Here’s a simple option you might not have explored yet: subscriptions. The right subscription option can provide a huge boost to your online store—not only will it open up repeat orders and recurring payments, but it can provide further benefits that enhance retention and help you foster a robust customer base.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest benefits of the subscription model and how the right subscriptions app can help you take advantage of them.

Subscriptions are dependable

Whether you plan to sell a curated subscription box or replenishable essentials, subscriptions have clear advantages for both consumers and brands. For consumers, they de-stress the day, keeping everyday essentials stocked and ready to go. A brand that can deliver killer products on a customer’s terms has an excellent shot at entrenching itself in their daily routine and becoming a long-term standby.

For brands, that translates into solid, predictable sales. A non-subscription business relies on one-time customers consciously choosing to return; a subscription business has repeat purchases built in. Even retaining customers for just a few recurring orders can smooth out dips in business, and the right combination of products and subscription experience can result in customers for life.

A Shopify subscription app can strip out hassle and manual work

The concept behind subscriptions is sound, but execution is critical. Don’t leave a potentially integral component of your business to an ad hoc manual solution—instead, opt for a business-ready, off-the-shelf option for your Shopify store.

Here are some of the top factors to consider among subscription apps.

Robust subscription management options

Simply offering subscriptions is one thing. But remember the shifting landscape of brand loyalty—the brands that truly thrive on subscriptions are the ones that provide a flexible experience that fits into (and enhances) customers’ lives rather than expecting customers to conform to it.

What does that mean? Provide options. Your subscriptions app should let customers manage subscriptions effortlessly, including:

• Configuring their subscription plans and delivery cadences
• Adjusting product options and selections easily
• Skipping or delaying orders, or even pausing subscriptions indefinitely

The easier you make it for customers to work your products into their day, the more likely they are to do so.

Easy migration and launch

Just like customers won’t rearrange their lives around an inflexible subscription, you likely don’t want to rearrange your business to suit a one-size-fits-all subscriptions app.

Whether you’re launching your subscription offering from scratch or trying to upgrade your existing one to a more robust version, make sure your subscription app of choice is prepared to meet your business where it is. That means:

• Supporting your (and your customers’) preferred payment options, to avoid disruptions to recurring payments.
• Intaking existing subscription data, if you already use subscriptions, so customers can continue receiving subscription products uninterrupted.
• Responsive customer service and extensive support. Integrating an all-new function into your business can be complex, especially for established businesses—your subscription provider should be prepared to guide you through it and make sure you can launch without a hitch.

The right subscription app will elevate your whole business

While you’re implementing your subscription app, see how else you can enhance your business. While the more basic options may focus solely on subscriptions, others provide more holistic retention offerings, ways to increase customers’ cart sizes and LTV, and more.

Don’t overlook these benefits—if the core advantage of the subscription model is the dependability it provides, then you don’t want to miss out on other ways to shore up your revenue streams.

Recharge: Far from just a subscription app

Built for Shopify, Recharge subscriptions are at the core of our platform, but that’s just the start. Our full offerings include loyalty programs, cancellation reduction measures, automated failed payment monitoring, and more—plus the in-depth analytics and industry benchmarks you need to put your performance into context.

Shopify subscription apps are a top tactic for dependable revenue

Online stores of all kinds can benefit from implementing subscription apps. Subscriptions are a key opportunity to turn one-time purchases into recurring payments from repeat customers—don’t miss out!

When evaluating potential subscription apps, make sure the one you choose will be right for your business and your customers. It should provide easy subscription management options for customers, helping your subscription options complement their lives rather than complicate them. If you already carry subscriptions and are trying to upgrade your offering, make sure your new selection can easily intake existing subscription data and support your business as you get onto their platform.

The post Driving sustainable growth: Leveraging Shopify subscription apps for recurring revenue models appeared first on Recharge.

But retention is also a different beast from acquisition—it requires a multifaceted approach to different aspects of the customer experience. And with different brands favoring so many different retention strategies, it can be hard to know where to focus your efforts.

In this blog, we’ll walk through some of our most trusted customer retention strategies, including:

• Loyalty programs
• Personalized cancellation alternatives
• Automated failed payment resolutions
• Lapsed subscriber re-engagement

Like what you see? Take a look at Recharge’s Retain package, our suite of offerings designed to help you build lasting relationships with customers.

Our favorite ways to retain customers

Expand your customer retention strategy with these proven tactics.

Thank loyal customers with rewards

They’re no secret—brands in every retail segment have used rewards programs to earn customer loyalty for years. This tried-and-true approach could be the perfect addition to your customer retention strategy, providing incentives that get existing customers to their next order every time.

Rewards programs come in lots of different forms:

• Points-based programs that reward customers with points to redeem for discounts on future purchases. These are often ideal for consumable products that are replenished regularly, adding a layer of variety to a subscription.
• Tiered programs that reward customers with freebies or points when they pass certain milestones, like the number of orders placed. These can be the perfect option for something like a skincare or nutrition regimen that need time to start working—staggered rewards at key points encourage subscribers to stick around long enough to see results.
• VIP programs that provide special perks and benefits, like access to members-only events, new releases, or opportunities for input and feedback. These are a versatile option that can be blended with other setups for unique results. And more detailed customer feedback will help you enhance your products, too.

No one-size-fits-all option

Whichever loyalty program you choose for your business, make sure it’s flexible enough to adapt to your brand and customers. Recharge’s Rewards feature is designed to get better over time—its built-in A/B testing capabilities help you zero in on the most effective incentives for customer retention.

Plus, its integration throughout the customer experience means you can even use remaining rewards to try to sway customers when they move to cancel (more on that below).

Alternatives to cancellation

Eventually, some customers will end their subscriptions. There’s no way around that—churn is an inevitable part of subscription commerce.

But not every cancellation attempt needs to be the end. Sometimes customers cancel permanently due to temporary circumstances, or to solve a problem they don’t realize has another solution. That’s where personalized cancellation alternatives come in.

It’s simple: When a customer initiates cancellation, just check on why, then offer a tailored (and less permanent) solution. Too much product on hand? Skip or delay the next order. Extended trip out of town? Pause the subscription, to be resumed when ready. Trying to save money? Here’s a one-time discount. Not sold on your product of choice? Try these other options customers like you love.

