaviyo accounts at this point. Yeah, so it just doesn't make sense to not do stuff around Winback and I think in the next episode we're really gonna hit on all the different emails and how to set that up so I'll save the good stuff for the next episode. What else can people do? We talked a little bit about gifting that coffee example, like how they gave a free gift on the first order. Where, Experience Engine is my favorite tool, where are you seeing people use Experience Engine? Speaker 2: Yeah, there's I think like two main categories for Experience Engine and one is reducing churn and then one is for cross-selling or upselling customers. Churn prevention I think has gotten a lot of hype, rightfully so. I think it's always worth AB testing a free gift on a specific order cycle. And then once you have information about what gift performs well, you can even use the churn prediction experience engine flows just to have something on Always that, when it identifies a customer that's ready to churn, it will give them a gift. So that's super cool. But I think the most underutilized part of Experience Engine is like the cross-sells and up-sells. Speaker 1: Yeah. Why don't, like, everyone should have this, okay, another, this is why our laptops are up today is because I need to make sure we hit all this stuff and I need you to pause right now and put your laptop up and go look and see, do you have any cross-sells set up in Experience Engine? If you don't and you have more than one product in your product catalog, Go set up a cross out. Audrey's gonna tell you how to do it. Speaker 2: Yeah. It doesn't have to be complicated and you can A-B test it, you can A-B test different discounts, different products and whatnot, but literally just take whatever your best-selling product is and set up the promotion so if a customer doesn't have that gift or that product in their subscription, give them an upsell. It adds it as a one-time, so it's kind of like they try it, maybe they like it, they come back and subscribe, but if anything, it's a higher AOV order and customers are trying different things in your product catalog. One of my favorite cross-sells was Intake Breathing did a really cool one. Their product catalog is honestly super small. Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna actually say what did they even do? Speaker 2: Yeah, so on the second order they did a 50% off mouth strips. So yeah, they have the nose breathing strips, but to improve your sleep, they gave customers 50% off if they added mouth strips to their next order. Speaker 1: That is a no-brainer. I bet the take rate was good on that too. Yeah, exactly. I love that. And yeah, the take rates on it, even if it's a... I see some people set it up and they're like, oh, it's only a 3% take rate. And I'm like, this took you one second to set up and 3% of customers just added a product that they weren't going to add. It's a win. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: Call it a win. Speaker 2: Yeah. And even just like going back to everything we've been talking about, about like making the customer portal like a positive place, like even though the customer is adding that and they have to pay for it, like it's still, in my opinion, like a positive interaction. Speaker 1: Yeah, especially with the way that Stay does it now. This is where I'm like, all these little tweaks really make a huge difference where Stay is so focused on that customer experience. So if you do an experience engine test where it's a free gift, you can, I mean, go as far as setting up confetti when somebody enters the customer portal, which I love. I'm a big confetti person. Speaker 2: There wouldn't be an episode if you didn't talk about confetti. Speaker 1: No, the confetti is really important. Again, check, check your laptop, laptop up, go see, do you have confetti turned on in your customer portal? It's a little toggle right in the customer portal settings. Anyway, If somebody just randomly gets a free gift from you and you're like, oh, it's surprise and delay. They just like randomly got this product, but it's not in the email comms. You didn't send a text about it. You didn't notify somebody in the portal. Like how are they supposed to know that was a gift and not just a mistake from your 3PL? Like that to me is crazy behavior that some of the other platforms like don't like. So we focus so much on you can have that, you know, in the upcoming order email. We send over a metric specifically that you have a gift coming in your upcoming order. And we tell people immediately when the product, like, so if you have a upsell or free gift or whatever on order number two, the second order number one goes through, that's when that email triggers. If you want to put a day delay on it or something like that, you can, but I wouldn't wait too long because especially later in the buying cycle, If you're doing an upsell or a gift on order three or four, sometimes we see the highest churn one is three days before when that first upcoming order email goes out, but it's also right after the credit card charges hit. So if you look at like the risk analysis dashboard of the days that have the highest spikes in churn, a lot of them on the second and third order is right after that order was charged. So telling people the same day that the order goes through is, hey, surprise, on your next order, you get this gift. It's not too soon. It's not too many emails that they got at once. It's a very positive thing. Speaker 2: I think you should be sending both emails, when the promotions actually apply to their subscription and a reminder in the upcoming order email. But a lot of brands are scared of sending emails to customers, which we'll get into. But I think this is A positive email that you should be sending. Speaker 1: It's so positive, especially like when you're just, when you just charge someone's card to be like, just charge your card. But the next time we do that, you're going to get this gift. Also, I love it because when you get into the customer portal, even if it's a pay, so even if it's not a free gift, if so, if you're running an experience engine, cross sell. So when you go into the customer portal, it like sits in a special place and it even has like special like offer for you. And then it like lets you accept that offer and it just feels great. So even if you offer like, let's say you have 25% off subscribe and save. So you let people do, you know, 25% off add-ons. If you do just 30% off for the targeted cross sell, it looks so good in the portal where you're like, oh, this is special. I'm going to take it. Speaker 2: Yeah, the CTA literally says accept special offer and the customer has to