This approach doesn’t just prevent losses, it turns them into wins—solving problems for customers extends their subscriptions and results in even higher customer satisfaction (and thus customer retention) than before.

A built-in solution from Recharge

Recharge’s Retain suite includes Cancellation Prevention, a solution that does all this out of the box. Your brand can use it to build custom exit surveys and configure alternative offers for different cancellation reasons.

And like lots of Recharge tools, it comes with built-in testing capabilities and analytics, so you can rest assured that you’re maximizing your customer retention rate.

Fix failed payments

Churn may be inevitable, but it’s not always intentional. In fact, passive, or unintentional, churn is relatively common—and since it happens to customers who still value your services and products, addressing it can be a surefire way to keep subscribers around and revenue flowing.

Passive churn is usually the result of one of a handful of payment-related reasons, like insufficient funds, expired cards, or processing errors. And its solutions are often straightforward on paper: notifying customers of payment info issues, reattempting failed payments, etc.

But even among brands that have solutions to passive churn, those solutions are often inadequate. They may simply reattempt payment over and over without addressing the root cause, or they may provide cryptic, confusing communication to customers that doesn’t lead to a resolution. When choosing a passive churn solution, be sure to invest in one that addresses the issue intelligently and can actually increase customer retention.

Try Failed Payment Recovery from Recharge

Also included in Retain is Failed Payment Recovery, which Recharge designed from the ground up to tackle the most common problems with passive churn solutions. It uses a custom AI- and machine learning-based smart retry policy to reattempt payment processing at the times most likely to result in success, and the communications it sends to customers can be fully branded and customized.

Re-engage lapsed subscribers

While customer acquisition and retention are often discussed as separate concepts, they intersect at one notable source of new subscribers: former subscribers.

That’s right—a surprising number of customers are ready to return for the right offer. And since they’re already familiar with your brand and products, they typically require less education than brand-new customers, making them a cost-effective source of subscriptions.

The trick is personalization. Someone who’s already tried your products and ended their subscription isn’t likely to be won over again by the same approach that earned their business the first time—you’ll need more finesse.

Luckily, you know a bit more about them now than you did when they first began shopping with you. You have information about their shopping habits, budget, and preferred products. Use that! When you launch a new product, advertise it to former subscribers with a history of enjoying similar products. If you lower the price of an item that many subscribers have cancelled in the past due to costs, send them an email about it—you may earn yourself a few more customers.

Coming soon to Retain: Win Backs

Recharge’s platform is built to enable deep personalization and strong customer relationships. Win Backs, an upcoming component of the Retain suite, is no exception. Brands will be able to use it to craft personalized landing pages that showcase compelling offers on products that subscribers are likely to love, making new customers out of old ones.

Boost customer retention with a comprehensive strategy

Retaining customers may not always be simple, but a multifaceted strategy will keep your customer retention rate high and growing higher.

• Turn curious shoppers into repeat customers with a loyalty program that incentivizes them to get to their next order (and maximizes customer lifetime value to boot).
• When current customers move to cancel, offer alternative solutions that they’ll find even more effective.
• Monitor payment processing and implement a smart, automated system to fix issues.
• Don’t rule out former subscribers—send them personalized offers that can renew their enthusiasm.

With the right combination of systems in place, customer retention can turn from a problem into an advantage.

The post 4 customer retention strategies to extend subscriptions & build customer loyalty appeared first on Recharge.

As ever, the conference was a whirlwind of ideas and insights. Recharge unveiled a new suite of tools, industry leaders like Omar Johnson, Erik Qualman, and Ally Love provided guidance through a shifting landscape, and top ecommerce brands shared some of the secrets to their success.

Here are some of the biggest moments and themes coming out of ChargeX 2024.

Retain revealed

Recharge announced Retain, a suite of solutions designed to holistically support retention throughout the subscriber lifecycle. Retain contains four distinct tools, each designed to promote retention at a different phase in the subscriber lifecycle:

• Cancellation Prevention, which mitigates churn while collecting invaluable data on the factors driving cancellations.
• Rewards, a loyalty program offering tailored incentives to get customers to their next order throughout their lifecycle.
• Failed Payment Recovery, which prevents passive churn with automated, AI- and machine learning-informed smart retry technology.
• Win Backs (coming soon), which will incentivize lost customers to return by showcasing compelling offers on personalized landing pages.

Embracing the routine economy

One thing on everyone’s minds: daily routines, and how to get your products into them. Recharge and its brands live at the center of the routine economy, the segment of retail powered by customers’ day-to-day habits and rituals.

Dynamics in the routine economy are a little nontraditional, says Recharge Marketing SVP Jen Gray in her keynote “Amplifying your brand promise & winning in the routine economy”; the mark of a product that a customer keeps, rather than simply buying and discarding it, is its ability to relieve everyday anxieties and de-stress the day. In this new market, traditional differentiators like price take a backseat to complementing and simplifying customers’ lives.

The path to success is simple: listen to your customers to find out what they need. Every touchpoint from the first site visit to subscription cancellation presents an opportunity to gather insights on customer needs and behaviors—don’t miss out on them.

Personal connections are key

Evaluating some of the top-performing brands in subscription commerce will quickly reveal a trend: tight customer relationships. In a market increasingly full of options, satisfying subscribers depends on cultivating connections with them—and tailoring your experience to them based on their preferences and profile.

In “Mastering customer retention,” O Positiv CMO Martin Ye outlined the multifaceted approach brands need to take toward retention. Tactics like loyalty programs and customer engagement on social media reward subscribers for their support and help provide a personalized experience that differentiates brands from competitors; meanwhile, relentless A/B testing and a strong retention team ensures that the customer experience is airtight and subscribers have a reason to stick around.

Tiege Hanley echoed similar sentiments in “Retention reinvented.” Tom Bambara, Senior Manager of Customer Success & Experience, noted that relentless A/B testing can make a big impact—even when conducted on seemingly insignificant differences, like whether customers with too much product on hand prefer to skip their next shipment or delay it.

For one, customers’ perception of their subscription management options has a big effect on their overall experience. Even when two paths lead to similar outcomes on paper, if one feels smoother or easier, it can have an outsized impact on the customer experience.

And perhaps more importantly, even a small improvement is still an improvement. There’s no silver bullet for retention—only lots of small victories that add up to a subscription worth keeping.

ChargeX award winners

Recharge’s yearly awards honored some of our hungriest and most innovative merchants and partners.

Amplify: Prismfly & Good Store

The Amplify Award jointly honors a partner and merchant who collaborated to push the Recharge platform past its out-of-the-box capabilities.

Merchant Excellence: Earth Breeze

Merchant Excellence award winners demonstrate world-class products, relentless customer focus, and a commitment to making an impact.

Partner Excellence: eHouse

Partner Excellence award winners use their extensive knowledge of the Recharge platform to deliver value to our brands and help them scale.

Igniters: Hiya Health & CQL

Igniter Award winners capture exactly what customers are looking for and demonstrate explosive growth.

Trailblazers: Gardencup & C+R

Trailblazer Award winners fearlessly adopt new Recharge tools and use them to make an immediate impact.

See you next year!

ChargeX is coming to Los Angeles in 2025, running from April 14–16 at the J.W. Marriott. We can’t wait!

The post Sights & sounds at ChargeX 2024 appeared first on Recharge.

When customer acquisition is increasingly costly and difficult, Retain provides brands with new ways to satisfy subscribers, enhance their offerings, and nurture longer-term customer relationships.

Retain is available as an add-on to Recharge Pro & Custom plans.

A complete customer retention suite

Retain is a collection of products that work together to keep customers coming back at each stage of their subscription journeys—and, when they choose not to, to gather data on why and inform business decisions upstream.

Incentivize repeat purchases with Rewards

Our loyalty program builder incentivizes customers to purchase more and stick around longer with rewards like credits, free gifts, and progressive discounts, all customizable to your business.

Its benefits can also be integrated throughout the subscriber experience: display rewards previews on PDPs to turn one-time purchasers into long-time subscribers, or highlight unused rewards in the cancellation flow to incentivize retention.

Save subscriptions with Cancellation Prevention

This active churn reduction tool offers customers personalized alternatives to cancellation based on their reasons for canceling. Along the way, it also collects critical data on cancellation reasons, providing intel on which aspects of the customer experience to focus on.

End passive churn with Failed Payment Recovery

Powered by AI and machine learning, this automated passive churn eliminator detects failed payments, diagnoses issues, and proactively contacts customers for resolutions to keep subscription orders incoming.

Re-engage lapsed subscribers with Win Backs (coming soon)

When customers eventually end their subscriptions, Win Backs makes it easy (and compelling) for them to jump back in by presenting personalized offers on landing pages that you can customize to feature cross-sell carousels, subscription perks, and more

Built for an evolving marketplace

When acquisition slows…

Retain is designed to address some of the most acute pain points subscription brands face today. First, customer acquisition costs are daunting—it currently costs about 5 times to acquire a new customer as it does to retain one.

The marketplace is also increasingly crowded. Customers seemingly have more options all the time, and without a clear reason to return to any one brand, they’re more likely to try out a competitor’s products.

…retention is key

In such a fluid environment, even small improvements can translate to huge advantages: boosting retention by just 5% can improve revenue by over 25%. 

Retain provides brands with ways to enhance retention at every point of the customer lifecycle, making it easier than ever to find that 5%. This holistic retention approach has the potential to make a big impact on customer lifetime value.

Learn more

The post Reimagining our brand toolset: Recharge introduces Retain appeared first on Recharge.

A low churn rate and high customer retention, on the other hand, are good signs of a satisfied customer base. They signal that subscribers are content with your brand, products, and value, and can make it easier for you to plot the trajectory of your subscription business and provide a steady platform to grow from.

In this blog, we’ll uncover the basics of churn and the top strategies your brand can use to stave it off.

How churn factors into DTC retail

An industry-wide issue…

Customer churn is a problem everywhere in retail, though its effects can vary in different sectors. A traditional retailer or marketplace like Amazon, Walmart, or eBay has some natural churn defense built in—the variety of brands and products it features. A customer who loses interest in one brand or product can easily find an alternative right on the same site, and they may shop for many different types of products while they’re at it.

…magnified in DTC ecommerce

On the other hand, a DTC brand has a much narrower range of options (just their own). Once a customer churns, it can be extremely difficult to lure them back, losing the brand revenue for good.

That’s why cancellation prevention is critical to a DTC brand’s success—with customer acquisition getting more difficult and more expensive, you’re better off focusing on customer retention and developing a satisfied, dependable base of subscribers.

The main causes of customer cancellations

Customer churn can occur for lots of different reasons, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Customers may end subscriptions because they weren’t satisfied with the products they received, or because they found a better fit with a competitor. They may find a subscription too unwieldy or inflexible to maintain and opt for a simpler alternative. They may even feel disconnected from the brand itself and look for one that better represents their values.

If you were hoping for a quick answer to low customer retention, we’re sorry to disappoint—the solutions are as varied as the causes. But while cancellation prevention may be a complex issue, it’s far from impossible to tackle.

How to prevent customer churn

If there’s one underlying key to churn prevention, it’s flexibility—flexible subscription management for your customers and flexibility with your products and services, leaving room for them to adapt and improve.

Make subscriptions easy to manage

Success in ecommerce is about meeting customers where they are. If they can’t get exactly what they need from a brand when they need it—in other words, if a subscription becomes more trouble than it’s worth—they’re likely to bounce to an alternative that’s easier to manage.

It can be hard for customers to calibrate exactly how much product they’ll need each month. The simplest way to solve that problem is to offer a range of quantities and delivery cadences, enabling customers to find their own sweet spots.

But there will still be edge cases to accommodate. For times when subscribers need just a little less than normal, offer partial shipments. And for occasions when they’re truly overloaded, make it easy to pause subscriptions instead of canceling altogether—and you can even offer the option to gift a skipped shipment as a way to salvage customer cancellations.