scroll past, like going back to the beginning of the episode, scroll past the carousel, the banner ad, the special promotion, all the copy that says add product for 15% off. So before they can even get to the cancel button. Speaker 1: And before we wrap up the episode, I want to do a little segment of, is it on? There are a lot of tools in InStay that are as simple as like turning them on. And they're slept on. There's just some things that I cannot believe that people do not have turned on. So is it on, first thing, Smart Dunning? What is it? Why should somebody have it turned on? Speaker 2: Yeah, Smart Dunning uses AI to kind of like dynamically retry failed payments and this is a no-brainer to me. It's literally one toggle and the back end just kind of optimizes everything related to Dunning. Speaker 1: Duh. No brainer. I feel like I'm like in one of those TikToks where I'm like, and this is my lead CSM, Audrey. She's going to tell you how to optimize your program and you're going to be nice. Okay. Yeah. Everyone be nice. Next. Is it on? Check stock levels. Speaker 2: Yeah, this one, before you turn this on, you should just ensure that like your Shopify inventory is accurate. But if it is and you're using Shopify to do that, you can enable this so that every time an order, a recurring order goes through, we're checking the stock level in Shopify and either the order fails for out of stock or it goes through. And that kind of leads into the next setting, which is partial order fulfillment. If you are using Shopify for inventory and you are checking stock levels before billing, you should have partial order fulfillment on because it will just remove the out-of-stock product from a subscription that has multiple products. Speaker 1: Okay. Is it on? Upcoming order email. And what is the subject line? Speaker 2: Unfortunately, you do need to be sending this. So please make sure this is on. It will save you a lot of time and energy with chargebacks. But that doesn't mean that it needs to be boring. So the subject line can be fun. Make sure you're testing and tweaking this. It shouldn't just be like, hey, we're charging your card. That's kind of going to be an automatic cancel. It should say health and wellness is on the way in three days. Speaker 1: Yes. Love it. Winback Engine, is it on? Speaker 2: Yeah, Winback Engine is another sneaky easy one to just enable and we have a Klaviyo template that we can get you set up with really easily. But yeah, this also uses machine learning to just determine the right time to send customer a Winback email. Requires another step, small step in Klaviyo, but again, turn it on and stay, turn it on in Klaviyo and you're good to go. Speaker 1: Yeah. Merge and split. Speaker 2: Just more options for customers to manage their sub. They can either merge two subscriptions together. So if they have different products on different cadences or they checked out with one product and at a later time made another subscription, they can merge those together. And then split is actually my favorite one where you have two products in the same subscription, split them out so you can manage them on different cadences. You can send them to different addresses. There's a lot of different use cases, but yeah, just want to make it easy for. Speaker 1: Sneaky one, Partial Skip. Speaker 2: Oh my god, yeah, this one is kind of hidden in the selling plan. Speaker 1: I know, it like needs to be, I understand why it's there, although I wonder if new product and pricing updates maybe will be able to pull it out, but Partial Skip, is it on? Speaker 2: Yeah, Partial Skip essentially just allows people to skip one product in a multi-product sub. Speaker 1: Turn it on. Speaker 2: Yeah, just go into the selling plan. Honestly, go into all of your selling plans and make sure this is toggled on. Speaker 1: The only reason you wouldn't want this on is if you have some type of, like, minimum order amount. Like, you don't want people to be able to, like, separate their such, like, maybe on the website you have, like, a minimum, like, somebody has to check out with two items or something like that. You don't want them to be able to skip and you did some custom coding that, like, enables them not to remove items. But outside of that, just turn this on. Just turn this on. Because it stops somebody from removing the product from the subscription and then forgetting to add it back. So partial skip is a big one for me. And then last one I think we need to hit, it's not so much of it is it on, but maybe like check to see if you should turn it on and make the switch over, is the new Shopify accounts. How do you feel about them? Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a big fan of this because I just like The ability for a customer to log into one portal and the new Shopify login experience is like pretty slick. It's fast and super reliable and you can really like unify all of like your Shopify experiences that you have in one place. So yeah, not necessary, but I think definitely worth looking into. Speaker 1: Yes. Amazing. That concludes my is it on segment. So I think we covered quite quite a bit today. What would you say is your hot take? Somebody is going in, they're like, hey, I have 30 minutes to do something to optimize my subscription experience. What is the one thing that you tell them that they have to go do? Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good question. I would say make sure that you have add-on products enabled. Speaker 1: Yes. Okay. I love that. I think mine, although it's like not the biggest impact, I think like my just number one is actually a partial skip. I think I'm like shocked at how many people don't turn that on. And it's not gonna be like the biggest, biggest impact, but I guess if you told me that you only have Three minutes I'd be like just go turn that on. I guess if you have 30 minutes then mine would be the banner. I think the banner can really change the mood of the portal where just spend some time and make sure that you're updating that banner at like every 30 days. It doesn't take much. It's a graphic like you can even have the same messaging but change the graphic of it. It just gives like a really fresh feel to the entire portal. Speaker 2: Definitely. Speaker 1: Sweet. Well, thank you guys for tuning in to everything that you can do to optimize your subscription program. I hope you took this very seriously as you can see with my serious glasses and our laptops up. We will be back in the next episode to talk about everything email and SMS you should be doing to make your subscriber experience better. See you then. Unknown Speaker: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.