Don’t skimp on customer service

This may seem obvious, but customers won’t always be able to solve subscription issues with self-serve options. It’s crucial that your brand have a well-staffed, knowledgeable customer success team to step in to provide timely assistance when those options fall short—delayed or incomplete resolutions are every bit as likely to result in a lost customer as a clunky or rigid subscription experience.

Improve your customer experience with feedback & data

Every part of your brand impacts the customer experience: website, products, delivery options, packaging, pricing—the list goes on. With so many factors potentially influencing churn, it can be hard to narrow down which ones are harming customer retention.

But there’s no need to guess what your customers are looking for. Give them the opportunity and they’ll often let you know directly.

Get input early and often

Simple solutions like questionnaires and feedback surveys can help you collect a broad array of feedback at a variety of touchpoints.

Craft some brief, easy-to-complete surveys about specific aspects of your customer experience and surface them at key touchpoints: checkout, confirmation emails, account creation, etc. Soon you’ll have a wealth of data about sentiments toward each aspect of your brand and how they impact your customer retention.

With those insights in hand, you can get to work enhancing your customer experience and mitigating future customer churn. Prioritize the elements that most directly impact customer satisfaction, especially your products themselves—customers won’t keep paying for even the most delightful brands if they’re not ultimately happy with their items.

But don’t discount the impact that details like your site UX and subscription management can have, either.

Offer a smooth, pleasant UX

There’s a simple principle in retail: the harder it is for customers to spend money on your products, the less likely the are to do so. So invest in your site to minimize the friction in between your shoppers and a completed order.

There’s a lot to consider in this area, but here are some of the top items to focus on.

Page load times

Slow websites discourage customers. Test your site to make sure it’s snappy throughout.

Navigation

It should be easy for shoppers to identify and move between different areas of your site.

Product organization, sorting, and filtering

Ecommerce is highly personalized. Make it easy for customers to find the products they need by organizing them into specific categories and collections, then provide an assortment of ways to sort or filter items: size, price, purpose, special features, etc.

Offer data-driven cancellation prevention alternatives

While improving your customer experience should result in fewer subscription cancellations, it won’t eliminate them entirely. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room left to improve!

You can still gather data from customers as they cancel—and, when you understand the remaining factors behind cancellations, you can even prevent customers from cancelling by offering targeted alternatives.

Many customers who submit a cancellation request are actually open to maintaining their subscriptions. They simply have a specific problem to solve, whether it’s related to pricing, logistics, products, quantity, or something else, and either don’t know how to solve it or don’t realize they can.

By finding out why customers plan to cancel, you can open the door to solving those problems and increasing customer retention. They receive too much product each month? Swap them to a smaller quantity or less frequent deliveries. Prices too high? Try a cheaper option or offer a discount on an upcoming order.

Here’s a tip: Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention feature takes care of both of these steps. Use it to present a cancellation survey to canceling customers, then assign targeted alternatives to the most common cancellation reasons. It’s helped some Recharge merchants save over 20% of cancellations.

See how Wildgrain saved 22% of cancellations with Cancellation Prevention

Enhance customer retention with brand connections

We often talk about churn as a tactical, short-term metric, measuring it on a monthly basis and offering solutions that address it head-on. But softer approaches can enhance customer retention just as effectively over the long term.

Entice customers with loyalty programs & benefits

The long-term success of subscription businesses depends on going beyond transactions. Customers don’t just want to buy your products—they want to feel valued and rewarded, to have a reason to keep coming back instead of trying a competitor’s products.

Loyalty programs are the perfect solution. They’re endlessly customizable and can provide a host of ways to give back to customers: freebies awarded at different purchase tiers, points to be applied to future purchases, or exclusive benefits like early access to upcoming products are all great options. And you can even engage in a bit of tit-for-tat by offering bonuses in exchange for subscription referrals—everybody wins!

As always, data is key here. Survey your customers to find out what kinds of incentives they’ll respond to to determine which type of loyalty program will suit your business best.

Craft a compelling brand story

Remember what we said about marketplaces being less susceptible to churn because of the range of brands they represent? That’s true in some ways, but the DTC model comes with some advantages in that department too.

DTC brands have the opportunity to put their own brand front and center, building closer relationships with customers based on the values and traits they represent. And with customers increasingly preferring brands who share their own values, that’s an advantage for your brand to press.

Many DTC brands dedicate a section of their website specifically to explaining the genesis of their products, especially when a social or environmental good is involved.

Bite, for example, chronicles their journey from their founder’s desire to reduce plastic waste in the ocean all the way to becoming a certified B Corp. Their commitment to the environment takes center stage, making it abundantly clear that their products are intended for customers who value the same things.

Lean on enthusiasts and brand ambassadors

Simply stating your brand’s goals and values and promising that your products are great won’t be enough to win over customers. They’ll want to see some evidence for your claims, especially from trustworthy sources.

Brand advocates are the answer—users who spread positive messages about your brand and build trust in it. While brand advocates can include groups like your own employees or sponsored influencers, we recommend sourcing them organically from your customer base.

Try encouraging user-generated content like in-depth reviews and social media posts and keep an eye out for exceptionally enthusiastic subscribers. Cultivate relationships with them—your loyalty program may be a great avenue to encourage and grow brand advocates.

Before you know it, you may have a mutually beneficial dynamic with superusers who are willing to tout the benefits of your brand and products. It’s one of the most effective customer retention strategies you can implement.

Watch out for passive churn

Most of the churn reduction tactics we’ve covered so far target active churn, which is the result of customers choosing not to maintain their subscriptions. But a lot of churn is actually passive, meaning it results unintentionally from things like expired payment methods or declined transactions.

Luckily, since customers who churn passively didn’t intend to, their subscriptions can often be saved. But many brands aren’t equipped to track or prevent passive churn and ultimately leave revenue on the table.

To stop passive churn, you’ll need automated tools that can spot failed payments and prompt customers for updated payment details. Don’t miss out on passive churn monitoring—it can be a simple way to recover lost revenue for your business.

Retain customers with smooth subscriptions & personalization

Churn is endemic to the DTC marketplace and caused by factors ranging from dissatisfaction with products to confusing site design or payment issues. While your brand may never stop churn altogether, there’s still plenty you can do to mitigate it.

• Causes of churn like inflexible delivery, high pricing, and unsatisfying products all have different resolutions. Find out which ones impact your brand the most and offer targeted alternatives to each one during the cancellation process.
• Make sure your customer experience is smooth overall to minimize friction. That includes building a snappy, navigable website and making it easy for customers to find the products they like and receive them at the right cadence.
• Share your brand’s values and story to build lasting personal connections with customers. Foster a community and elevate brand advocates who can spread positive buzz.With a few of these customer retention strategies in place, you’ll be able to knock churn down to background noise.

The post Churn prevention 101: Strategies to prevent cancellation for DTC brands appeared first on Recharge.

Luckily, there are lots of subscription apps available on the Shopify app store to help your online store grow. But with so many options available, how are you supposed to know which one is right for your business?

Here are some of the top things to keep in mind when choosing one.

The subscription model: an ideal way to drive recurring revenue

The subscription business model can be transformative for an ecommerce business. Businesses built on one-time transactions can be successful, of course, but they also come with some unpredictability. Customers make repeat purchases less frequently, revenue streams can be more variable, and plotting your growth trajectory (and planning the future of your business) can be more difficult.

Subscriptions can mitigate all of those factors. The recurring payments from an active subscription provides a solid foundation for your business to grow on, and as you gather information about customer behavior and subscriptions, you can make much more informed choices about your trajectory. And when customer acquisition is getting more expensive all the time, getting purchases on a recurring basis is a huge boost to your bottom line.

How to win in the routine economy

The key to maximizing the benefits of the subscription model lies in becoming essential to your customers’ daily lives. In our 2023 in Review report, we highlighted how the most successful sectors in ecommerce are the ones that have integrated into customers’ routines, providing the snacks, supplements, and skincare products that subscribers have come to rely on.

Take a look at our top tips on thriving in the routine economy.

What to consider when choosing a subscription app

There’s no shortage of options on the market—the Shopify app store offers dozens to pick from. One way or another, you’ll be able to find one that checks the most important boxes for your business. Let’s break down how to choose it.

Subscription setup

What are your business’s subscription options like? Do you carry a small assortment that ships to all of your customers on a set cadence? Then you may not need a feature-rich subscription app option, and you can look to other factors like budget and ease of use to guide your decision-making.

On the other hand, if:

• Your catalog is large and diverse
• You want to provide multiple cadence or bundling options
• Or you want customers to have lots of control over their own subscriptions

…then you’ll need an app with more robust configurations. Evaluate how flexible your options are—including hands-on product demos if available—to see which ones you’ll be able to mold into your ideal subscription setup.

Prioritize customers’ ease of managing subscriptions

Step one is picking an app that works for your subscription products. Step two is picking one that works for your customers.

Shoppers are becoming more particular about the subscription plans they’ll maintain, and they’re likely to drop one that won’t adapt to their schedules, budgets, or pantry space. To make sure your subscription box remains a necessity rather than a chore, make sure your app of choice makes subscription orders flexible. It should offer a combination of partial shipments, order skipping, rescheduling, frequency adjustments, and other measure to keep temporary circumstances from ending in a permanent cancellation.

Pricing structure

Different apps target different businesses. Some are plug-and-play options designed for small businesses with a few customers, while others are enterprise software targeting larger-scale businesses—and the pricing scales for both usually match.

Of course, the first thing to consider is what you have the budget for now. But don’t forget to look forward, too. Your business may seem better-suited for a smaller option now, but if you’re ready to scale, you’ll want a subscription option that scales with you.

Bonus features

While some subscription apps will maintain a tight focus on subscriptions themselves, others fill out their offerings with additional features designed to help your business scale or solve other problems. Recharge, for example, offers features that enhance customer loyalty, reduce churn, and more.

The bottom line: when selecting a subscriptions app, pick one that meets your needs now—and one that will take your online store where you want it to go.

Customer support and documentation

The app’s out-of-the-box experience is just the beginning. The last thing you need is for a business-critical tool to turn out to have hidden configuration issues, a critical missing feature, or limited support options that mean you can’t get help when you need it most.

Before landing on an option, take a look at review and user testimonials to evaluate how responsive and helpful your vendor of choice is. Then check out their online resources to make sure their knowledge base and technical documentation are robust and accessible.

Connection & integration options

Just like pricing structure, your need for integrations will vary depending on your business. If you have a small team managing recurring orders and inventory, you may not need more from your subscriptions app than a snappy UI.

But as you scale, you may find that manually managing your offering is becoming a bottleneck. When that happens, you’ll likely want access to an API that you can integrate directly into your own codebase for efficient, hands-off, scalable subscription management. Recharge’s API, for example, supports virtually every feature on the Recharge platform for sophisticated integrations and easy scalability.

Tap into third-party extensibility

The potential for integration doesn’t end with your subscription app. Many of them actually provide the potential to extend your capabilities further with other tech options. As you grow and explore new capabilities, take a look at the tech other brands are using to see what other problems you can solve for your business.

How to know your subscription app is working for you

After implementing a subscription app, you’ll want to make sure it’s delivering as expected. Keep an eye on key stats like churn and retention—these are the most direct measure of customers’ satisfaction with your subscription experience overall. If they start to spiral, you may be lose customers faster than you can sustain.

There are lots of potential causes, so make sure you’re also collecting data from customers to find out why. Some apps contain features like Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention, which can poll customers about why they’re cancelling (and even provide personalized alternatives!). Find the most frequent cancellation reasons to determine which area to focus on: subscription management options, product quantities, pricing, etc.

Tons of options, one perfect fit

With so many subscription management options built for Shopify, just picking one can be an undertaking. But with some careful attention to the needs of your online store—pricing, featureset, flexibility—and to how your customers like to manage subscriptions, you’ll be able to narrow down the field in no time.

The post What you need to know about implementing a Shopify subscription app appeared first on Recharge.

In our 2023 in Review report, Recharge named 2023 the Year of the Routine. With economic factors forcing consumers’ spending habits to change, subscribers have tightened their focus to the products that matter most—the ones that define their daily routines—and rewarded them with sustained success.

That presents an opportunity for ecommerce brands. If your products can become indispensable, turn into everyday essentials for customers, then your brand is positioned to thrive.

This blog will cover how the subscription model is evolving, how the new routine economy is affecting brands, and what top brands can do to rise to the top.

First: Why the subscription model?

The subscription business model offers direct-to-consumer brands a key benefit that can be hard to come by in a broad marketplace: predictability.

Ecommerce is enormous, and much of it doesn’t rely on the subscription model. One-time purchases power some of the biggest brands online today. But for DTC brands with more fluid customer bases, the monthly subscription fee or order costs that customers pay will form a stream of predictable recurring revenue and provide a steady floor for your brand to grow on.

The routine economy took flight in 2023

The future of the subscription business crystallized last year. As shopping habits shifted amidst economic factors, Recharge merchants in two industries excelled: Beauty & Personal Care and Health & Wellness. Both industries posted significant gains in KPIs, including an incredible 82% increase in monthly recurring revenue for Beauty & Personal Care.

Not all shared in their success. The Home & Pets industry’s growth flattened in most respects, while Food & Beverages succeeded in some areas and receded in others.

The difference? Routines. Subscription based businesses trading in cosmetics, supplements, and personal hygiene products have made their products indispensable to customers by adding value to their lives each day and making replenishment a no-brainer. Other industries may find themselves competing in more crowded fields, or with products that feel less personal and easier to replace. With subscribers cutting back expenses, a successful subscription business is one that transforms from a novelty into an essential.

How a subscription based business thrives in the routine economy

The subscription business model hasn’t fundamentally changed. But the route to success does require careful attention to certain areas that have become more important. Developing customer relationships is crucial to the success of your own subscription business.

Focus on retention & LTV

It’s no secret: acquisition is tough now (and expensive). Funding is harder to secure and customer acquisition costs are constantly rising. If expansion is starting to feel like a stretch for your brand, it’s time to refocus on maximizing the customer base you already have by emphasizing customer retention and lifetime value (LTV).

Diversify your customer experience

Subscription services that start to feel flat or stagnant are at risk of becoming nonessential. Experiment with ways to deliver a more varied experience to customers. Try exposing different areas of your catalog, whether by thoughtfully cross-selling related products or notifying customers of promotions on products they might be interested in based on their purchasing habits.

You can also offer gifts, product samples, or other incentives based on milestones like order value or subscription length. This can be a great way to show subscribers that you appreciate them sticking around and reinforce customer loyalty.

Stop churn in its tracks

Churn is inevitable—it’s part and parcel with the subscription business model, and no merchant will be able to retain every customer. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be mitigated. Not every customer who moves to cancel truly wants (or even intends) to cancel outright. Many simply need a temporary change in their subscription and don’t see alternatives.

Automated solutions like Recharge’s Cancellation Prevention feature can help brands hold on to customers. Cancellation Prevention can help you identify the top cancellation reasons your subscription business experiences, then offer personalized alternatives to cancellations for each reason: order discounts for customers who are trying to save costs, order skips or partial shipments for customers with too much product on hand, and more.

It can even A/B test different offers against each other to determine the most effective options and drive down churn as much as possible—like by saving 17% of cancellations for LOLA.

Listen to your customers

To make your subscription service indispensable to customers, you need to understand exactly what they need from you and what they value in a subscription. The name of the game is personalization—an offering that doesn’t feel tailored specifically to their needs is unlikely to resonate.

Arm yourself with data

Decisions made without supporting data are shots in the dark. To make sure your subscription offering resonates with customers, you need to understand your audience as thoroughly as possible: who they are, how they shop, and the factors that influence their purchases.

Recharge’s Home Analytics Dashboard is one way to get to know your customer base. It can deliver insights into different cohorts of your subscribers, evaluate which of your products perform the best, and track retention and churn. Explore your platform of choice to see what insights it offers to help guide your business decisions.

And don’t forget that data collected for one purpose can help other areas of your business too. Do lots of customers who cancel say that their subscriptions cost too much or that they have too much product on hand? Sure, you might retain individual customers with discount codes or paused orders. But you’ll likely satisfy many more (and boost sales while you’re at it) by reducing your monthly fee to offer more competitive pricing or by tweaking the amount of product delivered in each order.

Tailor your business to your customers

Success in the routine economy is about feeling essential to customers’ daily lives. Personalizing your services conveys that you’re ready to meet your subscribers’ needs no matter what they are.

There are tons of ways to personalize subscription businesses, ranging from simple to sophisticated. A discount for first-time customers doesn’t require any actual personalization, but provides a warm welcome to your brand and makes customers feel like they’re getting extra benefits from your brand right off the bat. Custom bundles are another hands-off way to deliver exactly what your customers need—who knows their routine better than they do?

Once you’re armed with more data about individual shoppers, you can really personalize your services. Target customers with coupon codes on products you think they’ll love based on their shopping history, run promotions on product lines that resonate with specific cohorts of customers, and more—the possibilities are endless.

Subscription strategy is business strategy

Rapid changes to the subscription business model in recent years mean that many subscription companies are struggling to retain paying customers. But by learning from your customers and molding your offering to their needs—whether that’s with targeted promotions, personalized retention offers, or other data-driven approaches—you can turn uncertainty into steady sales and predictable revenue.

The post The future of commerce: Embracing the subscription model & the routine economy appeared first on Recharge.

Optimizing components of your site experience immediately before and after it—including the cart itself, the checkout flow, and conversion-relevant elements of the product info page—is crucial to the site experience and your bottom line. 

This blog uncovers four key ways ecommerce brands can boost sales and enhance their store experience.

How your company can maximize your cart performance

1. Optimize shopping cart design & management

Start with the basics. The best thing you can do for your store is to remove all obstacles preventing customers from clicking that buy button. It may feel obvious, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of an easy purchasing experience.

The Add to Cart buttons on your product pages should be prominent, easy to find, and obviously clickable—any difficulty with a step as simple as adding a product to cart may result in a shopper abandoning their purchase.

The shopping cart page itself should be equally navigable: eliminate visual clutter to keep the focus on the products, minimize frustration, and minimize cart abandonment. 

With a smooth path all the way from the Add to Cart button to a complete checkout, you’ll likely experience a notable boost in conversion.

Don’t forget to consider the experience between clicking the Add to Cart button and viewing the cart itself. There are many different kinds of carts which can make it easier to show your customers the products they’ve added, or visually engaging opportunities to offer tailored product suggestions.

An example of this is Primal Kitchen. They display their cart in a side panel, giving them ample space to optimize its contents for cross-selling opportunities as soon as a customer clicks the add to cart button.

2. Cross-sell & upsell on product pages & more

A customer clicking the Add to Cart button provides valuable information about their intent to buy an item. Use it!

Take the opportunity to cross-sell, or offer related, complementary items to round out their purchase and encourage them to add items to their purchase. Cross-selling is the perfect way to expose shoppers to different parts of your catalog—they may not even know what options you offer, or which ones pair well with their first item.

Try displaying cross-sells either directly on the product info page or in a popup after the customer adds a product to their shopping cart (and don’t forget to include an Add to Cart button there too, so users don’t need to navigate to individual product pages to add products).

And if they decide on products that come with multiple feature sets at different price points, they may benefit from upgraded versions, so consider making personalized upsell offers. 

Personalization is paramount

Cross-selling and upselling are both potentially effective tactics, but to be valuable, they need to be thoughtful. Whenever possible, offer options relevant to the item being purchased or to the customer’s profile—or both.

When not personalized, cross-sells and upsells can feel transparent or pushy and are just as likely to alienate customers as they are to increase sales.

3. Make it simpler for customers to add to cart

A cumbersome checkout process can be a major deterrent for customers looking to complete their purchase. To minimize cart abandonment, prioritize a streamlined and user-friendly process to encourage customers to add to cart.

First, make checkout friendly to both new and returning customers. Not all shoppers will already have an account with your store, and not all will want one (at least not at first). To make the first order easy and subsequent ones more likely, offer a friction-free guest checkout option that doesn’t require signup.

Similarly, you’ll find a wide array of payment preferences across your customer base. Try adding support for some popular one-step checkout options—Shop Pay from Shopify, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay, to name a few—to make it nearly effortless for customers to buy your items and complement the Add to Cart button.

And don’t discount the effect that simple design decisions can have. Displaying progress indicators throughout the checkout process helps users track their movement toward a completed purchase.

Tip: payment doesn’t have to be complicated. Ecommerce platforms like Shopify offer native support for plenty of payment options. Check with your platform of choice to see how you can support shoppers.

4. Measure, iterate & improve

Ongoing assessment of your brand’s cart metrics is essential. Different shopper cohorts will respond differently to all of these tactics; to make informed decisions and avoid overinvesting in initiatives that don’t return sales, you need to track how each part of your shopping journey performs. 

By tracking stats like cart abandonment rate, average order value, and conversion rate, you can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and identify areas for improvement on your site. The power of data doesn’t end at tracking: businesses should utilize what they’ve discovered to make strategic decisions, test, and iterate on the results.

Think beyond the Add to Cart button

Add to Cart is more than just a button on a page—your business depends on it, and it represents a critical opportunity to engage customers and drive sales. By optimizing the shopping cart and checkout experiences, embracing cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and monitoring cart metrics, your business can unlock the full potential of the shopping journey.

The post Mastering the Add to Cart button: 4 key opportunities appeared first on Recharge.

This blog will cover the factors you should consider when choosing a payment method for your online business or subscription, plus some of the top options on the market.

Understanding available payment methods

There’s a broad array of options available to ecommerce businesses:

• Credit and debit cards
• Digital wallets
• Bank transfers
• Buy now, pay later

No one payment method will cover every business and every customer. As an online merchant, your best option is to accept multiple payment methods that combine to cover the bulk of your transactions.

Credit and debit cards

Since most customers likely already have either a credit or debit card, these are some of the most widely-used online payment methods. They’re almost universally accepted both online and in physical stores.

Cons of credit and debit cards

While credit and debit cards are widely accepted online, they can lack certain convenience and security features common to digital wallets, including one-step payment and two-factor authentication. Their use also requires your business to work with a payment gateway.

Digital wallets

Unlike traditional bank cards, digital wallets are third-party services that act as intermediaries between businesses and customers. They enable customers to save payment and personal details like their shipping and billing address for use across every website that supports their digital wallet, providing a smooth and easy checkout experience even for first-time customers. Their ease of use makes them one of the most popular payment methods on the market.

Digital wallets also take steps to protect users’ payment details and private information with features like two-factor authentication and data encryption, making them a trustworthy option for both businesses and customers.

Cons of digital wallets

Digital wallets have relatively few drawbacks compared to many other payment methods. However, some users may prefer not to share their information with a third party. Businesses also need to specifically support each wallet, meaning there’s no universally accepted option. Each wallet’s usefulness is limited to the stores that accept it.

Examples of digital wallets include:

• Shop Pay
• PayPal
• Apple Pay
• Google Pay

Tip: Recharge supports payment from all four.

Bank transfers

Similar to debit transactions, bank transfers enable customers to transfer money directly from their bank accounts to merchants. These are more popular in Europe and Asia than in North American markets.

Cons of bank transfers

Though relatively safe and secure, bank transfers can vary more widely in speed and ease than other payment methods due to the more variable processes and institutions involved.

Buy now, pay later

Especially for large transactions, customers may prefer to defer or spread out payment. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) providers like Klarna and Affirm have become popular among both customers and businesses for enabling flexible payment schedules.

Cons of BNPL

There are few downsides associated with simply supporting BNPL. However, details like spending limits and payment plans vary between providers, so if BNPL makes sense for your business, be sure to choose an option whose terms suit your products’ price points and your customers’ preferences.

Factors to consider when choosing a payment method

Not all payment methods provide the same features and benefits. Be sure to select options that are:

• Popular among your customers
• Equipped with up-to-date security features
• Accepted in the markets you operate in
• Economical for your business
• Easily integrated with your chosen ecommerce platform

Customer preferences and demographics

Different payment methods are more common or more popular among different demographics. Before deciding which ones to support, it’s important to understand which ones your customers are likely to prefer. Take into account both the market you operate in and the specifics of your target market to determine which payment methods will result in full coverage.

Security and fraud protection

A customer may not explicitly consider security when selecting a payment method. But considering the risk that security breaches and fraud could pose to you and your customers, it’s paramount that you consider it.

Features like two-factor authentication and encryption are highly valuable for the layers of security they provide customers. Fraud detection is also essential for ensuring that customers’ payment methods and information aren’t used without their knowledge. All of these may be included with different payment methods and providers, so consider the options available to you when selecting them.

Geographic considerations and international transactions

International ecommerce can be complex. Before you expand to a new country or begin accepting international transactions, be prepared to navigate local processes and preferences for payment (or integrate with an ecommerce platform that handles them).

Case study: optimizing international transactions

Bird&Be tackled sticky currency conversion problems by implementing Recharge’s multicurrency feature.

Transaction fees and processing time

Processing fees and times can vary between payment methods. Credit card fees for merchants, for example, can vary from 1.5% to 3.5%, and bank transfers may involve extra steps that slow processing times. You’ll need to weigh fees and processing time for each method against factors like its popularity in your market and ease of implementation.

Integration with your ecommerce platform

It may seem obvious, but it’s important to consider how easily you can support different payment methods on your platform. Some platforms provide native support for a variety of options; others may provide more limited support, requiring you to invest more in supporting them yourself—or forego them altogether.

You’ll need to weigh the level of effort required to support each method against its usefulness to your customers.

Best practices for implementing payment methods

Ensuring PCI compliance and data security

Businesses that expect to handle customers’ card data should comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), a set of internationally-observed standards set by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.

There are many factors involved in PCI compliance. Relying on established, creditable providers who are already PCI-compliant is one way to streamline your own business’s compliance.

Offering incentives for using certain payment methods

If a payment method is exceptionally convenient or economical for your business, it may be worth devising ways to make it appealing to customers. Consider offering perks like product samples or points in your loyalty program to customers who use that payment method.

Note that incentivizing one payment method doesn’t necessarily mean disincentivizing another. Some localities have regulations against practices like charging fees for credit card transactions. Be sure that your practices comply with local regulations.

Cover all your bases with these payment options

Checkout and payment have an outsized impact on your business’s customer experience. Get to know your customers and their payment preferences so you can meet their needs and support their payments. Choose your lineup of payment methods carefully, considering factors like their security, prevalence, and financial impact to your business.

Remember, success in ecommerce isn’t just about details like payment options—it’s about crafting a smooth, customer-centric experience at every touchpoint.

The post Payment methods for your ecommerce subscription: how to choose the best ones appeared first on Recharge.

It’s a proven route to customer satisfaction in an industry where success depends on resonating with your customers and, on delivering products and experiences that feel just right every time. Tailoring your customers’ experience especially to their needs and preferences builds long-term connections and provides a healthy boost to your bottom line.

This blog will cover how different personalization tactics can help you deliver an exceptional customer experience that boosts sales and conversion.

Benefits of ecommerce personalization

Personalized experiences can have positive effects in both the short and long term, adding multiplicative benefits to your brand’s bottom line.

1. Higher conversion
2. Higher AOV
3. Higher LTV & retention

Higher conversion

It’s simple: customers are more likely to buy products that they’re confident meet their needs. Personalized recommendations are more likely to be those products. And not only that, but delivering timely recommendations to customers reduces the legwork they put into browsing, moving them that much closer to an order.

Higher AOV

Personalized recommendations don’t just make customers more likely to purchase in the first place. They also help shoppers find more of what they need—so not only are their odds of buying higher, but their carts are bigger when they do.

Enhanced customer loyalty

The impact doesn’t end at the point of sale. When your brand consistently delivers satisfaction with the right products and experiences, customers are more likely to reward your personalization efforts with repeat purchases. The most successful brands are ones that successfully integrate into their customers’ daily routines—don’t miss out on an opportunity to do so.

Ecommerce personalization examples

No one part of your customer experience exists in a vacuum. Every step of the shopping journey works together—and presents its own opportunities to deliver personalized experiences.

1. Targeted discounts
2. Product recommendations
3. Flexible order options 
4. Promotions

Personalize every touchpoint in the customer journey

Targeted discounts

Personalization can start at the very beginning of a customer’s journey with your brand—a first-time visitor discount recognizes a new customer, welcomes them to your brand, and incentivizes them to start shopping.

As individual customers shop with you more, you’ll be able to learn more about their preferences and find more opportunities for personalized discounts: promo codes for products you know they love, targeted discount offers if they haven’t ordered from you for a while, and more.

Product recommendations

Ecommerce personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple techniques like bundling products together or suggesting related items on product detail pages can help customers navigate your catalog with ease. That results in what feels like a personalized shopping experience, even if it’s not explicitly based on any customer data.

Once you have more insights at your disposal, you can layer in more targeted approaches. Try emailing suggestions for products that complement a customer’s past purchases, or that are related to their browsing behavior.

Flexible order options

Sometimes ecommerce personalization is less about curating an experience for customers and more about letting them guide their own.

There are tons of reasons a customer might not need a full shipment every month: travel plans, too much product on hand already, or budget changes. If you don’t provide sufficient options for customizing orders, whether by ordering less, skipping a shipment, or pausing a subscription, they’re likely to end their subscription and find a more flexible option.

Promotions

There are lots of advantages to splashy sales: they can generate traffic, hook in new customers, and even clear out old inventory. But when combined with customer data, they also provide another avenue for ecommerce personalization.

When you launch a sale on part of your selection, don’t miss the opportunity to highlight it to customers who might be interested based on their purchase history. Personalized notifications show that you pay attention to what they like to buy—and that you’ll help them find a great deal.

Ecommerce personalization results in more loyal customers & more sales

Personalizing your customers’ experiences can increase their satisfaction and loyalty, boosting key metrics for your business like AOV and LTV. Implement a variety of personalization tactics like targeted product recommendations and flexible order options to maximize their benefits.

The post Ecommerce personalization: Top benefits and how to unlock them appeared first on Recharge.